Strange New World

The new school year has just started out at work. We lost all three of our administrators last year. (2 retired, one got a new job) This means that we are having to adapt to a whole new staff. (as an aside, we got a new District Superintendent halfway through last year, and the new prinicipal is his guy) So far so good. I'm the Social Studies Dept chair, and I'm finding it a much harder job than in years past. Part of it is the fact that I am the only 7th grade Social Studies with any experience and one of the positions is filled by a sub, so I have to provide extra support. I am not too thrilled with my teaching assignment either. I have 5 classes, all Social Studies. I am not ELL trained, but I have 2 ELL classes this year. One is level 4/5's which isn't too bad. There are 30 students in that class. The other is a sheltered group of level 3's. There are only 21 students in this class, and it can only have a max of 30. These kids are much harder though. Their English skills are somewhat limited. Plus they have been tracked together for years, so they have a practised routine set up. I have a class of 30 in which ten of them are leadership students. This class should be OK and it's my last period. The other two classes are "normal" kids. One of these classes has 37 students in it. Basically they are the kids that are left over when you pull out the AVID students (who tend to be much more motivated), the special ed students, the ELL students and the Leadership kids. So basically they turn into dumping grounds for the unmotivated and the discipline problems