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"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" Ecclesiastes 3:1

I've been preparing all sorts of changes to my AP Environmental Science (APES) class for next year. The subject matter makes it probably my favorite class to teach, but unfortunately, circumstances have not allowed me much time to make the class my own.

Allow me to explain. First, I met a guy. A really great guy - a cute librarian and word nerd! Then, I went on the job market and scored a great job in St. Louis at a great private school. As a result, I moved away from great guy to a new town and started a new teaching job with new preps, new coworkers, a new work culture, new everything. The amount of time I spent talking to him on the phone every night was easily enough time to revise an APES course, but alas, priorities! The great guy and I decided we ought to just go ahead and get married- in August, for a December wedding. Yes, December the same year! Wedding planning took over my life then, and then getting to the wedding date without imploding, then getting married, going on a honeymoon, moving my new hubby and our four cats, and then it was back to school for second semester. There was barely time to exhale, let alone make changes to my curriculum. We adjusted to married life just fine, squeezed into a tiny apartment in the city. Hubby got a job. Then we moved again. And again. During the second move my new science department was also moving into temporary spaces as we prepared for the construction of our resplendent new building opening this fall. Hubby got a new job. We bought a house. I worked for a year in a big-ass trailer temporary structure. We planned a vacation to Europe. We lost a cat and gained a new kitten. The active volcano of change in my life returned to spewing out a more manageable slow bubble of hot molten newness.

I ended the school year this June as exhausted as ever, and I immediately traveled to Cincinnati to attend the APES reading, a week-long festival of grading funded by the College Board®. There I read/graded 1504 responses to an essay question about indoor air pollution and talked to numerous other APES teachers. I joined the APES teachers Facebook group. My eyes were opened. My class was a St. Louis dumpster fire. Three years of just slightly tweaking what my predecessors had done was just not cutting it. To be clear, this has had nothing to do with my students' AP scores. They're very well-trained monkeys when it comes to standardized tests. They always score above average. Their scores are not the problem, it's how miserable my students and I feel throughout the year-long slog.

So I started over. I vacuumed out all the corners of my syllabus, leaving just a few select labs and the test dates arranged for the new school year. I've been refilling it slowly, this time with stuff that I really like, that I find valuable, that I know my students will enjoy more. One thing that really put a speed bump in my path was trying to "get" environmental economics. Every year I try to lead my students out onto a skinny diving board above an Olympic-sized swimming pool of information about economics and try to point out a few key things that they should know about. Inevitably, I get it wrong, slip off the grip tape, and end up drowning in a sea of questions that I can't answer about a subject that I hated in college. More on that in my next post!