Taking a Break

So I know I never posted much.  I wanted to, but I was too busy teaching to actually blog about teaching.  And now I will be taking a more official break from this blog to try a new blog.  I am taking a break from teaching as well to be a stay at home mom for a bit or my daughter, Evelyn.  Follow my mom blog at www.leveledoffspring.blogspot.com.  Enjoy.

So I will be taking a little break from teaching.  I hope to return soon.  I will do one more blog post here with the link to my mom blog (once I come up with a good name).

It's Hard

So I am realizing that it's incredibly hard to be an enthusiastic teacher and keep up a blog about being one.  Any advice from successful blogging teachers out there?

Sadly, I have gone from an enthusiastic teacher to an enthusiastic fiance.  I have not been very diligent in updating this.  I promise to get back into it as soon as I am done being an enthusiastic fiance.

Almost time to make new years resolutions

One of my New Years resolutions will be to update this more frequently.  I think I will try to make it happen on a weekly basis.

The school year has gotten away from me much faster than I intended. I have spent the first two month of school sick with a sinus infection and I think I am just now finally done catching up.

I am applying for a grant with a few of my peers to work on improving co-teaching strategies within my school. I will let you all know as it happens and what fun things we discover.

Tools for Teaching!!!

I just finished a 3 day workshop with Fred Jones on Tools for Teaching. It was fantastic. I haven't finished gathering my thoughts and plans for how I will incorporate this in my classroom this year, so for now I present you with some highlight quotes from the workshop. (all quotes from Fred Jones himself unless otherwise indicated)

* Student behaviors will not exceed your expectations.
* By the time you give consequences for the behavior, it's already occurred
* 80% of all goofing off is talking to neighbors, 15% is out of seat, 5% is everything else
* The biggest variable linked to goofing off is proximity
* Either you work the crowd or the crowd works you
* a stable green zone is death
* the biggest hurdle to working the crowd is the furniture
* No child has ever been nagged into righteousness
* Never do anything for students that they are fully capable of doing for themselves
* A teacher does 5 matinees a day, show biz people would never do that
* We systematically destroy our highest job function (tomorrow's lesson planning) with our lowest job function (yesterday's clerical work)
* Ears are overrated
* Practice does not make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect ~ Vince Lombardi
* Think of learning as a performance and coach that performance
* Don't ever mix discipline and instruction
* Calm is strength and upset is weakness
* Consistent is one of those words that does not have degrees, kinda like the word dead,
* Don't ever make a rule that you aren't willing to enforce 100% of the time
* Your emotions are irrelevant, is the child over the line or not? Play this game with your head, not your heart
* It takes 1 fool to backtalk, it takes 2 fools to make a conversation out of it
* The rules in any classroom are reality
* There is only one professional in the room. Save your time and energy for the things that only a trained professional can do
* Kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care ~ source unknown

These were just all the quotes that I copied in my notes. Obviously they are out of context, but feel free to take from them what you will. I will try and do a reflection post after I plan a bit. In the interim, here's the website: http://www.fredjones.com/ I highly recommend you check it out.