#blogamonth

The hardest part of teaching for me is reflection. I do not give myself or my students enough time to sit and reflect on anything! After a strong Pirate start, I was just barely treading water leading up to midterms. Lucky for me, a new semester is a fresh start! It doesn't feel quite as clean as a new school year, but I'll take it.

I recently stumbled upon the hashtag #blogamonth and I am going to stick to that idea-to write one blog post a month. I have this blog for a reason-to help MYSELF become a more reflective teacher. I am only letting myself down if I don't keep it-but that's the problem, isn't it? I'm quite OK with letting myself down in too many aspects of my life. I would never drop the ball with those who I am accountable to the way I do with myself. I would feel incredibly guilty if I were to give up on my colleagues or students in the same way I give up on myself. So-here it is. My first blog of the year in trying to be a more reflective and purposeful teacher.

The good, the bad and the ugly. 

I am proud of quite a bit of what I have done so far this year. I really like the emphasis being placed by my entire department on the modes of communication. We have common units with similar assessments for the 3 different languages, and rubrics for the different levels. As a group, we are reflecting on the units as we go to make adjustments as we see fit. I have also made a conscious effort to be more organized in my classroom. I have created a lot of tools with our new Google Accounts For Education to make life easier for myself and for my students.

I am horrible at planning for my singleton class. I teach two classes of Spanish 4 and two classes of Spanish 5-which I spend most of my time preparing for. I also have one small class of novice learners in Spanish 1. That class flies so far under the radar that I often start class without a clear objective in my mind. We just go where the wind takes us. These are my most vulnerable learners and they deserve so much more from me. The content is simple-I just need to work at making it more relevant to them and help them use what I am teaching them in real life situations.

What happened to my 90% target language goal????  I have fallen so far behind on that! I gave up speaking Spanish in class because I feel like what we're doing is important culturally-and it's just EASIER to do it in English. I was so proud of how well the kids were doing with the immersion classroom the first few weeks of school, and I am embarrassed of how little Spanish we're speaking in the classroom on a regular basis.

New Semester-clean start. Time to get my head back into the game and work as hard as I expect my students to work.