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TITLE: If You Really #LoveTeaching Then You’ll Admit It’s Hard as Hell

Learn about the 50 States of USA here:

www.50states.com

You Tube: https://youtu.be/_E2CNZIlVIg

Body of Post:

We’re halfway through the school year. Halfway through the essays, assignments and tests. Halfway through the assemblies. Halfway through the fire drills. Halfway through the observations and debriefs. Halfway through the parent phone calls. Halfway through the conferences, conventions and PD (professional development) sessions. Halfway through tardies and absences, detentions, suspensions and expulsions. Halfway through unit plans and lesson plans. Halfway through rubrics and exemplars.

It’s February, and we’re finally, painfully and thankfully (only) halfway through.

IT CAN BE HARD TO ADMIT, BUT I’M TIRED.Scanning the education media landscape, with its pedagogical superheroes and indefatigable warriors, it can be hard to admit, but I’m tired.

I’m tired of arriving in my classroom no later than 6:30 a.m. I’m tired of putting on my armor of positivity and excitement in order to engage more than 100 recalcitrant, hormonal, and understandably distracted teenaged students who have far more going on in their lives than simply my English lesson.

I’m tired of hearing countless stories of trauma and feeling powerless in their wake. I’m tired of having barely enough energy to engage my two little boys at home or enjoy dinner with my wife, who spends her equally stressful days as an intensive care nurse in a trauma one hospital in Camden, New Jersey. I know how important my work is. But I’m tired.

WE’RE TIRED BUT WE LOVE TEACHING

We wouldn’t do this work if we didn’t love it, and to me there is no better way of honoring #LoveTeaching Week than acknowledging how difficult the work is.

Every day, teachers all across the country open their eyes to alarms that surely must have gone off too early, take a breath, and get up for another day of service for their communities. We go to school, prepare our lessons, and engage our students with honor, care, love and respect. We provide spaces of safety and comfort and dependability, spaces where our kids make the mistakes that help them learn to be successful adults.

THIS IS SIMPLY ONE TEACHER’S NOD TO THE SERVICE AND EXHAUSTION FELT BY OUR NATION’S CORPS OF EDUCATORS.This isn’t another piece about the angelic devotion and sacrifice of teachers. This isn’t a piece about the need for higher teacher salaries. This isn’t a piece about building respect for the teaching profession. This is simply one teacher’s nod to the service and exhaustion felt by our nation’s corps of educators.

When the bell rings and I take my stance on the threshold of my classroom, I acknowledge my fellow educators posted up and down the hallway. We can all see it, the tiredness in our countenances, the yearning for just one minute to catch our breaths.

Then the kids arrive, and one-by-one our teacher faces appear, exuding our openness and willingness to connect with our young people. We extend our individualized greetings for our students as they enter our rooms, and as we close the doors behind us, our voices carry with warm welcomes and do now instructions. There is no rest for the weary, teacher and student alike.

Fellow educators, we are halfway through. We are tired. We are drained. September’s impenetrable layer of patience, caring and compassion has begun to show signs of wear. But we are here together. We will count down the days together and push one another to keep putting our best selves in front of our students. And when that merciful June day arrives, we will raise glasses together to a job well done.

R is for...Research

Internet research is used so frequently everyday with in school. Much of it is used to help with homework and some of it IS the homework. But when students are to write a formal research paper, they must know how to write the information and how to present the information in the proper format.

http://www.aresearchguide.com

F is for FUN!

If you make reading fun, kids will read more.

Here are some entertaining Literacy Activities and Games.

L means Literature Circles

We have to value this important technique to produce results when promoting reading among student teams. Literature Circles enables participants to have a wider ..."from distance" view of the material and topic of a literary piece. For example, by role playing each member assumes roles as: Summarizer, Discussion Director, Investigator, Illustrator, Connector, Travel Tracer and/or Vocabulary Enricher. Facitating collaboration and knowledge sharing.

I believe role playing is always a good promoter for engagement and critical thinking.

http://elearningrandomwalk.blogspot.com/2006/07/literature-circle.html


Best regards,

Carlos Ramirez

D is for Distance Learning

The Monster Exchange is a program where students from around the world come together to share reading comprehension, descriptive writing and art.
Students from a classroom work in groups to design a picture of a monster and then create a description of the monster.
The students then swap the descriptions via email to a partnered class (in a different school somewhere) and each class re-creates the monsters using the only descriptions provided by the original artists.

There are some lesson plans, chat rooms and a discussion board available for educators to utilize.

M is for "Music"

Promoting Literacy Through Music

Did you know that Language in music and language in print have many similarities, such as the use of abstract symbols? That both oral language and written language can be obtained in the same manner? Emergent readers will attempt to "read" along in a shared reading of a familiar text, just as they will join in a sing along to a familiar song.

Explore the sidebar areas for songs and materials. Some of it is sales, but there are some materials available on the website.

http://www.answers.com/

A is for Access. Having technology available to all teachers and students would be a beautiful thing!

We'll use this blog to come up with ABC's of literacy. Just pick a letter of the alphabet and write an explanation. You can find graphic images to illustrate your point. Have some fun with it.