Meetings enhance knowledge...to a point

While sitting through my 20th meeting/professional development in the last several week, I was thinking about how this might be affecting my progression. A little bit of background, I am a first year teacher. I graduated from college in May, and am in preparation for the first day of school. While I am excited, I know that there are a lot of things that I need to know. But what is the best way to learn? The answer to that question depends on who you are. If you are a conventional district, normal professional development (lectures) is the best way to educate new teachers on practices that they need know. This is the simplest way to teach these people how things are done, and why things are done. And to be honest, it is easy. All that is needed for this approach is one or more speaker and probably a powerpoint. If you want to get crazy, print out some sheets for the new teachers to fill out. But isn't this going against what we are trying to do in our own classrooms? I may be wrong, but isn't the point of our "new age" educational plan to engage our students and take them to that higher level learning? If this is true, then why are teachers being taught differently? Are we supposed to just gloss over the fact that our district is teaching us incorrectly? Maybe I just get bored easy, but I would rather be engaged like my students will be.

First Impressions, Common Core

Holy cow! When I remember my school experience, I remember a lot of lectures, a lots of packets of worksheets, and a lot of reading "popcorn style". These styles must have worked to some degree because I am now a somewhat educated person. However, I feel like most of my education was not done in the classroom, but more socially and perhaps even more independently (i.e. the internet). When thinking like this, I feel like I now understand the process that the common core writers went through to construct these standards. Long gone are the days where children have the patience and the discipline to stay sitting in one spot for more than five minutes. Long gone are the days where it is ok to accept mediocre work and still giving high grades. We as teachers must hold these students to a much higher standard and to much higher expectations than what we were held to. These kids must walk into our classroom constantly wondering wether to not they can actually do the work that we are putting in front of them. However, as teachers, we need to help them achieve the standard that we have set. Mixing these expectations with the scaffolding and adding the positive reinforcement, I believe we can achieve what the CCSS writers were trying to achieve. Andrew Hargis

Priorities

Have you ever wondered what your life would look like if someone other than you charted your life out by what you spent your time on? I sometimes think that what I say is important to me doesn't really matter because the people outside of my perspective could never see it. For example, I may think that school is important to me but really, since I only spend maybe an hour a week on my studies it must not matter very much.

I purpose a new way to handle this priority crises that I expect many of us go through when we are honest with ourselves. I wonder if we sat down and made a list of our top three, five, ten or more priorities and then compared it to a list that we make during a certain week of our activities and how long we spent on each they would be different.

Now that we have two lists and we are looking at them and realizing that we are living a life full of farces we can actually do something about it. I fully believe that once we have gone through an introspection period in our life, we can actually do something.

What you do after these actions is up to you. I would suggest however that you spend time in prayer and meditation about whether change needs to happen. Maybe your actions are your priorities and you just didn't know it. But maybe, your actions are the opposite of what you hold dear in your heart and you just haven't followed this up with actions. Now is the best time to change if it is necessary.

Rings

I feel like this has been a reoccurring theme in my life, the argument about engagement rings. Not only do I feel like they are not needed in a couple's life, but I also feel like the very idea of a ring can jeopardize the marriage before it even happens.

So much pressure has been built up about this little object sense we were all children. For the girl, it is the thought of being wowed with an expensive thing that show them how committed their man is. For the guy, it is the idea that you finally have the opportunity to sweep a woman off her feet. This is all a recipe for disaster.

It gets so bad sometimes while thinking about it that I start to liken it to Christmas. By Christmas I don't mean the good kind where you go and worship Jesus for hours and then thank all your friends and family for all their love. But the Christmas I would liken engagement rings to is the kind that causes men to go crazy trying to find the perfect gift for their loved one, and the kind that causes women to stampede Wal-Mart at four in the morning in November to find that gift that is on sale by five dollars.

Does this sound like a good thing to you? I feel like the marriage would be better without the stress of this "symbol". Instead, let me just ask the girl of my dreams to marry me and let her say yes...then we can plan the wedding without that shiny object to distract us.