>> My name is Donna Poore.
I work for the Newcastle
County Vo-Tech school district.
I specifically am down in
Middletown at St. George's.
I'm a high school social studies teacher
so currently my placement is 10th
and 11th grade social studies.
I teach civics, economics,
and United States history.
Day to day what that looks like is
I'm responsible for all the classes.
As teachers we're involved in a lot
of external meetings and committees
and extra responsibilities and things like that.
So my day to day is very
much about the instruction
but there's also a lot that goes with that.
I think that certain things, your
schedule-- at least in my situation--
remains fairly constant so I
always know between this time
and this time here's [inaudible]
I'm going to see.
You know here's what I would
like them to accomplish.
You know you have your curriculum map so you
have your game plan for where you're going.
But different days mean different meetings,
different committees, different
things like that.
So it looks different more
on the professionalism side
of things whereas the instruction side of
things usually remains pretty consistent.
You, when you start off in August
you hit the ground completely running
so you have a very packed schedule
until you get to right around Christmas.
And you get, you know, Thanksgiving break,
Christmas break, things of that nature
and you go right on to the
end of the year, again,
with lots of afterschool
activities, lots of meetings.
If you volunteer to coach, if you're on any kind
of committee for prom or you know homecoming
or anything like that, weekends a lot of times
you'll find yourself either chaperoning a dance,
spending time at a game, play, whatever.
And then when you get to the end of the year
you do see, you kind of get like a little break
and then right around middle of July, end
of July starts the whole okay I have to go
in for this week to work on
this piece of the curriculum.
I have to go in for this week to
work on this piece of the curriculum.
And it's nice because it's less
structured than necessarily
like okay I have to teach these many classes.
But you're still, you're still there.
You're still working because you are
working on either curriculum committees
where you're rewriting things for the
next school year or you're trying to,
especially you know during your first
and second years you're trying to figure
out okay well here's what
didn't go well my first year.
Here's what I need to kind
of reflect on and build upon.
So do you have summers off?
Sure, theoretically, but you really
don't because you're doing so much work
and preparation for that next year.