Category Archives: life

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My Last Weekend of Summer Vacation

This is the last weekend I have as a mom and a wife only. Come Tuesday, my classroom will be filled with the chatter of brand new freshmen and a few repeat students. It is a bittersweet weekend. I love spending time with my family, but I cannot wait to embrace this new group of kiddos and become a part of their support structure.

The great thing is that I have had quite a few of these students before as seventh graders. When I check my rosters, there are little pictures of them. There are so many of their little faces that I recognize and it fills my heart with happiness. I can’t wait to reacquaint myselves with them and to get to know the others whose faces are unfamiliar.

My summer has been filled with so much professional development. ISTE, Anita Archer, Teach like a Champion, posts from my PLN on Twitter and Google+. Honestly, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by all of the new ways that I have to reach my students. I decided that this is the perfect time to reflect on what I’ve learned and set goals for myself.

I am going to keep my goals SMART this year. If I do so, I will be able to develop a good plan to achieve them. So, here goes:

  1. I will keep my word wall up to date by posting my words in the morning on the day I teach them.
  2. I will give my students more choices about how to learn their objectives. There is more than one way to get to mastery.
  3. I will create authentic audiences for my students, even if it takes more time to find them.
  4. I will faithfully preassess before every unit. I do this for many of my big units, but I sometimes just wing it on others. 

These are my goals for this year.  I will revisit these and see how I’m doing.

What about you? Do you have any goals that you want to focus on for this upcoming school year?

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Being off the Grid

I recently had an opportunity to go completely off the grid for a week. Well, it wasn’t an opportunity, really, more like a forced exclusion. I visited my father in the middle of Missouri– three hours from St. Louis and three hours from Kansas City. It was out of network for my smart phone and not even on the map for Internet access.

That’s right. I went a whole week without Facebook, Twitter, email (all 7 of them), and all things cloud-based. Crazy, I know!

At first, I was in a panic. How would I keep connected with the world? How would I blog about what I was doing? How would I get my online class started? I was like an addict, freaking out about my next “fix”. However, being the trooper that I am, I soldiered on.

I left my smart phone in my room (gasp).

The first day was very hard. I kept on clutching my pocket, seeking the rectangular security that I usually found there. Feeling the absence of its assuring weight was alien to me. I felt a little lost, especially when I wanted to share with my friends what we were doing. It felt strange to not tell people what was happening on my vacation. The thing is, I found myself paying even more attention to my family and sharing with them.

It was AWESOME!

Mighty Fishermen!

Because I was forced to let go of my Internet “leash,” I realized how much I have been missing in the present moment. It has made me think about how inundated I was getting with extraneous information. It made me realize that so many of my students probably feel exactly the same way.

When I returned from my vacation, I wasn’t as frantic to get online. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone. It has been three weeks, and I still don’t miss them. I still check both networking sites daily, but I am not checking every hour. It is kind of nice to not feel the urge all of the time.

Have you ever been disconnected unwillingly? If so, how did you deal with it?

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On Friends and Books

One of my cherished friends gave me a book yesterday. To me, the gift of a book is one of the most caring of all. It requires knowledge of the person you are giving it to. After all, you don’t want to give them something that they would not be interested in. Giving a book is showing someone that you know them and care for them.

My friend knows me. She accepts me for who I am– my good days, my cranky days, my ocd days. It is so nice to not feel judged and not feel the need to conform to what I think she wants me to be. She is my OCD checker, my enthusiastic encourager, my positive sympathizer. She lives life large and has taught me that it is useless trying to be anyone but yourself. I’m still learning that one!

The book that she gave me is called cold tangerines by Shauna Niequist. I started reading it yesterday and got through the first essay called “on waiting.” I could have written it. Okay, maybe not exactly the way she did, but still. She talks about the movies that have the “Big Moment”. You know, the moment when everything comes together and changes the characters’ lives forever. Niequist writes, “I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies” (p. 16). It hit me that this is how I’ve seen life and I’ve felt a little bit like a failure because my life was not “interesting” enough to matter.

Well, to that I say HA! I am going to take my little moments that make up my life and use them to have the best life I can. My life is not boring. It is my life and I enjoy it, for the most part. Thank you, my friend, for giving this book to me. I can’t wait to see what other insights I glean from reading it.

