While students begin preparing for the first day of school in August, departments such as English begin planning nearly six months earlier.
Like other department chairs, English teacher Amy Keys begins the process in late February by sending out a form asking her colleagues about their preferences on classes for the next school year. Keys then works closely with the administration, counselors and teaching staff to work out each teacher’s schedule.
“I ask all the teachers in the department what would they most want to teach, what would they be willing to teach and what they feel like they’re not in a good place to teach right now,’” Keys explained. “We try to not have too many people teaching a lot of different classes — any more than two starts to become difficult.”
While the teacher preferences play a crucial role in deciding the school’s master schedule, it is ultimately a complex puzzle trying to accommodate students’ class choices and keeping class sizes to a minimum.
Each class a teacher teaches comes with its own set of responsibilities, from designing unique quizzes and planning tailored activities to grading assignments and leading discussions. These duties multiply with every additional class, creating a demanding workload.
Even the difference between MAP and regular classes is significant, English 11 Honors teacher Natasha Ritchie explained.
Because MAP is interdisciplinary, the class works through different novels as they have to align with the period of history the students are studying. As a result, they end up reading different texts than regular classes — for instance, MAP 11 reads “Kindred” by Octavia E. Butler while English 11 Honors reads “Beloved” by Toni Morrison.
Not only do the MAP and standard English classes have different texts and areas of emphasis but the MAP classes also have regular and honors level classes all rolled into one period, adding even more to teachers’ plates.
Teachers end up having to teach two separate classes, with different quizzes and content variation, all at once.
“On any quiz day, I’m running at least four versions of something,” Ritchie said. “I also have to grade MAP 11 Honors and MAP 11 Regular separately to treat them as two different classes, even if they share a classroom and a slide deck.”
While many teachers have been teaching the same classes for a long time, some have to adapt to new courses as well; this year, English teacher Emily Wu taught AP English Language and Composition for the first time, a class she will continue teaching next year.
When taking on an entirely new course, teachers have to undergo intensive preparation to learn the subject material, particularly if they are teaching an AP class. For English AP teachers, they must independently read and analyze all of the texts for the class and then attend an AP workshop where they learn the scoring guidelines and rubrics for the AP exams.
“After I finished the readings and discussion questions over the summer, I met with my teaching team,” Wu said. “We discussed the different units and what the assessments were going to be. For the first couple months of the year, I sat in on (English teacher Jason) Friend’s lectures to watch how he formated certain discussions and activities.”
Since teaching a new class is such an involved endeavor, Keys said that when choosing teaching assignments for the new year, they try to keep people teaching the same classes as much as possible. Oftentimes, it can take teachers up to two years to become fully comfortable with teaching a new class.
Additionally, the department aims to provide new teachers with strong support from veteran teachers to ease their transition.
“We are very collaborative, so during department meetings, we split into teams to work through the lesson plans and rubrics,” Keys said. “We also share all of our material so that for the first year teaching a class, somebody could look at what another teacher was doing, day by day, and copy it almost exactly.”
Many teachers also gather one or two times over the summer for full-day work sessions with their respective teams to do tasks like plan and standardize shared assessments, rubrics and units.
Ultimately, teaching a new class places a lot of pressure on the teacher, but it can also be extremely rewarding when the results of all the work pay off.
“While it does sometimes feel like I’m juggling the classes and trying to figure out how to prioritize my time, I like it,” Wu said. “It adds variety to the day, and each class is awesome in its own way.”
