My Take On My Life

Can I tell you about this “Hail Mary” lesson I did the other day? I say “Hail Mary” because it was mostly unplanned, thought of in the moment, and was the result of weeks of frustration. It also isn’t specifically "CCSS-aligned” or whatever. It’s also in a similar vein to my “Don’t Fear the Reaper/SNL” lesson. We are working on speeches and how speakers create tone, through repetition or word choice. We started with The Gettysburg Address, to which many kids replied “how can we tell tone if we can’t hear him?” I ultimately played the Wikipedia audio clip, but they were quick to realize that wasn’t particularly helpful. We tried connotation/denotation, we tried vocabulary, we tried focusing on repeated phrases for importance…everything. They saw a wall of text with no way to make meaning of any of it. The next morning, I copied/pasted these emojis onto a slide: 

OR ‘PEAKED’

BUT PIQUED

‘PIQUED MY INTEREST’

YOU ARE NOT ‘PHASED’. YOU ARE ‘FAZED.’

IF IT HAS BEEN A VERY LONG DAY, YOU ARE ‘WEARY’. IF SOMEONE IS ACTING IN A WAY THAT MAKES YOU SUSPICIOUS, YOU ARE ‘WARY’.

ALL IN ‘DUE’ TIME, NOT ‘DO’ TIME

‘PER SE’ NOT ‘PER SAY’

BREATH - THE NOUN FORM

THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE

WANDER - TO WALK ABOUT AIMLESSLY

WONDER - TO THINK OF IN A DREAMLIKE AND/OR WISTFUL MANNER

BALL- A FUCKING BALL

I made the decision after my internship that I would NOT take work home with me. I would not grade mountains of essays at home, I would not take power points home to finish. I would not take my Sundays to plan my entire week.

The trade off is that I have learned to use my planning time and school time more efficiently. I will even stay after school for an hour or two to get things done if it meant not taking work home.

I made the decision to keep my house…separate. I have a hard enough time falling asleep because I can’t turn my mind off from teaching / planning. During my internship, I couldn’t paint my nails, couldn’t shower, couldn’t cook meals during the week because I was so busy planning and grading and worrying and making documents that could be made during the 40 minutes of before school time. I vowed that I would not start that habit my first year teaching.

And I want to tell you….it has made all the difference. Now I realize a lot of this works because I am SUPER type A, super organized, super efficient, super list-y. This combination has allowed me to use every second I’m not teaching, to sit at my desk and use my time to get whatever I can done. But I can’t tell you how wonderful and HEALTHY it has made my first year. I needed my home to be a safe place. A place with less stress. Sure there are times where I’ve desperately needed to lesson plan for the next day but let’s be real here….we all have a slight idea of what we’re doing tomorrow. It can wait until I get to school with my textbook and I put a sticky note on the page. Now I realize again, this only works because I’m one of those people who generally walks in with a very vague idea and it comes together as I’m up there on the go. Not everyone is like that, and if you’re someone who needs to plan all those steps, I still recommend coming I earlier, or stay in a little later if you’re trying not to compromise that home space.

valid 4/13/2016 - 4/24/2016

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