I Just Love Being a Teacher!

You know what? I love being a teacher. Seriously, I love it!

My bio on our institution's website even starts off this way: "I love to teach! ..." I figure I might as well let people know right from the get-go. I believe I'm called to this work, and that I've been equipped for it, and as a vocation teaching gives me deep joy.

Don't get me wrong...there are definitely joys and concerns. There are very real challenges in this profession. And the demands and expectations always seem to be growing, year-by-year. But overall, the joys outweigh the concerns, for me at least.

Sometimes I need a reminder about this though. I have my moments when the work starts to pile up, and the meetings start adding up, and the stack of things to read starts towering...and the distraction of this gets to me.

And then, somehow, I always seem to get a moment of encouragement, a word from a student, an affirmation from a colleague, something that reminds me, "I get to do this!"

I had one of those moments recently. I was up to my eyebrows in the thick of planning and grading and keeping up with email, and--honestly--losing some of the joy that I typically feel in my work.

I took a Twitter break.

How to Learn from a Textbook

I'm thinking today about textbooks.

Probably this is because today I gave my Middle School Curriculum & Instruction students an assignment to review curriculum materials. It might also be because I have a textbook that I love that I'm using for teaching World Regional Geography. Okay, and it might also be because I was helping one of my kids take reading notes on a textbook-based reading assignment tonight.

Textbooks are a really great resource for teachers. I remember feeling as an undergraduate Education major a sense of pressure that if I ever relied on a textbook I would somehow be failing my students. But I've definitely come around: textbooks can be an extremely helpful resource to support teaching.