I have had a busy week of "developing" myself as a teacher. The scary thing is how much of this overlaps into my precious weekends, and how I strangely am okay with that.
Over the past week I have attended a school PD (program development), a network PD, a workshop on organization, a collaboration meeting about reading strategies, meeting about reteaching, conference with my PD (program director...can't keep them all straight), conversation with a lead teacher/board director/7th year teacher, mingling with SPED teacher from Richmond, and the list goes on and on and on.
Teaching and learning how to teach is my life. Every moment I get a chance to learn more about being a (better) teach I pounce on it and soak in as much helpful information as possible. TFA has provided some great resources, but I have begun to realize my saturation point is quite shallow (where the information get absorbed temporarily, just to be filed away in my "to read" pile i.e. never to be seen again). Even so, here are some random things that did stick from my many workshops, conferences, and chats with seasoned teachers.
- if you are not organized, don't expect your students to be
- keep all of your schedules in one place, and that place is NOT in your head
- teaching is not perfect, but it is for the perfectionist
- teach, reteach, rereteach
- steal any lesson plans you can
- teaching gets easier, but it will never be easy
- you must teach what you are passionate about
- this work will never go away
- we would rather have life long teachers at 80%, than 2 year teachers at 110%
- get to know the kids
- Strategy for next year: 20 min of silent reading 2x a week (yesss, freedom)
- communicate and compromise
- even if you teach 3 years, you only really were a teacher for 2
- Next year will be better. Next year will be better. (remind yourself)
- Don't give up. 3 more months.
- teachers are work-a-holics. Sorry bout it.
That is just a few tidbits of information or advice that I collected from this week of becoming a better teacher.
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