Curriculum, Technology, and Sleep-Oh My!

Today feelings of overwhelmedness have returned, coincidentally at a similar time as they began last year. This year it's a whole new ball game (not sure why I, of all people, am using a sports metaphor, but just roll with it). As my new found goal is to be an "excellent" teacher, I have been scouring books that have sat collecting dust on my shelf since I last used them in my English methods classes. They contain ideas, theories, practical applications of things I was once taught in college. Refreshing my brain has become a much larger task than I anticipated. Now I am overwhelmed.

Last year at this time, I was crippled with fear of the unknown. I didn't know what I was teaching, hadn't seen my classroom, and hadn't talked with any of my new colleagues. I couldn't start anywhere. This year, I could start EVERYWHERE. I have a curriculum to tweak and change as I see fit, but what is the best method?  I constantly seem to question and re-question all my new ideas for the year. Will this work? I ask. Will my students like this? Is this idea beneficial? Should I cut this project? Over and over these conundrums roll through my head at break-neck speed. I have a feeling starting this process a month before school beings is not nearly enough time.

Here are my current problems/thoughts/persisting pickles in no specific order:

1. In the school at which I teach, reading and English are separated into two different classes. I do not agree with this philosophy because kids fail to see the inherent hand-in-hand relationship of reading and writing, but I have to work with what I've got. Subsequently, the 8th grade English curriculum is grammar, writing and more grammar. Last year the other 8th grade English teacher and I broke our curriculum into various projects that included personal narrative, descriptive writing, research/persuasive writing, demonstration speeches, and creative writing. That was all well and good, but some of these projects were less than successful. I want to cut some, change them, what have you, but I'm not sure my 8th grade counterpart will feel the same. All of these things are technically in the curriculum, but I'm not sure that they're being taught the most beneficial way for the students. They do the project and then forget everything they learned as we move on to the next one. Each project feels so separated, and there's not a whole lot of student choice involved in the matter, something 8th graders so desperately need. I soo wish I could just tweak and change this stuff myself, do my own thing, but there's a huge push in the district for common assessment, so my counterpart and I need to be on the same page almost always. Besides, we did practically everything the same last year, so I don't know how to break out of that without abandoning the ideas and relationship I've developed with her.

2. I've been re-reading Nancie Atwell's In the Middle, and I would really like to somehow incorporate Writer's Workshop into my classroom. While she suggests that writer's workshop should be 4-5 days a week, I know there's no way in hell I can do that and still teach the required curriculum the way the middle school wants it taught. My initial idea is to have writer's workshop every Friday; students would spend the whole time writing (maybe minus a mini-lesson here or there), and every quarter would have to turn in a finished piece, whether it be creative writing, memoir,  poems, etc. Mostly, I just want my kids to write more often, and write what they want. But writer's workshop takes a lot of set up and a lot of time, and I'm scared that it will fall flat on it's face, and that because students have not done this type of thing in school before, they won't be receptive of it. Do I attempt it and watch it fail? Or do I play it safe and go with what I know?

3. If I end up doing writer's workshop, where do the rest of my already established writing projects fit in? Is it too much to have students working on two writing assignments at the same time? The goal with writer's workshop is to give students more freedom towards what they write. They get to choose the what and how. By doing all these other projects though,  am I counteracting the independence I establish with writer's workshop? Am I teaching hypocritically, and thus confusing the hell out of my students?

4. One of my biggest problems is technology. It is the thing I would LOVE to work more of into my classroom, mostly because I think these kids would really respond to it. For example, I love to do online discussions of some kind, to model the ones I would like to have in class. Middle schoolers already have all kinds of discussions online via commenting on their friends pictures, posts, etc. on Facebook...I just want to utilize the ability they already have and focus it towards writing and literature. Great, no problem? Right? Nope. My school has next to nil in the way of computer access. We have two 26 lab computers for 750 students. Finding an open day in the computer lab is like finding gold on my front doorstep...not gonna happen, and if it did, I'd probably wonder if Leonardo Dicaprio was about to appear with his Inception posse. As Tomah has a pretty high poverty rate, I can't assign this as homework either, considering a good chunk of my students definitely don't have a computer at home.

These are just some of the issues I'm desperately trying to wrap my brain around, but to no avail. I had hoped that the common first-year teaching practice of me lying in bed at night constantly worrying about curriculum, students, and school was going to disappear this year...I have a feeling my REM cycle's still going to be askew.