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Life Interferes Again

Is blogging to yourself the same thing as talking to yourself? It makes me wonder sometimes. Anyway, I am back again. I know that all of my followers (ha ha) have missed me while I was gone. A little bit to catch up on what has been going on:

  • My darling daughter’s broken leg healed perfectly. She didn’t need any physical therapy or anything like that. Yay! I didn’t realize how expensive a broken leg is, though. We are still trying to get out of that hole. It is going well, though. 🙂
  • I never did finish Moby Dick. I decided that life was waaaaaay too short to read a book that bored me to tears.
  • I took a class about technology standards in education by the AZ Department of Education. It was lots of work but massive amounts of fun. Plus, I learned so much. I was complimented when the facilitator recommended me to facilitate one of the next waves of courses. Unfortunately, I was unable to apply for it. Too bad, though. It would have been fun!

    That is the catch up portion of today’s post. Now on to other things.

    Part of one of the classes that I am taking has to do with integrating blogging into my classroom. I think that it would be a really interesting thing to do, but I wonder if I would be able to keep up with it. I have to figure out a direction for this blog. I think that is one of the reasons why I have been deficient in posting.

    There are so many blogs that I have seen that I really, really like. I have discovered Neil Gaiman‘s blog and have thoroughly loved reading his words. Of course, I couldn’t read his blog without reading his lovely wife Amanda Palmer‘s blog. Who would have thought that one of my favorite living authors would marry one of my favorite punk cabaret musicians? Crazy awesome.

    The point is, every quality blog that I read seems to have a point to it. It’s not just a bunch random chattiness. So, my next goal is to find a focus. Ooh! Maybe my focus will be random chattiness. It might suit me perfectly.

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    Of NaNoWriMo, Princess Pink, and Other Things

    I know it has been a while since I have written. It has been very busy for me lately.

    NaNoWriMo went much better than I thought it would. I was able to write 37,000 words and really enjoyed doing it. I had a few days of complete blockage, but I was able to work through it. I also had a couple of people read parts of  my novel and I think I have a good start! With six days left and a plan to get the 13,000 words written, I was fully ready to complete the first draft and “win.” Unfortunately, the day before Thanksgiving, my dear daughter fell off a purple dinosaur and broke her leg.

    Yes, you read it here. A purple dinosaur broke my daughter’s leg. Well, technically it wasn’t the dinosaur’s fault, but it was a huge player in the catastrophe.

    I thought I knew what it meant to have your heart hurt until you thought it would burst and you would die from it. I was wrong. Watching my daughter deal with the pain of a fractured tibia was the worst heart-pain I have ever experienced in my life. I do believe that I cried as much as she did when I had to help her stretch her leg out so that they could get the xrays.

    After the trip to urgent care proved the necessity of a trip to the emergency room, we loaded my poor girl back up into the car and drove to the Cardon Children’s Medical Center. They got us in quickly and made sure that our daughter was well taken care of. We even got a visit from one of the therapy dogs, though I believe it was more for me than for my daughter.

    The fractured tibia required a splint for a week. I took three days off of work. Thankfully my wonderful mother and father-in-law drove up to take care of her for two of the days. I am so thankful for their help! Because of them, I was able to get what I needed done at work. My girl did a fabulous job with the pain of the broken leg and staying off of her splint. Finally, the day came when she had to go to the orthopedist. The doctor’s office was wonderful, too. Everyone was so friendly. They got us in quickly, got the xrays done (again) with no pain for my girl (thank goodness).

    I was not prepared for the casting process, however. Her fracture was slightly askew, so they had to realign her bones. I listened to her pain as they molded her cast to set her bone correctly. That was not fun at all, but at least it was not as bad as the day she broke her leg. Guess what color her cast was? If you said princess pink, you’re right!

    And let me tell you, my girl is amazing to me. She hasn’t let this broken leg get her down. She’s kept her sense of humor and truly loves all of the attention she receives from everyone around us. Now we are sitting with four more weeks of princess pink and a child who has shown me how to deal with discomfort with a happy heart.