Archive for October 7th, 2009

Why haven’t I written more about teaching in the last month or so? Well, as one of my colleagues in the alternative certification program said last week, “I work 24 hours a day.” I remember when they told me I would be working nights and weekends trying to keep up with lesson planning and administratative requirements, and I thought, “that may be true for some new teachers, but I work faster than most people so it won’t be me.”

Me. It is me, and that’s the reason for the silence over the blog lines. And then there’s a second reason for not saying so much. That is that so much of what occurs during the day when you’re a teacher is protected by confidentiality requirements.  You don’t want to tell anybody’s name if you’re blogging about school, or any other identifying details. I write a lot of about the process of learning to teach — I think I’m learning to teach, at least — but it’s all in a paper notebook, where no one can see it. I feel safe writing there. Here, I have to be more careful.

I thought I might try saying things about my subjects, writing and science, in upcoming weeks, and how I am teaching them. The curriculum that we use has changed this year, apparently, and I’m rather pleased to see the way we do things is, surprise surprise, pretty close to the way I would do things if I had designed it myself. We do something called Writing Workshop and Science Journals.

But writing about these things will demand that I start to wake up earlier. I’ve decided to go to bed at ten so I can get up and write at 5. I set my alarm. But getting up is not effortless like it used to be. This morning, I was deep in a dream of some long forgotten love song when the alarm beeped its way into my consciousness.  I had an awful moment of really really not knowing where I was — in the dream, in the song, in life, and what’s more for some reason I was sleeping in the easy chair, not in the bed. This is pretty much how my life goes these days. As I said at the top of this blog, I can barely get out of bed, and when I do, something else happens.