Classroom New Year's Resolution: Quick Daily Assessments With GradeCam!

The new year is fast upon us, and having a little break gives me some time to reflect and think about goals for the coming year. I think that it's important to focus on only 1-3 goals, otherwise it just gets to be too much and none of them get done. So, when I think about if there's only one change that I can make, what would that change be?

I've been learning a lot from other teachers around me, and particularly from Ben Slavic's TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) and CI (Comprehensible Input) Professional Learning Community. One of the gems that I've culled is assigning a student to be the quiz writer for the day. He or she then writes 10-12 True/False statements during the course of the class based on whatever our discussion may be. The nice thing about this is that it keeps students accountable to the content of our discussions, while also allowing the class to be flexible and not entirely tied down to any preconceived plan if so desired. Also, it's a great way to review content at the end of the class, and if it's done on a daily (or at least close to daily) basis it keeps both the students and me aware of how much they're understanding. 

So, how will it actually work in practice? First of all, I will explain to my class the purpose of this. Secondly, I will explain what the Quiz Writer will do and then pick a student to be the quiz writer for the day. The last 10 minutes or so of class I will collect the quiz from the Quiz Writer and do one of two things. Option number one is to have students get out a blank sheet of paper and write their names and the numbers 1-10 (or 1-8 if you want it to be a bit shorter) on it. Option number two is to use GradeCam. For this you need to set up an account (for quizzes of up to 10 questions it's entirely free, and their's a free trial period as well) for yourself, and create a class with your students' names. You can then print out multiple choice sheets (A through D) of 8-10 questions each. I will assign 2-3 students to pass out the sheets because their is one sheet for each student with their names on it. (You can print multiple sheets per page so that it uses less paper.) I would probably go with option number one as more of an informal assessment on Mondays and Tuesdays, and option number two for more formal assessments during block (Wed./Thur.) and Fridays. 

Once students have either a sheet of paper or the GradeCam sheets I will read aloud the 8-10 questions that the Quiz Writer has written. That way I can quickly correct any grammatical errors, and it also assures that students are paying attention to spoken French. I will read through each phrase three times. Once they are complete I will either have them trade with a partner, who will grade them, or just have them hand them in. I will then go through each phrase one at a time and ask the class whether it is true or false, and have them respond together. If it seems like they are unclear or if I hear some students who respond incorrectly I can either explain it to them or ask a student from the class to explain it and/or translate it. 

If I chose to use GradeCam then all I have to do is take the Quiz Writer's quiz and quickly enter in the answers into a new quiz in GradeCam. I can then take each of their sheets and, using my computer webcam I can put the sheet in front of the camera and it will instantly tabulate their grade! And, it doesn't end there. If you are using an electronic gradebook (as we do) you can then open up your electronic gradebook, create the new assignment, click on the first student, and then hit the F8 key. It will then instantly enter in the grades for you! It's a beautiful sight to see! Not only does this help take away some of the really boring and repetitive parts of teaching, but it also gives students (as well as myself and their parents) some very quick feedback on how they're doing. It's a fantastic idea that I am actually looking forward to implementing in the new year!

Just get on the bike and ride!

I went to a training yesterday, and this is an analogy that really stuck out to me. Think back to how you learned (or are presently learning) in school. When I think back to my foreign language classes in high school and at the university a lot of what I remember is trying to memorize an almost endless amount of vocabulary lists, conjugating verbs, and doing lots and lots of book exercises. Don't get me wrong, we also played games, had short conversations, read, watched videos, and other fun and interesting things, but it still seemed like the emphasis was on memorizing, practicing, and then regurgitating what we had (hopefully) taken in. Now, I don't think that my teachers and professors necessarily meant any harm by this, but you kind of have to wonder just how effective this method (or methods) is when each year fewer and fewer students continued in the program, and many felt unsuccessful. How many people have you heard say, "I just can't learn a foreign language."? Perhaps it's not them. Perhaps it's the method.

I truly believe that a lot of the problem here is that much of this learning has been focused on learning about the language, and not simply learning by using the language. Now we're getting to the analogy that I ran across yesterday. Imagine that you want to learn how to ride a bike. For some reason you never got around to it. So, one way is to go get a book about how to ride a bike. You go buy a book, read it from cover to cover, take notes, quiz yourself, and maybe even watch some videos of people riding bikes. You learn everything you can about how to ride a bike.

