Guys, I've gotten so much more confident.

Last Thursday we had a school picnic, and Friday was Buddha's birthday, so no school.

Here is my weekly schedule at school:

During my free time on Monday mornings, I make worksheets and make final edits for the week's regular lesson plans (2 hours of lesson plans, 1 for 1st graders and 1 for 3rd graders). On Tuesdays, I use my free time to prepare for Tuesday's after school class (2 hours), and the same goes for Wednesdays. Which means I usually use my free time on Thursdays and Fridays to prepare for the upcoming week.

Which means I haven't prepared for the upcoming week. I'm preparing now. But oddly, what I'm preparing isn't the lessons for the upcoming week - it's the lesson for my observed class on June 7 (as part of my application to renew) that I want to talk over and edit with Shin-Jung this week.

I don't know what exactly I'll do in my 1st grade classes this week, I just know it will involve "family." I don't know what exactly I'll do with my 3rd grade classes after they finish their speaking tests this week, I just know it will be some kind of game that has to do with "going to the doctor" vocabulary. But tomorrow (Monday) I have two free periods before I have to teach, and that's plenty of time to pin up my hair, check my twitter, have tea with Young-Gyung, have coffee with Kyung-Hwa, listen to a little bit of K-Pop, and then make the worksheets/game materials that I will need.

That may not sound like a big deal to you, but understand that this is not at all where I've been in the "lesson planning" process, ever. Usually it would take me a good few hours just to decide on a lesson topic, and I spent heinous amounts of time making worksheets and powerpoints. I think I would estimate that for every 1 hour lesson plan I prepared, it took me about 5 hours of preparation.

I don't know why it took me so long before (maybe because I didn't have any practice and didn't know where to find outside resources or how to use them?), but it takes me a leisurely hour now, or two hours if I'm making an extraordinary number of powerpoints/worksheets/laminated game cards. And it's not nearly as stressful as it was before. Maybe this is all an after-effect of having my weekly needed lesson plans increase from 2 to 6 with the after school classes - while spending 10 hours on lesson planning may have been feasible last semester, spending 30 hours on lesson planning is definitely not feasible this semester. I guess I adapted.