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First day back
All in all, the first day went well. I pretty well filled up all of the minutes allotted to me and got done most of what I intended. My best idea for the day, if I do say so, was that after introducing myself I had the students introduce themselves by telling me their name, their favorite extracurricular at school, and their favorite book or author. The thing I did that made this brilliant was that I used my Canon PowerShot A510 digital camera to record it all on video. It does up to three minutes of video and has good sound quality. I'm lousy at learning names in the first place and I now have more students than I've had in class any other year of my teaching (a measly 57), so I figured I needed to do something. Thanks to this system, I think I've got one class pretty well learned.
Right after classes, I had to get everything around and head out to a tennis match. One nice thing about tennis here is that we get a bus instead of me having to drive a van. Hooray! We have 10 starters on a team, so it wouldn't be possible to take one van and we only have one coach. This was our first match and I totally didn't feel ready for it. Here's the fortunate thing for our team: our girls team has historically been lousy, and as a consequence we were moved down one division this year. This makes our varsity team more competitive and it looks like it may make our JV team positively dominant in our division. Seriously: we've had hardly any time for doubles teams to play together and almost no time to teach them the ins and/or outs of doubles strategy, but we killed our opponents today. 5-0, and only one match was really close (we were losing 4-3 and won 10-4). Things are a bit strange here: 10-game pro sets, no ad scoring, playing 5 doubles (and only five doubles). I think it's a function of girls tennis as much as anything, but introductions were different here too. Much more girly, I guess. I guess it was nice to get the win today, but here's my fear: if most of the teams in our division are this poor, we could very well have a great record at the end of the season without ever becoming good. I think I found the right balance in my post-game talk. Basically: congratulations on your first win, enjoy it, but remember that we still have lots of room to improve. We know that the team we played today wasn't very good and we're going to have to learn to play better doubles to beat the best teams." As I understand it, even at the JV level we do have playoffs at the end of the season and last year they got into playoffs and then got killed (after beating lots of teams). Well, that sucks; I don't want any part of it. I want to build a good team that's built for success in the playoffs. And, maybe ultimately more to the point, I want to build a team that can play doubles well and take those skills into the varsity next year to make that team stronger. Success at the JV league is one part winning this year and two parts winning next year as varsity players.
Anyway, this made for a long day and now I'll have to go and do it all (and I do mean all) again tomorrow. Classes, match, all of it. I'm getting tired just thinking about it.