In scenario two, you decide to just go get a bike, and ask a friend who already knows how to ride a bike to help you out. Your friend encourages you and shows you how it's done. Perhaps you even start with some training wheels so you can begin to get the feel for it without having to fall too much. But, eventually you take those training wheels off and you ride just a little bit by yourself (with a push from your friend), and you fall down. You get up, wipe yourself off, and try again. This time you go a little bit further before you fall down, but once again you get back up and get back on your bike.

Just imagine that you have two people. One person tries out the first option for a year, and the other person tries out the second option for a year. You could even extrapolate this out to four years or more. At the end of that time period you had both of them get on a bike and show you what they had learned. What do you think the results would be? Who do you think would be better able to ride a bike?

Unfortunately, a lot of the learning that has taken place in our schools is more about learning about things, instead of actually learning by doing. I think this is particularly poignant in foreign language teaching. I have even been guilty of teaching in this way as well. I have tried to teach my students to think about the language, which oftentimes just gets in the way of actually being able to use the language. Now, perhaps at a more advanced level it may be appropriate to teach about the language (or maybe not- how many of you really have to think about how English works at a conscious  level to be able to use the language well?), but considering the small amount of time that we have with students as it is, teaching about the language is of limited value if I really want them to be able to learn to use the language. It's time to turn over a new leaf!!! It's time to just get on the bike and ride!

Comprehensible Input and Personalization

Ben Slavic teaching some of his students French

1. Is it comprehensible?
2. Is it personalized?

According to Ben Slavic's book, "TPRS in a Year", these are the two main questions we should ask ourselves as foreign language teachers if we truly want our students to acquire the language we are teaching them. Acquiring the language, as I understand it, is about much more than memorization. In fact, there are those who would argue that rote memorization isn't actually all that useful in the long-term. We all know those students (and I have certainly been one of them) who simply memorize what they need to know for the next quiz or test and then promptly forget it because they know that we're just going to move onto something new, which they will then memorize, regurgitate for the quiz, then forget. It's an ugly process with rather limited results.

As I see it acquiring the language is about absorbing the language at such a deep level that it becomes a part of your being in the world. You've taken it in to such a point that you don't have to stop to think about it. It has become a reflex. It has simply become a part of who you are.

Acquiring the language, even if only a small part of the language, is ultimately my goal for my students. Because of limited time it is necessary to focus on the most important words and structures in the language. This takes lots and lots of repetition, and patience. Fortunately, we don't actually need an enormous vocabulary to be able to understand a large percentage of what we come into contact with, and with a little creativity we can communicate quite a bit with even a small amount of vocabulary and language structures.

Interestingly enough the 100 most common high frequency words in a language make up about 50% of what we read. Even the top 25 words make up about a third of what we read (Fry,
Kress, and Fountoukidis, 2004). By focusing on the most common vocabulary and really getting that vocabulary down there is an amazing amount that we can understand and do.

So, one major thing that we need to do is to focus on the most used words in the language and make sure our students have them down really really well if we want them to be able to understand what we are trying to communicate so that the language we use is comprehensible to them.

As an aside, I've also been looking into "Immediate Immersion", which is a TPRS based curriculum created by Scott Benedict that was recommended to me by a colleague of mine who has had a lot of success with it so far this year in her Spanish classes. During the first year the teacher primarily focuses on the 100 most common words. During the second year you then focus on the top 200, and so on and so forth. Of course, students come into contact with much more than that, but they aren't expected to have the other vocabulary down like they do with the 100 words that are being focused on that year. To me this seems like a sensible and humane way of teaching a foreign language so that truly all students can be successful- not just the ones that are gifted in that area.

Incremental Improvement

 

 While I love those "Aha! That's genius!" moments (which I am most certainly always open to), it's constantly focusing on making small, incremental improvements which lead to big growth in the long-term. Those small changes may not seem like much at first, but over the long-term they can be completely transformative. 

To give you an image of incremental change which leads to big results, today I took my dog Archer into the vet for a check-up. His last visit was a few months ago. I had realized that he was getting bigger, but it was hard for me to really tell just how much, since I would see him everyday. In my eyes he's still my little puppy dog. But, lo and behold, he's gone from weighing about 32 pounds in June to 53 pounds today! My little puppy isn't quite so little! (I suppose that's why it's getting more difficult to lift him up. At least I can be pretty sure that it's not because I'm getting weaker...) Now, what you choose to focus on incremental improvement may or may not be a puppy, I think an analogy can be found there. (While tempting, I'm NOT going to refer to my students as puppies. Scout's honor. Of course, by saying that I'm NOT going to refer to my students as puppies I suppose the argument could be made that I am to some extent. It's sort of like saying, "Don't think about a pink elephant." You're going to do it either way. In fact, as teachers we're told to always frame things in the affirmative, because if you tell someone not to do something they're going to focus on what you told them not to do. Sigh... I hope you like tangents...)

