What happens when a Math, Art and Barbering Teacher find time to exchange ideas?

As this school year draws to a close, I finally have some time to sit down and do some blogging. June has been a whirlwind for me and today was the last teacher day at my school. I finished collecting the laptops for the year, signed out some for the summer, locked up my storage room, forgot my phone, unlocked my storage room to get my phone, locked it up again, hopped in my car and am now ready to start the summer.

This summer will be the first one for me where I have specific goals that I need to focus on completing before September. I always have ideas about what I want to accomplish but this year is different. For school, this summer is about planning for standards based grading, 20% time and project-based learning. For family, it's about spending inordinate amounts of time with my Little Princess and her Mommy at Sesame Place, the Philadelphia Zoo, Cape Cod, Williamsburg and any place else we feel the need to visit. For me, it's all about work on the house, CrossFit and Paleo.

Back to the question that leads of this post.

What happens when a Math, Art and Barbering Teacher find time to exchange ideas?

Only good things!!

Where do I go from here?

Wow, it's almost June. It seems like it was September the other day and here I am getting ready for the last 2-3 weeks of school. I constantly try to reflect on what I do and how the year has been going but June always seems to be when I really think about it. Questions abound in my head, like:

• Why did this work?
• Why didn't that work?
• What was I thinking when I tried that?
• Will it get easier next year?
• What can I change for next year?
• Where do I go from here?

Most of these questions are for internal reflection that I can hopefully use to get better. The last two are the ones that take up most of my thoughts.

What can I change for next year?

There are many times that I find myself asking this question. At this point, the list of answers is probably endless. Obviously, there is no perfect environment or school or classroom or teacher but there are some that are close. Each year I try to fix what didn't work in the past. Some changes have worked, others notsomuch. I think my biggest problem has been to pick and choose small changes on top of some aspects that haven't been working. A few weeks ago, I wrote about what I wanted to do next year (after some more reading, standards-based grading is getting added to that list) and now I'm starting to think more and more about how to do it. Using Twitter has opened up my eyes to all of the possibilities for my classroom and has made this year the best for me in terms of my own professional development. 

Where do I go from here?

This is more figurative question than a literal one. I'm not leaving my school and I'm still going to be teaching math next year, but I'm at a fork in terms of my philosophy and practice. I believe that my school and district focus too much on the grade and not enough on the process. Too many of my students worry about what they need to do to get an A, B or C and not enough about how much further to take their understanding. Before the end of this year, I hope to have a clear idea of what I will be specifically teaching next year and a plan on what to do. I'm actually looking forward to the idea of rebranding my teaching style for next year. 

At times I feel like the picture-perfect world of students engaged and wanting to learn is unattainable. Then, I read a blog or follow a link and see examples of it happening everyday. In the end my personal goals as a teacher are to look forward to every day of the year and to be disappointed that the year is ending because I will have to wait 2 whole months to get started again. If I have to change almost everything to get there, I'm willing to take that chance.