In the Cool Cat Teacher blog The Routine of Being Amazing: Check out the organizational to do list app she has for her iPad! This looks really cool – and could be what i need to solve my focus problems where I spend way too long getting way too little done!
I am currently pondering ways to do two things:
1) home issue: Spend more time with my family. I miss them. I am spending too much time working. They feel left out. and rightly so. I need to be home more.
2) school issue: How do I go over homework thoroughly in class without BORING students, and taking half the class period to correct. I don’t have that kind of time. If I could cut 10 minutes out there it would be really useful.
Hmm… Need to figure these things out! Aaahhh… the joys of teaching!
This has been a bad month. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of awesome things have happened this month. However… This community has experienced the loss of a lot of amazing people this month. And we’re only halfway through January.
I won’t even begin to go into the number of people I haven’t personally known who have died. I don’t know them; but I do know those people who have been affected by their deaths. Everywhere I look I see hurting people – hurting because they are missing chunks of themselves. Hurting because those people that have passed on have left large shoes to fill.
This morning Josh and I attended a funeral service for Tom Hight. A man whose hand I shook every Saturday or Sunday at church. A man who as his daughter put it today “was a man of integrity.” There is no question. Tom was a man of integrity. In everything, with everyone, in all that he said and did. A man who someone mentioned today left very large shoes to fill.
Pastor Nick challenged the church to step up, just as Elisha picks up Elijah’s mantle, puts it on and carries forward with the ministry… and that scares me and excites me. My prayer today is that someone can make that statement about me at my funeral…
Wendy lived a life of integrity.
Because if I can learn that one lesson from Tom I believe the legacy I leave behind will be as God has intended.
I love “training” days that feel worthwhile! Today I got to spend time with other tech lovers writing our districts technology integration and technology proficiency goals for the next three years. Some of you are probably thinking – “wait, that was worthwhile?” but I will answer a resounding YES! It is really neat to see what people are doing, and figure out how to be creative with the limited money we have to spend. Finding ways to meet the state’s technology requirements while not costing the district an arm and a leg, while tricky, is very intriguing to me.
Maybe I am just crazy!
Here is a cool sum up of what we talked about, that was passed along by another teacher who was at the planning day today: http://www.committedsardine.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=600
This year has been an interesting one. I have learned the value of struggle. Or at least I am learning it on a daily basis. As a teacher I often feel that it is my job to “swoop in” and save the day. I don’t like watching students get frustrated. It is not something I enjoy. However, I have also been learning a lot raising an infant. Specifically, Ashlynn is an “I do it” baby. She doesn’t like help. When she is learning something, SHE wants to be the one in charge; she wants to figure it out on her own. Ash learned to roll over in August (at 2 and a half months old – YIKES!). She would start on her back, and flip herself almost all the way over. She would get stuck on her arm (as is normal) and needed a little push to get up to on her arms with her head in the air. However, if I gave her that push she would scream at me. You see, Ashlynn is a normally quite happy baby, but she wanted to do the whole thing on her own. If I constantly “bailed” her out by giving her a push she wouldn’t learn to roll on her own.
In the same way, as a teacher it is not my job to give my students the answer. I have to sit there and tell them they can do it, and watch them “roll” and get stuck over an over again until they get it right. While Ashlynn naturally obsesses with any new skill she is learning, I need to encourage my students to “obsess” about learning a new process, or thinking pattern or skill. I need to provide ample opportunity for them to practice their new skill, just as I allowed Ashlynn plenty of time playing on the floor in a safe environment to learn how to roll.
And while I sometimes regret encouraging my now 6 month old’s growing mobility I also know that it is NORMAL and GOOD for her to be learning to crawl, just as it is good for my students to learn to think mathematically on their own.
Where are you struggling? Are you obsessing about learning this new skill, or are you complaining that you are stuck?