One major way for me to keep track of those small improvements is through my use of presentations in my classes. First of all, I use them so that my teaching is image-rich and it helps students (and myself) to have a very clear idea of where we're at in the lesson, particularly since I use little to no English in the classroom. But, it's not just about helping myself and my students to keep organized and aware of expectations.

One of the major factors of using presentations (for me anyway) is that I can easily move activities around and/or modify them on the fly, or at least soon thereafter. While I love the idea of keeping notes on what went well, what didn't go so well, and what I can improve on in the future, it's difficult to have a good system for that. That's where my presentations come in. When students are working independently or in groups I can easily freeze my projector and then go right on over to my computer and change around my presentation as needed. Oftentimes it's during the moment or not long after that I come up with ideas for improvement. Even if it's something that I don't have time for right now I can easily add a slide and quickly type in those ideas to flesh out further on in the future. 

Also, if there are things that didn't go so smoothly, or if I find that there are certain pieces of information that need further review I can fairly quickly make those changes for future classes, if not for the current class. While these changes may be small in the moment, they will cumulatively create more momentum and success in the future. It may not seem dramatic at first, but after years of constant incremental improvement you can make great gains! Just stick with it and focus on the next step!

The Joy of Moodle Quizzes!

One of the most amazing things about Moodle (our online content manager) that I'm really getting into this year is the ability to create quizzes that are (mostly) graded by the computer. Using Moodle I can make quizzes that have all of the multiple choice, true/false, matching, and short answers automatically graded by the program. I then only need to grade essay questions or other questions that require a more complicated response. This is a lifesaver for me because one of the things that I really hate to do is grade the very repetitive and mostly mindless grading that those types of questions require. (Of course, I also believe in using projects, presentations, and other sorts of products for summative assessment. In fact, I find them to be quite fun, interesting, and useful. But, I do believe there is value in more traditional forms of assessment such as quizzes.)

Not only does it make my job more enjoyable, but it gives students instant feedback on how they did on the quiz. They don't have to wait even a day to know. They can find out right away! Now there's feedback for you. Also, I have the option to give them multiple tries to improve their score. Each time they take the quiz the question and answer order is shuffled so it won't look exactly the same as before. This is fantastic because then both they and I can see not only what they need to improve upon, but also exactly what they have improved. I think it's very rewarding to see students say, "Oh, now I get it! That's what that was about!" Plus, I can easily create practice quizzes that they can do as many times as they like so they will know that they are prepared when they do the real thing.

Another fantastic aspect of it is that I can compare how all of my students did on each question without having to flip through a whole bunch of papers. It makes it much easier to see if there are particular questions that a good number of students are (or aren't) understanding, and I can modify my teaching to address that in the future. Moodle does a great job of letting me know how students are doing in essentially real time.

Also, once I get a class set of headsets I will be able to record my voice that students will then be required to respond to. You can even have them record their own voices as the response! It is definitely a time consuming process to get everything going, but I think it well really be helpful for both me and my students in the future. 

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...)

Youtube to the rescue!

Another great resource for education is of course Youtube. If you want to learn something you can find videos on almost any subject. Of course, the difficulty is in finding videos that are of high quality in their instruction and information. There's definitely a lot of junk out there.

One way that I like to use Youtube videos is to provide instruction from other teachers. That way students get another angle on the subject that might click with them a little better than the way that I teach. In fact, one teacher I know has made it her goal to provide instruction from at least three different teachers (including her own) through the use of videos so that students can get different perspectives and hopefully at least one of those will reach them.

One weakness that I often see in videos is that they often don't check for understanding. It would certainly be nice if we could just sit and absorb information (and we do to some extent), but it isn't the most effective way of learning. There has to be some sort of active element, even if it's only a short quiz or some guiding questions.

So, to practice this a little bit I created a lesson plan and assignment for French 2 students to review the passé composé with avoir and être (not including reflexive verbs). You can check these out for yourself at:

French 2 Passé Composé Review With Youtube Lesson Plan
French 2 Passé Composé Review With Youtube Worksheet

Keeping on track with Google Calendar!

