See You In 5 Days…

     I only see my Grade 9 math class 3 days a week… Now, I will note that although this is a high-school class, it is not broken into semesters and I will see them all year long. The problem, however, is that these 3 days are back-to-back Monday to Wednesday. This means that my students do not have math for almost 5 full days with the way our class times are laid out.

     Furthermore, our school functions on a 5-day cycle which means that anytime there is a holiday on a Monday, I only see my students 2 days a week. To put this in perspective, we have a potential of 38 school days in the months of September  & October. If there was no holidays, extra-curriculars, etc, we would potentially have 24 math class. The way our holiday & extra-curricular schedule has worked out, however, we will only have 19 classes (3 of these have less than 1/2 the students in attendance due to other extra-curriculars).

     Now I realize that 5 missed classes may not seem like a lot but when there is such a long time-gap between math classes, I find that I am spending a lot of time re-teaching information when students return because they have forgotten. To make it even more scary, I only see my math class FOUR times between now and November 18th when report cards go home…..

     What can I do? This scheduling set-up makes me nervous for the year to come.