Getting ready for school

I have been working on lesson plans, but it is hard since school started the 9th of August for them, and I am stepping in a few weeks later. I tried my best to connect with the teachers who are currently teaching the classes to find out what they have done so far. One problem was that they were still using the textbooks, so I could not take the textbooks home with me. I have been reading the novels and essays that I will be using with my AP student. One of the novels I have decided not to use and the same with one essay. There may be some others that I decide to use. It is hard because many of the works for the AP class I have not read. They were books on my to do list, but I had not gotten to them yet. The Director of Studies suggested that I have the class audited. I will have to check into that more. There is another teachers outline of the class that I can take an adapt, but it will take me awhile to do so.
I have been getting excited because I have all these ideas I keep thinking of things I want to do in the future. I have been writing them down so I don't forget them. Some of the ideas I have I need people from back home to send me the directions. I tried to scan as many documents as possible, but that was time consuming, and I had to pack and ran out of time.
I did a junior field experience at the 8th grade level in Social Studies. The teacher was a nice guy but all he did was lecture and the students fell asleep. I came in with things that I was learning in my classes like Anticipation Guides, Cloze passages, jigsaw, KWL charts, etc. The students actually enjoyed learning about history and paid attention. All these activities plus the timeline we put together at the end helped them to do much better when it came to test time. The teacher was even impressed. I am excited to use these activities again. I love English, but sometimes I admit there are authors I am not crazy about, but I act excited anyway and don’t let me students know that. Some of those same activities I have used in my English classes, but some I had forgotten. It seems like I had more enthusiasm when I first started teaching and could do creative things to get the lessons across, but at my last school they were so strict about how they want things done and the time frame. They wanted everyone to do everything the same thing the same way at the same time. I feel that we are all different and when we can be creative in our strengths then it makes our teaching better, the students enjoy the classes more and they retain the knowledge longer.