Season 13, Episode 2: Slowly But Surely

Two conflicting thoughts have been running through my head on a consistent basis today:

1. It's hard to believe the first two weeks of school are past us already.

2. Workshop week, the first day of school, and summer in general seem WAY longer than two weeks ago!

Many times thoughts like these can cohabitate in our consciousness, especially when you jump from a season like summer into the full-on rush of the start of a school year. There is simply so much going on that even though time seems to fly, shorter (relatively) amounts of time seem to span much more than what meets the eye.

In that same vein, another pair of thoughts going on in my head right now are:

1. It doesn't feel like I've accomplished much with my students.

2. Man, we've gotten A LOT done already!

I think it is easy to feel as though not much has been accomplished when you do need to spend so much time and energy going through things like the syllabus, grading, expectations, materials, planner use, schedules, etc.

But as I sit here and reflect on our first two weeks, I begin to realize that quite a bit has been accomplished so far in class:

• A week's worth of Moodle activities, including work on cyberbullying and digital citizenship
• Starting in on our first unit of grammar work
• Two writing assignments already in the books
• Our "Digital Me" projects have begun, and will be presented next week
• Students have created their Language Arts Blogs, which will support much of our digital writing efforts this year

From that perspective, I am quite happy with what's happened and where we are going. The students are eager to learn and are especially excited about the amount of work we do electronically. I look forward to covering new ground with them this year and try some exciting new things.

So while time has seemed to move at various speeds, I write this feeling pretty assured of where we are as a whole. I guess sometimes it just takes a certain kind of perspective.

Slowly but surely...

-JM

***Follow-up from last week: I have successfully learned all 182 student names! My next challenge will now be to move them to different spots in the classrooms and test myself without associating names with seat locations.