As part of my Google Apps for Education class I've been learning about Google Calendar and all that you are able to do with it. It's quite timely particularly because we will be required to use it for all of our classes this coming school year at MCPS. 

One of the features that I love about the Google Apps in general is that they are made so you can very easily share your work with others, while also keeping everything in one place. For example, I created a Google Calendar for my French 1 class, which I then embedded on my French 1 website and in my French 1 Moodle. If I change something on the calendar it will automatically be updated whether a student or parent is looking at the French 1 website or the French 1 Moodle (or any other place that I happen to embed it for that matter).

I usually put the topic of the day, the homework, and due dates on a calendar on a whiteboard in my room anyway, but this way I can put all of the same information on my Google calendar so students and parents can keep updated on what's going on. Plus, there will be a permanent record of what we did last week and the weeks before that. I just don't have enough whiteboard space for all of that!

Another feature that I wasn't aware of before is that you can attach files from your Google Drive to any events that you create. For example, if the topic of the day is the numbers 0-20 I can easily attach a Google Presentation or video to the event that I created called "Topic: #0-20". I can also create an event entitled "Homework: #0-20, Due: Next Class" and attach the actual homework to the event for download or printing.

The beauty of it all is that as long as the file is in my Google Drive I can always edit the original file and I won't have to worry about uploading the newest version. It will already be updated. Plus, it gets rid of the headache of wondering which version was the new version and which was the old version. Love it!

If you would like to see an example, here is my French 1 Google Calendar:

Google Apps for Education, Reflection #1

I just started a three week class on using Google Apps for Education, and it's pretty amazing how much is available. I already use Google apps a little bit- I have this blog, a gmail account, and I really love Google Drive. Google provides at least 10 gigabytes of free space, and I found out I could get 100 gigabytes of space for only $1.99 a month- which is a steal considering I can make sure all of my school files are synced and I don't need to worry so much about losing my work. I've always found copying and pasting files from one computer to another can be quite a headache. With Google Drive you can download the Google Drive application onto your computer and then copy any files and/or folders that you want onto it and it will then save all of those files onto the cloud so you can access it anywhere you have internet access. This makes it so I won't have to worry about whether what I saved on my flash drive was newer than the file that I saved on my computer, and if I change it in one place it will automatically be changed in another place. Amazing!

I'm looking forward to learning more about how to connect with other teachers, and be able to share what me and my students are doing on a regular basis.

Learning how to learn: "Foreign Languages for Everyone"

Lately I've been reading the book, "Foreign Languages for Everyone" (2011) by Irene Konyndyk, which is a great book about how to teach foreign languages to students with learning disabilities. This is an extremely important topic to me because I feel like students with learning disabilities are often discouraged from taking foreign language classes because they're deemed to be too difficult for certain types of students. Now, I certainly won't say that learning a language is always easy; it's definitely one of the most challenging things that I've ever done. But, that's one of the reasons I really love it. Because I've challenged myself I truly have something to be proud of. Likewise, students with learning disabilities may find certain aspects of foreign language learning more difficult than others, but there are ways for them to overcome these challenges, and for teachers to help them to do so in a more effective manner. That's what this book is all about. It starts with the premise that foreign languages are truly for everyone- not just for the "gifted and/or talented" students. It's easy to teach to the students that are probably going to get it no matter how bad of a teacher you are, but it's another thing entirely to effectively teach to the students that are often ignored (unless they're acting out, that is...). "Foreign Languages for Everyone" gives some solid techniques and pedagogy from a teacher who has focused on doing exactly that.
I have to admit that I'm certainly still figuring things out myself, but I've found some great ideas in this book. One of the things that I'm going to start doing in my classes is a short weekly journal that helps students to reflect upon how they're learning so that they become more aware of what works for them and what doesn't. I think that this is brilliant because not only does it give me feedback on how students are doing and what they think of the class, but more importantly it helps the students themselves to realize how they think and learn. In education circles this is known as metacognition- being aware of how you think. When students become more aware of their own thinking then they are able to be more active in their own learning instead of simply going with the flow. This brings to mind the growth mindset of Carol Dweck's book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which I also happen to love. When students focus on their own growth and what they can do to improve they are active instead of passive learners. They are also much more likely to be successful because they see mistakes as something to learn from, not just a sign that they're stupid.
So, I've begun working on an outline of topics to focus on next year so that each week we will look at a tool for becoming a successful student as well as using questions to reflect upon the learning process. To give my students a general set of tools I created a simply acronym to help give some structure to what I'll be teaching them about the learning process. This is what I came up with:

Reflection and Change

As the end of the year fast approaches I'm starting to find myself thinking about changes to make for my classes next year. One of the wonderful aspects of teaching is that we get the chance to bring each year to an end, reflect, and make changes for the coming year.

