It's vacation! Happy vacation everyone! We're about four days into it, and I was trapped in DC during the THUNDERSNOW. That was epic and crazy. I didn't take pictures of the long, wonderful walk I had during the snow. I went off from my place and wandered down 14th St and ended up at the 14th & U Snowball Fight (I like this description, though it's a tad more innocent than the eyewitness report of a cop brandishing a gun...yikes!); ran into a colleague, who went with me to the Mall! Lovely, lovely, all of it. I was freezing afterwards, but that's the price you pay for beauty?
So, now that I'm home, my main goal is three-fold: pull all my grades together; study for my praxis 2 exam (boooo); figure out how to really differentiate and plan well for my kids next quarter; and, most importantly, find a cure for what's ailing me.
I talked it over with my mom, and didn't really come up with much of a plan, unfortunately. But, I have an idea in my head about how to combat some of this negativity: I'm going to firmly plan my feet again and not kid myself: everyone's going through this shit that I'm going through. And it's not that I'm not special in that regard--my own experience is my own experience, I think. I deal with it however heavily I do (perhaps too much so), but I'm going to try to figure out how to go through that bullshit and do things in the school the right way.
I'm going to try and do my hardest to differentiate properly, and really study the units (workshops) that we go through in the rBook. I'll review the skills and the stories and try and predict how the kids're going to struggle, and how they're going to succeed. Some of this stuff is in place from last year, so I won't try and reinvent the wheel. But, as I'm trying to find my own way to deal with the problem of not being invested in my work, I will try and figure out what's best for my students in terms of homework, reviewing for the final, and planning, etc.
Here's what I want to do:
1) Build a review packet for the final like I did last time
2) Figure out what homeworks will be needed next workshop, and what I want the kids to focus on more
3) Write in my "Belief" notebook that I used to for school last year, and spend some time at my old Starbucks haunt from last year developing some curriculum.
4) Get some poetry recitation lesson plans set--I'll be starting some of them soon for an 11th grade classroom. I'm wicked excited about it, and it will provide me some insight into how an English class is run, at least, for now.
5) Write some poetry
6) Relax
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