The best thing about teaching?  Of course it is the students, and the attendant unpredictability of each year–of each day, if we’re truly honest.  I understand all the talk about efficiency, but truly teachers are working with personalities, and that means learning to be flexible, finding moments of serendipity in the unraveling of a well-crafted plan.  That’s the best thing.

At its heart, the act of teaching is the consummate act of learning.  In what other profession is it so clearly built into every day?  Another great thing about teaching is that, to do it well, one must constantly be changing and growing and learning.  The second-best-thing!

(photo by Christian Montone @blogspot)

An advertising tagline that has become almost invisible because of its ubiquity is, “New and Improved.”  Teaching requires that we carefully attend to the phrase, however.  In our role as consumers, it is difficult to know what that means with a product we already think is good.  What can possibly be done to make it better?  If we’re lucky, the improvement, the tweaking of something that was already good, enhances its worth, and we wonder at the process.  If we don’t notice any difference, we question the claim.

This is my 35th year in the classroom, and I want to make this one new and improved, so people say, “her class was good before, but now it’s even better.”  It’s a challenge to embrace the new for improvement’s sake, but keep the tried-and-true because it has served its purpose admirably.  Striking this balance is an imperative because we’re not talking about laundry soap here; we’re talking about learning and the lives of young people.  The decision to perform differently when one has already attained a level of success must  be approached judiciously.  I know I need to work on reading conferences with your children, so with an eye toward that performance goal, for THEM, I shift toward the new.

After reading two professional books with change in mind, Book Love and Readers Front and Center, I anticipate more productive reading conversations with your children, deeper engagement with the texts they choose and the thoughts they share.  True improvement.  In terms of tracking these conversations and maintaining a history that we can reflect upon, I will be using a web-based tool, Evernote, to capture the gist of our interactions in a format that I can easily share with you–the new for me though I follow in the stead of fellow professionals for whom this is already tried-and-true.

I will work to have my “consumers” wonder at the process, not question the claim, as we venture forth this year.  Let me know how I’m doing.

While it is necessary to get the room ready for the new year, I’ve become much less focused on the trappings and far more interested in the real estate:  STUDENTS.  Today I ironed out some glitches with the new app that I hope will benefit any of the eighth graders who possess a smart phone, Apple or Android.  Julienne and her colleagues at ClassOwl worked tirelessly to have all systems “go” for tomorrow.

When I first connected with them, I appreciated their vision, realizing that the best tech tools do one thing REALLY WELL!  It is a lesson in focus that would benefit many of us to remember. (I speak for myself here.)  Julienne described how, in her time at Stanford, she realized that the phone was truly underutilized as an organizational tool for juggling assignments.  Out of this lack sprang the Class Owl app.

The addition of integration with files and Google Drive holds true promise for our year together.  I hope you and your children who possess smart phones will avail yourself of the class code to join.  I will be discussing it during our first day together–tomorrow.  For those students without the phone, the ClassOwl site is available online.  I will also post homework on my webpage in the Calendar (see navigation).  It’s time to GET REAL!

The CLASS CODE IS:  86QC5V