Saturday, September 19, 2009

Happy New Year!

An appropriate title this weekend, and for this time of year. This year, the start of school has brought more than the usual number of to-do lists for me. My children started kindergarten and I went back to work full time. These are both good things, but bring with them little suitcases of emotion responses I wasn't expecting as well as some out and out physical challenges. If you've never taught, you probably don't realize that the first couple of weeks of school is actually physically difficult--the body has to adjust to all that standing, smiling, explaining, and late nights (planning and parent meetings).

That all being said, I'm really excited about some of the changes this year is going to bring. I'm an advisor again; a part of teaching I have truly missed over the last few years. I've helped plan a unit on the nature of the heroic journey. For our intro session, we're going to watch Star Wars (the real first one, now called Episode 4) and then discuss Luke's progress from brat to hero. I'm so excited about this, I can hardly stand it! I hope the students will engage in the movie and then make the transition to thinking about themselves and the journey through adolescence they are experiencing.

We've re-designed our blogs with an install of multi-user Word Press. It looks gorgeous and I'm optimistic that we'll recapture our fervor for blogging that faded last year. The class wiki is up and running too--let's hope that the parents join in our conversation a bit more this year. I welcome any suggestions for the types of wiki pages that encourage parent conversation!

That's all for now--it's going to be a great year! I'm blogging with the students and will be starting to blog more at Ed Social Media, but my goal is still to write here every other week this year. This is still the only spot that feels "away" from my school life for my thoughts. So, I'll close with this quote from Seth Godin on why blogging is good for you.

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