Stress and De-stressing

Stress comes and goes, and I have found as a first year teacher, that this stress is continually present.  I find that there are just not enough hours in the day to do my job to the full extent that I want to.

Ideally, I would have enough time to sit down and thoroughly plan all of my lesson and differentiate the material for each student in my class.  Personalized worksheets, instructions and homework set for each of their strengths and weaknesses.  This, unfortunately, I do not think will ever happen as I see over 200 students a week with 11 different classes.  In addition to all of this, I would love to have the time to sit down and mark each student's notes to ensure proper spelling and grammar and mathematical content.  If this was not correct, I would love to have work waiting for them in the next lesson to correct their errors.  As one set of books seems to take me 2 hours to mark (half decently; without extra notes or added activities being glued or written into them), again, there is just no way I could do this - especially with the classes I see twice or three times a week.  Then there is marking of coursework, planning, classroom management, classroom organization and decoration, after school clubs, coursework catch-up, and the list goes on and on.

From my experience so far, I have to say that I do not know how those amazing 1% teachers do it all!  Not only do they have flawless lesson plans and activities for their students, but they are usually the ones with families, other large roles in the school and so forth. 

So, not to rant about how I would like to do my job, I need to find strategies on how to do it more effectively.  Currently, I have implemented the use of stickers in my marking scheme.  The stickers (well they are more like labels) have pre-written sentences and next steps on them that I can differentiate for each student.  This does help A LOT with the motivation of marking, by the end of a class set of books, I do not feel run-down or tired, but it has not seemed to help with the amount of time I am spending.

I am using different Teacher Community websites, such as TeachersPayTeachers, to find different ideas and lesson ideas.  Unfortunately, as a newly graduated university student, I do not have the extra money to purchase the resources, but their sample pages usually give me an idea on how to go about my lesson. 

One thing that I wish all teachers within the school engaged in would be the sharing of lessons.  We all teach the same material and we all struggle (or I would like to this so) with creating lessons each day, week, month, term, year, so if we all shared them in a resource bank, I feel that that would definitely assist with the time allotted for this task.  I do realize that that could make lazy teachers who do not teach for their classes, but I think if I was given a sample lesson, it would take half the time to differentiate it for most of my classes.

But for now I will continue to search the Internet, talk to other teachers and hope that the answer to time saving practices will come soon to me!  Best of luck in all of your planning and marking and teaching!  We do make a difference, one student at a time!