Now Where Was I?

Well, here we are a year later and I have learned a thing or two. One thing is that getting started is not necessarily the hardest thing about blogging. Obviously I have yet to "buy into" this whole process seeing as I am currently averaging one post per year. This has not been the end of my learning though.

This last year was full of professional learning opportunities. There was most likely a day or two that I spent feeling sorry for myself last year but now there is a sufficiently large temporal space between here and there that I can take pride in surviving that first year. I was teaching seven core courses at a small school with very unique demographic. Did I mention that all of these courses were middle school math and science? But now I have climbed my Everest and the view from up here is very different than what I expected. Now I know that I'm on a mountain and I think that I can see the summit! This will undoubtedly be an entirely different yet comfortingly familiar experience. I can't wait.

I am still at the same school but I have a couple less classes. I will only be teaching Math 5, 6, 7, 8, and Science 8 to two groups of kids. I even have a prep this year!!!

How will this year be different? Well last year I did not have a plan, that's for sure. I had no idea about planning and the planning that I thought that I was doing was more reactive than proactive. This year I have full year plans for each of my courses. I have some unit plans from last year but they are just a starting place.

I realized that one of my biggest weaknesses last year was my hodge-podge assessment. It was a nightmare for me and confusing and frustrating for my students. This year I'm going in with an assessment plan. A regiment if you will. I've been reading some Anne Davies over the summer and I can see now that I was killing them with assessment last year and at the end of the term all I had was a bunch of marking and numbers.

This year I will have a four pronged approach. The first three prongs will be based on a rubric that we will flesh out together. I'm aiming for a gauge of procedural knowledge, ability to communicate mathematically, problem solving skills and conceptual knowledge. These three prongs will be Work Samples, Unit Projects, and On-going Observations. The last prong will be straight up summative assessment in the form of a Unit Final Multiple Choice Test. I sure hope that this is closer to a winning combination. Time will tell and then I will try to remember to tell you.

A beginning.

It seems to me that I heard somewhere that the hardest thing about blogging is getting started. I really hope that this is true. I have been working on this process for the last month and I still have not been able to put pen to paper as it were.

I suppose that there were a couple of barriers that I have had to overcome in this process. The first was my preconceived notion that bloggers are pocket-protector wearing introverts that are not very adept at face-to-face communication so they pour out their souls on cyberspace in hopes that some one is bored enough to read it. I have recently had to reevaluate this latent belief as I have witnessed the power that uploading or contributing to the online community can have.

The other barrier that I have had to struggle with is a peculiar shyness that I am experiencing about having my digital voice heard. This is peculiar for me because I am not shy about having my voice heard in face-to-face interactions. And since I believe that being a teacher and being shy should be mutually exclusive, I need to overcome this barrier. I suspect that the main issue is that when you let your digital voice be heard, you are putting yourself out there in an uber-public and permanent sort of way. From this point on, every employer that I will potentially have will have the opportunity to develop a first impression with out ever meeting me. So instead of proceeding with caution, I think that it is important that I proceed with prudence and purpose.

With that in mind, now it is time for the bit about what I hope to accomplish here. Well, it all stems from my feelings of dread and confusion around the process of finding myself and my way as a teacher. In a lot of ways, I feel like my particular teacher prep program left me totally unprepared. But on the other hand, my teacher prep program gave me tools which I am only beginning to become aware of. The primary goal of my teacher prep program was to turn me and my colleagues into reflective practitioners who are able to deal with all of the grey areas of our beloved profession. So through this reflective exercise, I hope to glean as many insights and as much wisdom from my experiences as I can. It is also my sincere hope that other becoming and beginning teachers might find something of worth as they follow this, the last leg in my journey of becoming a teacher.

So with out any further ado or fanfare, let us begin...