Keeping Class Interesting

     It's so easy for me to get into a rut when I'm teaching, this trimester I have two preps Economics and AP Econ. I like both of these classes, but I've been teaching the Econ class for six years now and I've grown pretty comfortable with the curriculum and with a lot of the lessons that I've recycled over the last couple years. Don't get me wrong I'm not "that" teacher, I do try to create new lessons and improve the ones I've been using but let's just say the thrill is gone when it comes to teaching some of the concepts on a day to day basis.
      So how have I  managed to dig myself out of the occassional teaching rut? Since we became a one to one google chromebook school one way has been to try to leverage Technology into my classroom. This has been fun and challenging for me. The great thing about using technology in the class is that the possibilities are endless, just when you have something figured out there is always something new and different around the corner.



     I've also been doing a lot video and google form creation to try to do more Flipping of my Economics class. Flipping the class is something I find really interesting right now especially with our 1:1 environment. Jumping into technology has really pushed me to rethink many of lessons and try new things in class that are interesting to me and hopefully interesting for my students.



     Moving to non-technology fun stuff. Part of the reason I wanted to teach high school was because I thought high school teachers could avoid all the touchy feely stuff with students, it would just be straight up teaching content and if the students didn't like it, well too bad for them. I have come to realize that a little relationship building goes a long way with having a happy classroom. Capturing Kids Hearts is a training that many of our staff including myself have been a part of over the last couple years. This program has spurred me try to create a more positive peer to teacher interactions throughout the day, including simple things like trying to greet students as they enter the room, talking about "good" things in class, creating social contracts for class behaviors, and most of all passing out a lot of candy.
     Teaching is really a unique occupation, every day doesn't have to be just like the last, sometimes there is comfort in routine but I know I have to be careful with getting too comfortable, I need to remember that one of the biggest reasons I became a teacher was because I love learning.

The Conference Conumdrum

     I have just returned from Boston, left on Thursday after school and returned home Sunday night. The occasion was the National Conference of Social Studies (NCSS). If you've ever been to a large professional learning conference like this you probably know how overwhelming and amazing they can be at the same time. Hundreds of workshops to choose from and you have to narrow your choices down to the just four or five each day. Inevitably you will pick the wrong workshop to go to. One that is boring or just not really what you thought it would be based on the four line synopsis in your conference brochure. I seem to have the inate ability to pick the wrong workshop. Some call it a gift, I call it a curse. When I would leave my dull workshop session to confer with my colleagues and share my misery, they would make things even worse by regailing me with stories of the brilliant and entertaining speakers and information they had just sat in on in their last sessions. 

     Despite my inability to pick an interesting workshop to attend in these conferences, I still keep going back. Even in the worst or most boring of sessions I can usually find some nugget of understanding or enlightenment that I can take back to my classes and apply to my teaching or curriculum. It's these moments that make me glad I picked the teaching profession as my occupation. I can think of very few jobs that require the worker to constantly improve thier skills and knowledge. It is at these conferences that I'm pushed to think about my teaching, what I believe to best practice, and what I need to improve to be the best teacher possible. I know I will never win a teacher of year award and I will never know everything about teaching and the topics I teach. After 15 years of teaching I'm ok with that, I don't want to feel like everyday is the same, I want to challenged and pushed to learn more and do more. These conferences and workshops allow me to be intropective, inquistive, and at times even confused about how I should be doing my job. That's fine I wouldn't want it any other way. 

How to create real changes in schools?

     Something I've been thinking about with great frequency is how can we create real change in our school. It is so easy to find the problems with our school, many of them stand out like like neon signs in Vegas, but the when it comes time to make changes that have an impact everything just gets so watered down, bogged down, completely and totally stuck in the mud. I think this is mostly due to the fact that I love to complain about things that are not going well or need fixed but often this is as far as my committment to change goes.
     Recently I sat down with some teachers and an administrator I really respect in a small group and we took some time to discuss the age old question of what is wrong at our school, this discussion went great until we tried to steer the topic towards how can we fix things. We had some suggestions, nothing particularly earth shattering or creative, mostly having to with punishing the students more so they are more accountable for their behavior. I left the meeting thinking is this all there is? The best we can do in the area of making our school better is just come up with stricter consequences for our students? I felt like an opportunity was lost in that 90 minutes we spent together, and these opportunities are lost quite often lost over and over again when I let opportunities for real change slide by and take the easy and sometimes cathartic approach of just complaining about the problem. Hopefully thinking about this and sharing my thoughts will push me to get out of the muddy pit of complaining and start working on some creative and inspired solutions.

First Post

Hi, just wanted to see what this looked like.