Teaching

5th grade, 17 years now. At the end of my first year I was reluctant to go back for a second. But... I kept going, and on most days I'm glad I did.

Teaching is rewarding. There's that deeply satisfying sense of contributing to the greater good of society; the opportunity to use so many of my talents; and of course, those "long" summer vacations! There are also many "warm fuzzy" moments that can't really be quantified but are an essential component to help keep things in perspective when the demands of beauracracy try to beat me down.

Although teaching is rewarding, it's also more stressful than I ever would have imagined. You have to ALWAYS be "ON" and ready for anything. You have to be consistently patient, fair, firm, diplomatic, and totally selfless- and that's just with the parents! And now there's this "No Child Left Behind" Act, which has designated my district as "underpeforming". (Not our school, mind you- we have been doing pretty well. But since we're a part of the "district", our school is automatically included in "program improvement" again this coming year.) It makes me angry, actually, but what can anybody do about it? Check out some of these pics from my classroom and then dare to call us "underperforming."

Somehow, despite the mess created by NCLB, at the end of the day I still feel like I have accomplished something important in the lives of kids who will one day be out there running the show.

I am not here by accident. I plan to stick with teaching as long as I can.

Links:

Check out my classroom web page.

A few pictures from open house.

"Data-Driven Instruction" (7.2 MB PowerPoint download) presented at the Alameda County Office of Education (see CTAP Award).

Download and try one of the eLearning Math Worksheets I developed in Excel to replace textbook assignments. (Note: This Excel file for Windows contains macros and will not run properly on Macs.)