Getting Off to a Healthy Start For School (and for me)

We just had our first week back to school! For me it's always a mixture of excitement and a little bit of nervousness getting back into the swing of things. It's a bit of a rush meeting new students and reconnecting with the older students. I particularly love the energy of my new students who come in ready to learn French and try out new things in their lives. Even though this is my fourth year teaching French (not including my student teaching), there's always enough things that are new and changing to keep things interesting and exciting for me.

One of the biggest challenges at the beginning of the year is simply getting back into the teaching mindset and juggling all of the things that we have on our plates at the beginning of the year. I'm meeting and getting to know new students, starting to memorize their names, making sure I have all the resources I need for each class, organizing all of it, planning using my Google Calendar and Moodle (an online content management system), putting all the resources on Moodle, thinking about how I can make my classes flexible and interesting for all sorts of learners (visual, kinesthetic, auditory, struggling/proficient/advanced, etc...), communicating with parents and other staff, etc... And that's not even counting all of the things that I'm doing during my actual classes!

As you might imagine, it takes a bit of time to get myself back into the rhythm of teaching, and finding a good pace for myself and my students. Don't get me wrong- I love my job, but it can certainly take a lot out of me! Even at the end of the first day (which was a short one) I could barely think about anything once I got home. I felt like a zombie.

It's for this reason that I'm committing myself to a nutritional cleansing and exercise program for 30 days(minimum). I have some friends who have been doing it for about three months or so and they've had impressive results, so I figure it is definitely worth trying. It's something that I've never done before (at least to this extent) and  I'm hoping that it will help me to shed some extra weight that has crept up on me over the past few years, give me more energy and mental clarity, and simply help me to be as healthy as I can be. If it even lives up to half of the hype I think it will be well worth the investment so that I can be more effective in caring for myself and others. Here we go!!!

My favorite education book of the year so far!

Teach Like a Pirate: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator, by Dave Burgess is my favorite education book of the year so far. It's one of those books that I can't help but think, "I wish I had written this one!" I'm actually reading it through for a second time for inspiration for the new school year. 

The first part of the book is primarily about how to get in touch with your passion for teaching (because of course, it's not like we're necessarily passionate about everything we teach), and Burgess gives some very inspirational and concrete ways of amping up your passion and enthusiasm for teaching. I believe that it is very important to rekindle our passion (or at least keep it burning) if we truly want our students to be engaged with what we have to teach. Let's also not forget that, yes, this is how we as teachers make a living, but you'd have to be crazy to do what we do if you're only doing it for a paycheck. I, for one, would much rather at least have the goal of doing what I do with passion than just trying to get by. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm always going to meet that goal, but it certainly seems more likely to happen if I'm doing everything I can to live my life with passion than if I'm just going along with the ups and downs of life in a more passive fashion.

The second part of the book is what really interested me the most. In this section Dave Burgess goes into how to make the presentational aspect of your teaching more dynamic, creative, and engaging for yourself and your students. Now, there are many ways of teaching, and presentations are only one way (often overused, by the way...) but, in a very real way we're on the stage quite a bit as a teacher, and if we don't pay attention to making our own style of presentation interesting for students we're not going to be able to connect with them very well. I don't think that we should necessarily feel like we need to be entertainers (and let's face it- with modern media we have quite a bit of competition in that arena), but I do believe that we should do whatever we can to make our  teaching as engaging for students as we can. If our way of presenting material is dry and boring it's going to be quite a battle to get students to invest their energy and concentration into what we have to teach.

I especially love how he gives examples of many questions to ask yourself in order to get your creative juices flowing for presentational hooks. By having these questions at hand you can go through them to help think of other ways to look at your lessons and get students more involved. For example, here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to include a kinesthetic aspect to your presentations:

• The Kinesthetic Hook (I like to move it, move it)
• How can I incorporate movement into this lesson?
• Can we throw, roll, or catch something inside or outside of class?
• Can we get up and act something out?
• gestures and motions?
• use room as opinion meter- students choose sides based on statement
• simulation to reenact part of lesson
• walk around activity?
• game that uses movement/action?
• How can I guarantee that every student is up and out of their desk at least once during this lesson?

Dave Burgess includes many, many more hooks and questions that you can use to spice up your lessons. They are definitely something that I'll be using as a reference this year to keep my teaching interesting for both myself and my students. Long live creative and passionate teaching! ARRRRRR!!! (I couldn't resist...)