This Teacher Life

As the week of testing approaches for my students, I had a fellow teacher come up to me and ask "What do you wish someone had said to you about the SOL's."  I gave some quick and true responses, but now that I have had a chance to digest it all, here are my more detailed answers to that question I wish someone had told me.... that I would feel every emotion I ever had, in just one day. it's okay to cry it's also okay to celebrate there is nothing else you can do at this point.   your heart rate will return to a normal level in about three days in the mean time, try to do some yoga.   watching student reactions is funny/entertaining/sad/painful this whole process is really jacked up The list could go on and on, but these were the ones I felt the strongest about.  I want to elaborate on a few; I imagine my teacher friends will fully understand these but I want the non-teacher people reading this to get a sense of the statement. "...that I woul...

Organization is not my strong trait.  Well, let me rephrase that.....organization in a physical sense is not my strong trait.  Digital organization, however, is my jam.  I love keeping files neat and orderly throughout my devices and clouds.  Sometimes I even, gasp, delete emails from long ago!  One thing that always scares me though is seeing the state of someone else's organization.  It can be utterly terrifying, and more importantly, a time-suck to find something. Most people do not have some sort of system they use to keep things organized, which leads to loss in productivity in finding their files.  I know a lot of people that their desktop looks like a minefield, similar to the picture below this scares the teacher.... Too much going on is not only disorganized, but it can be a sign of too many applications on your computer , thus slowing it down.  Please note: just having a lot of documents and icons on your desktop does not ...

Stress = rain I was not planning a two-week hiatus from this blog, but my personal life did one helluva job dominating any plans I had of being a productive digital member of society.  Recently I was attending the SOL Academy as part of my 11-month contract, our family dog died, and then I got sick.  Not the greatest combination of things to happen, so the blog had to be put to the wayside.   It is, however, a story that any educator can relate to.....because it happens to them as well!  Teaching is this weird enigma.  The highs of watching students succeed, seeing awesomely planned lessons be well executed, and schools improving is incomparable to any drug available.  The lows?  Bone-crushing, and often take a toll on the teacher physically and mentally.  I think it is important then to remind all of my teaching friends, and anyone that is dealing with a tremendous amount of stress, to R E L A X We are human.  We need to be rese...

Each Sunday I find myself holed up in a coffee shop, I will write a reflection on the  previous week and what is coming up ahead.  LOOK BACK This past week was all over the place, very much like a rollercoaster.  There were some high moments of joy, followed by some serious lows, and then a fair amount of evening out.  Some things that come to mind are all the laughs I had this week with coworkers about silly things.  One fun moment is when we discovered the old middle school mascot hat in the spare classroom; we had some fun claiming there were "birds" loose in the building.  Another joyful moment was the progress all of my classes made this week.  I feel like I am in solid position leading up to the state tests, and more importantly, I feel as though my students are really grasping the concepts they are being presented.  It has been a good flow. I hesitate calling the meeting with the student negative, because a lot of great things ha...

In honor of #tbt (throwback thursday), every Thursday will be a reflection on an event in my teaching career that has gotten me to this point.  Some will be amazing stories of success, others will hopefully leave you laughing, and some might be a bit dark.  It will also involve some old photo of me....that part should be fun. Two of the posters hanging in my dorm room freshman year at JMU,  and the beginning of what would eventually be known as my "picture face" The first lesson I ever taught had to do with proportions.  I remember that my partner and I were given a 7th grade classroom as part of our first practicum in college.  We met a couple of times leading up to our assigned teaching day, and prepared a pretty cool lesson.  We were going to have the students count the number of times they were able to shoot a ball into a basket for one minute, then use that to find how many shots they should expect to make after two minutes, five minutes, and ...

After school I was reading an article from Yahoo! and it redirected me to Forbes.com.  Before taking me to my page, I was left with the above quote and a little time to ponder (before telling me to turn cookies on).  That quote hit home for something that came up today. As teachers the oldest method of instruction known to us is Direct.  The teacher stands at the front of the classroom or at their desk with their document camera, and goes through the notes as their students copy down everything they say.  It is embedded within us and a safe method, rather, a comforting method of education.  I am not here to argue the pros and cons of it, but to illustrate a point; us teachers do love some talking! I found myself in a rather tough situation with a student today.  The student is struggling in my class, but never asks for help and when I approach them they have the same rhetoric of "I'm good".  This is not just the case for one of my students, but...

I think we are at an interesting point in the history of education in America.  The repeal of No Child Left Behind leaves open the door for the Every Student Succeeds Act to flourish.  The big push behind this new initiative is the reduction in the number of assessments students will take before graduation.  That is a major win across the board (unless you are a company that makes those assessments.....cough Pearson cough).  This is not the focus of this post, but for more information watch this amazing breakdown by John Oliver (warning: graphic language). No, the focus of this post is why do teachers use assessments, specifically warm ups.  I think one of the weakest areas of a lot of teachers is how they use their warm-ups.  It is often used as a refresher for students, but other than that the possible data collection is left by the wayside.  A recent conversation with a fellow teacher reminded me of this, and I can admit that I fall guilty of...

Recently I have been doing a lot of work at coffee shops, most notably Urban Farmhouse .  I like it because they serve coffee out of big cups, the coffee is solid, and it is a lovely eighty-steps away from my front door.  Cannot beat that.  One issue I kept running into though was having to locate all the things I needed for the productive trips to said coffee shop.  I did not have a wireless mouse at home, I own maybe three different pairs of headphones that I can never seem to find when I need them, my thumb drive is flat-out missing, and other random acts of delay usually stall my productivity.  So, I decided to do something about this. After a bit of research I came across several sites that talked about what you needed to have in your work bag, but most were business-person related.  Of the teacher ones that I found, they usually involved having a backup of your favorite lipstick or a nail file.  The file would be nice, but the lipstick...I am s...