So i finished my first week, what do I have to show for it?

Last week was my first proper week of teaching. I'll be quite honest, it was tough. Some of the kids seem like they're going to be really hard to get through to, and the fact that I haven't had the time to properly plan ahead isn't really helping the situation. I'm setting myself a few achievable, short-term goals, in the hopes that putting them into writing will make them happen sooner rather than later.

• Plan at least 1 week ahead for all the subjects i'm teaching (this is only about 4 lessons worth, I should be able to get it done with one solid day's work)
• Organise some sort of filing system where I can record information about my students, so when it comes to report writing time, I'm not scrambling around looking for random scraps of paper. (Frank Nochese's latest post on Action-Reaction ,outlines how he does it for America's SBG system, maybe I could adapt this for VELS?)
• Find out how kids at my school are assessed. (Is it just tests, or is it project work too? Is the testing consistent across the various teacher who teach at the same year level?)
• Start streaming my classes. (This is really really important. I've only been doing this on an ad-hoc basis, sort of giving extension work (or lower-lever work) as necessary)

One more thing. I ran a lesson at year 8 level about validating credit cards. I got the idea from a graphic I found from mint.com. (I wonder how these guys feel about copyright? Their logo was still on the bottom of the graphic when I handed it out to the students, so it should be fine, right?)

Here's what I gave the students, after a bit of a speil about online shopping:

One cool thing that came out of it: a student said "so what you're saying is, if we can come up with a credit card number according to this, then it'll work and we can buy stuff online?" - At least I made one person interested :-)