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5 Teacher’s Resources Worth of Your Time: Professional and Personal areas.
With the overwhelming amount of resources available online, its quite hard to track your time looking for what you really need when it comes to your professional development and personal needs. You might end up frustrated with the choices that you have, the quality of resources or even the lack of continuity that you need. In this post, I’m sharing 5 go-to resources that will help your professional development and restore your emotional sanity. 1. Cult Of Pedagogy by Jennifer Gonzalez. I value this resource for its dedication to quality and research. Jennifer talks about relevant topics in education and provides“what-you-can-do-tomorrow” ideas from the perspective of a classroom teacher. It’s…
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What Do You Do When You Are On The Brink of Quitting Your Teaching Job?
Hey! I’ve been there, so I know how it feels. It was almost two years ago when I was sitting in my cars crying, talking on the phone with one of my colleagues. “I don’t think I want to come back! It’s just too much!” I meant every single word, and back then it was entirely clear to me I was facing a problem I had to deal with. Teaching can overtake everything if you allow it to happen. It can drain you and set you on the way to growing anxiety and stress. But this is the truth: you will have to take steps to either make your teaching…
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Transformational Books.
In this post, I describe the books that were transformational to my life and my personality. Thanks to these books, I am a different person, mother, teacher. They are not for teachers and by teachers. In fact, the majority of my reading is not about my profession. I keep work separate from my spiritual get-away. However, these books made me a much happier teacher and a person. Why? It’s all about waking up one day and putting things in perspective. It’s about you breaking the circle of being sick and tired of having no things to look forward to. It’s about liberation, laughing at yourself, leaving the couch and stepping…
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Is Teaching Sustainable For Your Lifestyle?
I have been a teacher for two years, and I have been ferociously fighting the urge to take school work home. For some odd reason, while still being a teacher, I found it extremely weird to bring work home. You see, I love freedom. I love that at home I can indulge in doing the things that are not related to my job. I have recently understood the importance of doing nothing while giving yourself time to relax, process ideas, be in the moment for you, your family. And that was quite a shift from the mentality I had two years ago. Although I rarely took school work…
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Being Reactive Is a Dead End.
I’ve been reactive in what I did and how I felt most of my life. Being reactive means feeling trapped by the situations and thinking you have no control of the outcome. It also means taking on the role of a victim of circumstances and practicing self-pity. It’s hard not to be reactive. I get it. What could I do if they packed my classroom with 30 children that I need to differentiate for? How could I teach when in the 21st century everything I had was the blackboard and chalk in my classroom? How could I not complain if had neither resources no support of the administration when…
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How Much Money Do You Want To Make As a Teacher?
My husband is a day trader. He buys and sells stocks. He sometimes holds them overnight or for a couple of days, and then he sells them profiting from the difference in the price of shares. So it makes him a swing trader, too. Sitting next to him on a weekday, I channel into a cryptic conversation he has in chat rooms with other traders. Some things sound familiar because my ear is used to the trading jargon. But what I found more interesting is that straight money talk is never a taboo there. Traders discuss decent and significant amounts of money they once made or are still making a…
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Explore Your Creative Genius As A Teacher.
Teachers are believed to take pleasure in shopping at the dollar store for supplies, creating cute worksheets on the computer, crafting for classrooms, being nerdy, reading tons of books and living in libraries, grading papers on a Saturday evening while watching an educational documentary, or other crazy things. And while many teachers do this and enjoy it, there are many educators who want to have nothing to do with school once the final period bell rings and they go home. Whatever side you are on, you should not feel guilty about that but feel comfortable about doing what gives you joy. Having said that, I do believe being sucked…
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There Are Things You Cannot Control In Education, So Stop Worrying About Them.
As a new teacher, you have naïve expectations about what your classroom would look like, how your students would behave, how you would teach, and how things would work for you. I’m sorry to be a party pooper, but you are wrong, and you will fail. On top of that, if you don’t adapt your mind and teaching, you will fail again. Whoever is not or was not a teacher by vocation will never understand the fear and anxiety of facing twenty-five adolescents staring in your face, judging every move of yours, testing your integrity, emotional stamina, and knowledge. I’ve been there, and I failed, and I know now…
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Copy From Other Teachers To Figure Out What You Lack.
I tend to pay attention to things that happen in other teachers’ classrooms. While walking from a teacher’s lounge, from the main office, on my way to make copies, or grab some coffee, I take few-second snapshots of the action that I witness in a classroom, and my mind inevitably ponders the question: do I want to be a student in this classroom or not? Sometimes my answer is Yes, but more often my answer is No. This small test comes from the archives of memory going back to my school years and me learning English. My memories of the English class are quite unpleasant. I remember my teacher…
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Can Teaching Ruin Your Marriage?
Yes, it can. I have recently listened to the podcast episode “What to do when teaching is ruining your marriage” by Angela Watson. This was one of many episodes that made me relate and say, “Oh my! It’s not just in my head! Teacher overwhelm is real, and it does affect relationships if not taken seriously. ” I can relate to so many discussions led by Angela on her podcast. This platform actually became the first that helped me validate my good and bad experiences as a teacher. Those moments and hours of stress that I thought I had been experiencing on my own suddenly became shared by thousands of…
