I figured out why I'm so overwhelmed this year!

Last week was a crazy one, for many reasons. However, somewhere in the middle of my madness, I did have an "a ha" moment: I cannot teach the way I once did; I cannot rest on the comfortable lesson, worksheet, quiz I used to give. Therefore, on top of being a half time literacy coach and a half time teacher, I feel a lot like a new teacher this year. I over-analyze lessons and next educational moves I want to make with my students because my brain wants to apply all this new learning of the last year and a half. I cannot unlearn what has now been learned.

For example, I was getting ready to give a quiz to freshman - a quiz that I've used a few times over the past couple of years - and just prior to making my copies, I gave it a glance. Each question seemed to scream, "low level learning." Ugh! Therefore, it went into my homework bag for extensive revision. It's currently undergoing "testing" (yes, pun intended) on my freshmen.

Of course, that's what all teachers must do - continue learning and working on creating richer activities and assessments for our students, however, this is not always easy. Whew!

I could be the worst blogger ever OR I am really busy, but that's no excuse!

I really think I could be deemed the worst blogger ever. On the to-do list of my life, this routinely ends up at the bottom. That said, my hope this morning was to do a little catch-up blogging instead, but I'm going to cheap-out on that as well because my exercise bike and CBS Sunday Morning are calling me. However, as I dug around on the web this morning, I ended-up on colleague and middle school literacy coach Kasey's blog. Rather than write much on my own, I replied to a really interesting point she was making: "how do I model my thinking for students?  In my opinion, this is the largest piece that is missed by teachers in classrooms.  We may even think we are modeling our thinking when in reality, we are simply giving directions for how to do a task. " This is within her January 12, 2014 blog "Unscrewing Our Thinking Caps."

http://middleschoolteachertoliteracycoach.blogspot.com/2014/01/unscrewing-our-thinking-caps.html?showComment=1391349356580#c375063001655439793

I do still aspire to get back on here soon, but off to exercise land this morning!