Today was an amazing day, although it didn’t start that way. I spent most of the morning struggling through a medium level panic attack where I couldn’t even eat breakfast. Not exactly the way to start school in the morning when you have a ton of work to get done. Fortunately for myself, I have two amazing co-teachers who had already made the plans for each of the classes. In both classes, I didn’t have to do much except get them started. This afforded me time to focus on calming myself down. As the day wore on, I was able to regain a normal heart rate and get some work done in the process. Although, I can still feel the residual effects of being severely drained and completely unmotivated to finish work for tomorrow. 

While the work day was great, technology was not on my side. I spent about 15 minutes trying to get the tv up and running this morning during first block as it was not connecting to the correct channel for AirPlay. Effectively, this wasted almost 20 minutes by then because I spent the time on that instead of doing the classroom routine items like taking attendance and checking in. Then, during 3rd block, the projector went out and wouldn’t allow me to connect in there. This was even more disadvantageous as it was a requirement for the review game we were going to play. Fortunately, I was able to pull together the game by writing the codes on the board and proceeding from there. 

My fourth block EL class was by far the best it has ever been. The focus today was on getting students to write more when drafting personal narratives. Usually, the most I can get out of the students is one or two shallow topic items that end up in a single sentence. To adjust for this, I modeled using a timeline and set the expectation that they write about an entire day starting from when they woke up to when they went to bed. While the results still aren’t where I would like them to be, they are definitely better than their previous works. As a point of humor (knowing high schoolers to have the same level of maturity as myself, i.e., none) I explained that I was out on a date as a reason for being out so late. Of course the comments started to flow. It was kind of cute. 

I’m not sure when I will compile my notes and share what I learned at MELED 2019. I was hoping to do that on Sunday, but obviously that didn’t occur. Being as though tomorrow is the last day of school for the week, maybe Wednesday’s post will be the best time to share.