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!!!
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