I got these in an email from a friend.
Your students reflect what you project.
I woke up feeling terrible yesterday. My weekends are like mini vacations because they’re the only time I get to spend with my wife. When they end I feel as though I’m going out of town for 5 days only to return on the red eye flight on Friday nights, tired, and eager to see her. This is my reality this semester and as a result I have begun to dread Sunday nights like a 5 year old dreads Brussels sprouts.
I made the mistake of bringing that feeling of melancholy to work with me yesterday and of course my day was terrible.
My students’ behavior was off all day as was their willingness to do any work. And it was all my fault. When I’m on top of my game so are they. When I’m mad at the world so are they. I often forget how much they take their cues from my own.
Today I decided to sleep 45 minutes later, spend some much needed quality time with my wife before heading into work. I took my time in the shower, didn’t rush to iron my clothes, and I got to work only 20 minutes before the students instead of my usual 60-90 minutes.
I’m sharper today, more quick witted, and posses a fleetness of foot that was noticeably absent yesterday. My repeater has been eager to participate and answer questions. My 3rd period asked if I had been drinking red bull for breakfast again. I shot them all a sly smile and told them that this morning I just took the time to smell the roses.
For my L.I.T.
I met you in another lifetime.
I must have. I know your soul
like I know my favorite rhyme.
Deep ain’t it ?
I daydream dreams of
you and I dreaming about me
and you.Technicolor dreams,
Re- painted.
Love is like that sometimes.
My time management sucks this year.
I’m taking two classes in the evenings, teaching 6 classes a day, running my department, and still trying to keep my wife happy.
I’ve begun using google docs and google calendar to keep my life in order and to make sure I don’t miss any deadlines, dates with the wife, meetings with my parents, or obligations to friends and the web based tools have helped me immensely.
I’m new to this life hacking thing. What tools do you use to stay on top of your game ?
One of my blogging brethren has shamed me into being a better editor/proof reader of my posts. I must admit, I have a tendency to toss my ideas right out there with very little proofreading prior to pressing publish.
I’m working on that J.
I snatched this comments from the Jose Vilson blog. It’s related to my last post and his
Check it out. I think it’s pretty insightful.
Re: teaching to tests. In doing so, we give students the permission to forget. By saying you need to know this for the test implies that you don’t need to know it anywhere else. I am not at all shocked that students forget what they once knew for a big test. We live in a memorize, spew out, and forget educational culture. Still.
My students, for the most part, are pretty damn sharp. They pick up on concepts quickly and can generally learn to apply learned concepts in new situations.
However, their one weakness…their only major shortcoming is their mastery of what is considered to be “Standard English.”
The students I and spent the last 5 weeks learning about probability, permutations, factorials, set theory, the meaning of And vs. Or, etc. And they have been rocking it. They can create their own Venn diagrams displaying all the concepts of set theory…they can determine sample space, recognize when to use a factorial vs. the counting principle, and have no problems determining probability of independent events.
But they still bombed my test.
They did so because the test was not created by me ( one of the benefits of being in a Needs Improvement school) so they were not used to the language of the test. I did not see the test until the week before I was to give it so I didn’t have as much time as I needed to tailor my lessons/review sessions to the new language of the test.
I was in a meeting today ( my 4th for the day and probably 10th for the week ) about inclusion and co-teaching.
Many of my co-workers expressed a concern over the lack of common planning periods and planning time to effectively prepare for upcoming lessons and units. I understand their concerns but I’m also a little bothered by their unwillingness to think outside the box as problem solvers ( I know teachers aren’t engineers…but I digress)
I’m a huge proponent of using technology, particularly free technology, to make your my life easier. So, I recommended the creation of departmental wikis as a collaboration tool and the use of Google docs as a way to write lesson plans together without being together. The room was, unusually silent (if you’re ever been in a room full of teachers talking about ANYTHING you know what I mean). I thought I had them on the hook…but no one bit. They simply wrapped up the meeting and went back to thinking that there was no way to work together without being together.
I love free programs like Skype and Google Doc because they allow you to be productive and work with people through virtual networks. I plan on making it mandatory that my department use one or both of these tools so we can be more productive and more solutions oriented rather than reactionary complainers.
I need my fellow educators to come live with me in the 21st century.
I tried to keep the rhetoric about NCLB out of the relaunch of my blog(arithm) for as long as possible and to just focus on instruction and content in this blog(arithm), but an exchange I had with a student has compelled me to break the promise I made to myself.
My repeater and I had a heated exchange when I let him/her see his/her grades. He/She is currently failing my class after only one month of school because he/she never turns any work in. This drives me crazy because he/she should be acing this early part of the semester because (A) he/she has already seen the material and (B) the assignments are all very simple.
The details of our exchange are as follows:
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Pop-Locking b-boys and girls
What you know ’bout dat?
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