Well, I guess I can’t hide any more. I gave it a good shot. Heck, I’m actually still proud of myself. But it seems at this point that I failed at the 30 day blog post challenge. Failure may be a bit of a strong word, but I am a bigger fan of trying than I am of staying safe, so I’m comfortable saying I failed.   If you can look back at what you learned in the process, then failure isn’t really failure, just a stepping stone to move you forward.  What I was hoping to learn from the 30 day challenge was how to overcome the inner critic and discover my voice as a reflective teacher, and I certainly took some strong steps toward that goal. These steps will continue as I hope to go at least 5-days a week until the end of the school year in my own little “March to June 27th” campaign. Here’s to more steps forward!

What I’m teaching this week:

I’m getting kids ready for their portfolio presentations coming up in mid June, which means things are about to GET REAL. I’m going to start getting into performance coach mode as kids are starting to self-sabotage in a bunch of ways. While standardized tests don’t plague the students until the end of the cycle, the lower stress of our performance based assessments hits students earlier, and sustains itself longer. It’s my job to help my advisees and my students manage the stress (kind of like the dams from the Paul Tough book.

In addition to emotional support, I’ll be helping students with their final project in Banking and Investment, and Equations and Patterns.

What I’m blogging this week:

After I launch the project, I’m going to post up some of the ideas here. I also want to put up a post detailing some of the interesting things I’ve read around the the blogosphere, which I’ve been meaning to do since last week.  I think part of me feels like I can’t write anything because I haven’t yet read all of the blogs (my brain is weird). I will also do a post about my evolving productivity system, as I am probably going to need to make some changes to my evernote system.

What I’m thinking this week:

The end of the year can be depressing for teachers. As the end of another year approaches, all the half-finished initiatives and un-met goals become heavy burdens. These burdens can fuel last minute feats of fury, where you teach your kids that STEM unit you’ve been shelving, hammer through a lesson study with your department, and and finally get those papers back to the kids with time for them act on it! All these can wear you out.  You can also wear yourself out by simply coming to terms with the fact that you didn’t meet your expectations.  You’re human, and thus you have dreams and ambition.  Your dreams can can lift you up, but also pull you down when they go unrealized.

If this year has left you in a dark place, take a second and list out all the things that you are proud of that happened during the year. Include big and little things, completed things as well as things that only got halfway started. You’ll probably find that a lot more stuff happened this year than you previously thought about, and that the next step forward might not be to manically shove more things in during the final weeks, or to feel bad about yourself, but to reflect back with others about how to build on the successes of the year that passed.