Just logging

Tuesday, September 9, 5:30 am to 4 pm for 10.5 hours.
Wednesday, September 10, 4:45 am to 5:15 pm for 12.5 hours.
Thursday, September 11, arrived at 4:20 am, left at 5:15 for about 13 hours.
Friday, September 12, 5 am to 3:30 pm for 10.5 hours.
Saturday, September 13, 8:15 am to....

GBJAQ

"Getting beyond just answering questions" is supposed to serve as reminder of the point of teaching. I want to do more than just answer questions, and I want my students to do more, as well. What that means, exactly, is still to be discovered.
The state of things now in my classroom is still much farther advanced than it was say five years ago. Most of the student learning happens when they ask each other questions, or when they answering questions designed to lead them in developing understanding. But it seems like there are other places to go. I need to think on this more.

Time log: Monday, 5 am to 5 pm at school. 12hours.

Not at school!

I'm actually not going in to school today, amazingly enough. We have a family get together planned. Which is good, because yesterday I overdid it again at school, staying until 6:45 to work on the credit retrieval set up--which is not yet finished--and putting in a 10:45 hour day. If I put those into my workday average for the school year so far, I just blew it up to 14.7 hours a day. Perhaps it's understandable at the beginning of the year, but it's still out of balance.

I'm not counting the time I'm going to spend now on reading student journals. At least I'm at home while I'm doing it....

Cutting Down

I may be able to get the time-at-school thing cut down to a more reasonable level. But it's still pretty out of balance. Left at 4 pm on Thursday, so that's 11.25 hours. Arrived at 5:15 and left at 3:45 on Friday, for 10.5 hours. The reduction is promising. But the only way I could leave earlier Friday is because I knew that I'd be coming in on Saturday....

So here I am, working with a colleague to set up our science credit retrieval program for the fall. This entails collecting data on students who had barely failing grades or attendance issues, and grouping and sorting so that they can be assigned a reasonable number of extra class sessions for the purpose of extra learning, with the result that the student can retrieve a passing grade.

I like the idea of it, and it is successful in helping our students see themselves as responsible and in control of earning their grades. They say that they think it is fair.

It takes a few hours to set up the groups, though. I arrived at 8 am this Saturday. We'll see how it goes, getting everything ready.

For my time tally so far: 3 school days in this first week, 33.25 hours at school (plus whatever I spend today). I'm averaging slightly over 11 hours per day on school days.

PD meme and frantic school start

So I finished Brain Rules and Collapse, but the other two PD goals have not yet been accomplished. More later on that.

But first let me say that the fact that the network at our school was down until 15 minutes before I started teaching the first day of school was a little stressful. I came in early to print out fresh class lists and answer tech requests and felt totally paralyzed. Interesting how I've switched over to absolute dependence on network and internet access for teaching materials and information.

I've got to get the tech guys to give me a contact number or something, so I can call them in the morning and they can get it fixed before 7 am. Of course, they might not think it was so fun if I call them at 5 am.

I'm going to keep track of daily hours at school for a while, I think, just so I have a record of how things go in my life for real. So Wednesday, 9/3, I arrived at school at 4:30 am and left at 4:00 pm. First day, 11.5 hours. Today I arrived at 4:45 am. When I start my morning exercise program up again, I won't arrive until a little later. Hard going to bed at 7 pm, though.

Off to read student journals....

Professional Development Meme

I found out that Martha Thornburgh has tagged me with the Professional Development Meme, but I didn't notice until more than a month afterward, which is sort of embarrassing. At least I've been goaded into starting a blog; it remains to be seen whether I am the kind of person that will benefit from a semi-public expression of thoughts enough to justify the time spent.

My time to work on these Professional Development goals is shorter than intended, but it still seems like a good thing.

The Rules for This Endeavor

1. Pick 3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
2. For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/01/08).
3. Post the above directions along with your 3 goals on your blog.
4. Title your post Professional Development Meme and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/353.
5. Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme.
6. Tag 8 others to participate in the meme.
7. Achieve your goals and "develop professionally."
8. Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

The Goals

1. Finish reading Collapse, The World is Flat, Brain Rules and The Singularity is Near.
2. Incorporate the idea of the Digital Farm (from Alan November) into my class set up for the fall, and support the other chemistry teachers in doing the same thing.
3. Plan how I can help our staff effectively use a digital school calendar. This will mean (I hope) delineating some guidelines for use and providing a little training to staff.

Tagging

This part is hard. I notice that the originator had links to blogs for each of the people he tagged. The person who tagged me tagged 3 others without blogs. The people I know who have blogs, I don't know well enough to tag, and the people I know well enough to tag don't have blogs that I read, or can even find. So I don't have any links for the people I'm tagging:

• Missi Chalfant
• Heather Farren
• Sam Morrow
• Mike Thimgan
• Robert Coffey
• Anne Marie Morse
• Anya Keen
• Dave Woodward