I know I
have am embarrassment of riches that I could pick from – but I am going to just
choose one item to celebrate. My time is short – two young children are
anxiously awaiting some pancakes to be made.
Yesterday
I had the chance to present to a group of teachers in my district. Public
speaking is tough for me. Anytime I have any rush of emotions whatsoever, I
always get a red face. I’m not necessarily embarrassed, just excited, but it is
still tough. My voice used to quaver and my heart would race. I was please to
find that I didn’t have that reaction this time, just excitement. (And a red face,
but we’ll go with that.)
I spoke
about the different ways I use technology in the classroom. The reason I want
to celebrate this is not that what I do is earth shattering – or even that I
made it through a presentation without having a panic attack. What I want to
celebrate is two separate events.
First, I
have to celebrate the audience. If you’ve spoken to a group before you know
that you get feedback from them without a word even being said. Their body
language, eyes, faces, and more say so much. Teachers are notorious for being a
hard group to speak to. Yesterdays group was wonderful. Smiles, laughs, eye
contact, and more – I can’t say how much I appreciated it. I’ve always said it
is harder for me to present in my own district than to strangers, but that
group I had yesterday rocked. If any of them are reading – thanks so much! You
made me day start off on the right foot – and my weekend too.
Second,
as I spoke about what I have been doing with my students this year I came to an
important realization – we’ve done a lot. I think the nature of teaching is
that we never feel caught up, never feel like we've done enough. I always feel like I have failed – that I haven’t
had enough explicit lessons on comprehension. I haven’t conferenced enough. I
haven’t had enough time for them to write. I haven’t had enough time for them
to read. Standing in front of a group and sharing my class, I had to pause.
Holy crap. We’ve gotten Twitter off and running, ditto to Kidblog and a
Classroom blog. We’ve had a whole unit on monitoring comprehension through think
alouds. We’ve had five writing mini-units. The list goes on.
Yesterday
was a great reminder to me that I look for the positive in life, in my
students, in everyone else. However, I don’t tend to look for the positive in
myself. I am my own worst critic. So I think part of my celebrations need to be
recognizing that sometimes, I’m a bit hard on myself and I need to let that go.
If you’d
like to see the slides I made for my district presentation you can find them
HERE.
Thanks, Ruth, for starting this great new weekend writing idea. Have a
great weekend everyone!
