Ok, ok....I'll come clean. I'm not the most up-to-date teacher in my school, I mean, district, I mean, state, I mean country. I wasn't always this way. There was a time when I was up-to-date on the latest buzz, strategy, style of teaching and education there was. I participated and enjoyed being part of a district level literacy team and looked forward to the times that I spent working on the "academia" of teaching within these monthly sessions. Then "IT" happened...I started to feel the burn out that so many of us feel that work in any field of administering to others. And that's how I became the behind-the-times teacher that I am today.
I spent the last two years working with a group of teachers to reconnect, find time for myself, learn how to balance the professional life with my personal life and I have to say I've come a long way. I no longer "live for my class" and have been able to separate myself from feeling that my students were my children and started to make time for my own two teenage children--you know, the ones to whom I gave birth.
Where was I? Oh, yeah...how I convinced myself to start reading about teaching and trying new things in my classroom again. It started like this: I am blessed to work with some of the best teachers and a community of teachers who care about each other both professionally and personally and that in itself is a pretty special thing. Some of my teacher friends have been buzzing about Whole Brain Teaching for a couple of years. They talk about how fun it is for both them and their students, about how much more engaged their students are. BUT...the talk was never enough for me to do anything other than nod my head and smile...until this summer.
This summer I had purposely scheduled NOTHING for the month of July. I had done this purposely to give myself plenty of time to recover from an oral surgery that had a one month recovery time. My husband and children are all working and I find myself in the unusual circumstance of being the only one home and in the third week of my recovery, pain is managed, and I...began...to...get...bored.
Don't get me wrong, boredom is not a bad thing and everyone should have the luxury of getting truly bored. Now I'm not talking about laissez faire kinda bored. I mean the kind of bored where I feel better but still need to heal, caught up on my TV shows, tired of the movie choices on demand, there's only so much gardening and cleaning I want to do, I've been sitting around for 3 weeks kind of bored. That's a good bored. That's a bored that sparks creative juices. Some of us were lucky enough as kids to experience this kind of creative bored mid to late summer and I am lucky enough to re-experience it now.
So..what to do? I started to browse the internet looking for something inspiring and ordered a couple of books from the internet, one of which is WHOLE BRAIN TEACHING for Challenging Kids. It sat on the table for a few days while I looked over some other books. I picked it up this morning knowing fully that I ordered the book out of boredom and wasn't really all that interested in reading it but had nothing else to do. I read the first chapter and realized that HEY this book isn't all that different from what I was already doing! The biggest difference is that the book has the brain science behind it as well as a couple of different fine tuned strategies. Also, since it wasn't all that different from what I was already doing it wouldn't be that difficult to implement. So, that's how it happened that's how I pulled myself out of the dump of burn out and started to update myself but this time I will not lose myself again. This time I feel more grounded in determining what's best for ME so that I can be a better teacher. Stay tuned to find out more...
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