Hi Mom!

it feels like i haven’t called my mom in about a month. it probably has been at least 2 weeks. i’ve just been so extremely busy! every day i get home from teaching and work hard to prepare my lessons or do my homework, go to the gym, come home and shower, maybe do a little more work for school, and then go to bed around 11 or 12! it’s so not how i saw my semester going, and i know i need to get a better system in place.

right now, i’m working on creating a rubric for the final lesson in my reading unit, and i still have 6 other things on my to-do list that i wrote as things to do just tonight. tomorrow i’m heading straight to a meeting with a past professor at 5 to talk about a collaboration project and then going to hear chris powell speak in the eisenhower auditorium at 7. i love being busy and i love the feeling of walking home from zumba or kickboxing in the night snow after a full day, but i just can’t see myself going at this pace/workload for much longer. i just don’t know what the solution is because there’s a never ending supply of stuff to do for my classroom each week. i also know that any teacher is probably thinking “yup, welcome to the career,” but i know there has to be a better personal balance that i can come to.

i keep thinking that my solution should be to work for about 1 or 2 hours each day with complete focus to get as much done as possible. this would be different than what i do now because i basically fill every free second with work for student teaching. because i’m trying to constantly fit this in though, the times that i am writing lessons end up being half writing lessons and half being distracted by anything remotely distracting. i think that if i set aside an hour each day and just work intensely for that hour, that would help me have a fully focused time to get a good amount done. after that hour, i would put my work away and then continue working on it the next day for that hour. i’m just worried that i wouldn’t be able to get enough done working in this way, but i know that it wouldn’t hurt to try.

i also know that right now i could be focusing on writing this rubric so i need to get back to that.

oh, and HI MOM!!!!!!!!!!!

p.s. i’m thinking about challenging myself to post for 30 days straight or something crazy like that. or even just doing any kind of goals through my blog because i work well when i’m held accountable – even if it’s just to myself. i write this blog fully for myself to think through my thoughts and to look back at later, so writing for 30 days straight would force me to think of things to write about and would also give my future self a more detailed account of what is going on in my life right now.

p.s.s. two more months till australia!! so excited but also nervous!