One big change for me this next year (aka this summer) is that I'm going to start experimenting with blended learning and/or flipped learning. I'm leaning more towards the blended learning model. Essentially, in blended learning the teacher makes learning resources such as video class lectures, presentations, online activities, texts, and worksheets available to students online and/or on a disk so that students can learn using digital resources both at home and in the classroom.

In the flipped learning model these resources are made available so that students do a lot of the one-direction, receptive learning on their own to make room for more interactive, hands-on activities in the classroom. I particularly like the flipped learning model because it doesn't make sense to me to spend our classroom time together on lots of one-way communication that can be done outside of the classroom with the aid of technology. I believe that face-to-face interactive learning as a community should be the focus of class time. This is also what most students truly desire, and can't truly be done on your own at home with a computer.

While I like the flipped learning model there are a few problems with fully implementing it at this time. The biggest challenge right now is that not all students have access to computers and the internet at home. One solution, at least as far as videos are concerned, is to burn copies of the videos onto DVDs so that students can view them at home. Of course, computer labs are usually available to students before school, at lunch, and after school, but with students' busy schedules, activities, and/or transportation to and from school this can still be problematic.

Some districts provide one-to-one computing in which every student is provided either a laptop or a tablet. I think that this would certainly be nice- especially when you consider that pretty much all university students are expected to have their own technology, but every district has to weigh the pros and cons. First of all, it's quite an expensive endeavor. Where will the funding come from? What can be cut, and/or where can new funding come from? Perhaps partnerships can be made with private companies, but what types of pressure would that put on public school systems? Moreover, while technology can be very interesting for kids (or even deadly boring, of course) is it really more effective than more traditional methods or even hands-on projects? Research doesn't seem to show great gains in learning because of technology, but I would argue that if it is used well it can help keep students engaged, and it can also allow for more flexibility in teaching and learning.

My greatest fear is that some people may believe that teachers can simply be replaced by technology. I believe that this is highly erroneous because it is the human connection and relationship that is the most effective in creating conscientious and caring citizens. Sure, motivated students can certainly learn a lot on their own (there are quite a few examples of some amazing autodidacts throughout history), and technology can help them do that. But, technology should be used to free up more time to create, sustain, and develop those relationships so that we and our students will learn to be better people and create better communities instead of just creating more and more "technological islands" and divisions. We are much more than simply numbers or cogs in the machine.

It's almost the end of the year!

We're almost there! I know my students are starting to feel it, and to be honest, I'm starting to look forward to a bit of a break too! It's definitely a challenge because teaching (and learning really) is a marathon. I sometimes feel as though I have a lot of energy and excitement, while on other occasions I feel like I'm just trying to make it to the end of the day- or more realistically, to the weekend.

Thankfully, I have a lot of great students. Yes, there are some who for whatever reason aren't always into what we're doing or don't quite "click" with me, but I try to realize that you can't win over everyone. Of course there are also days where we may not have gotten enough sleep, or things aren't going great at home, or maybe we're just distracted by the fact that we're hungry, or it's not at a comfortable temperature in the classroom. It's always hard to say. I try my best to focus on the positive students, while also encouraging and helping those who aren't quite with it for whatever reason.

I find that it's especially important as an educator to try to focus on the positive during this time of the year. It can be far too easy to focus on the negative when everyone is feeling more tired and stressed out with all that needs to be done at the end of the year, and let's face it, it's sometimes easier to daydream about our upcoming vacation- not that this is necessarily bad all the time. We all need a break!

So, if you're a student, teacher, or a part of the education system take heart and be on the lookout for the positive things that are going on. Also, when the kids (or you) are feeling antsy and/or irritable take the time to take a deep breath and remember that we're all human, and while we may not be at the top of our game all of the time we can still make it through challenging times together. Also, if you really need that mini break- take it! Take a moment to daydream, but then use that positive energy to reinvigorate yourself and others around you!