About...

About Me:

Summary - I'm crazy

I'm a teacher. I teach 7th grade English/Language Arts in a junior high in middle America. I am also a career changer. After working for 12+ years and being a stay-at-home mother for 7 years, I chose to do this.

I spend my days trying to convince 12-14 year olds that language is rich, beautiful, structured, and worth knowing. I encourage reading with an evangelical zeal that they find hilarious, but sometimes might pay attention to, in spite of themselves. And I ask them, plead with them, threaten them, cajole them, and otherwise manipulate them to write. Then I attempt to wade through it, assess where they are, and take them just that one step farther. Anyone who has ever tried this knows what I'm talking about. See Summary, above.

About the Blog:

This blog is part of my expanding technology repertoire. Another blogger described it as a digital desk, a place where I can collect ideas and resources to share, mostly with other teachers, but perhaps with students or parents. These resources might be technology, teaching techniques, current issues, or instructional requirements (for example, our school will begin implementing Common Core Standards in one year, so I will surely share some of the process of the transition here). If I'm learning it or teaching it, it might show up on this blog.

I plan to start by documenting the tools I learn this summer. That way, I have a ready online resource that I can find my "notes" and reflections about how I want to use what I've learned. I can also share it with my colleagues who didn't get to attend, maybe work on a little collaborative lesson planning with my 7th grade counterpart. I've always struggled with implementing the ideas that I get from workshops or other teachers, mostly because I don't take the time (or have a designated place) to go over my notes, the examples, to perhaps take the lesson further by doing online research or writing a sample lesson plan. I can do that here. I hope that I will.

And I couldn't make it easy. I had to start two blogs at once, because I want to share lots about books, about reading, and about finding your way as a reader in a digital world. I will do that at Book Curious.

Check back. I'm just getting started.