A new outlook...

I have not been posting recently for several reasons. I am teaching a class that I have never taught before, I am in a new school with a very new schedule and I have taken on0 a club, something I have never done before ( I have coached but a club is very different). But the main reason for the scant posting is that I have found something that I have been missing in my first few years of teaching, a learning community within the walls of the school.

I have real discussions with teachers about education, student challenges, teacher learning, politics (not school politics but real honest to goodness local state and federal politics), dong what we do better and why we should try to be better, the list could go on and on. For the first time I feel like an educator working in a place where that word means something. When I sit down at the computer now I am not only exhausted but I feel that while I used to have so much to say and discuss and read about that I couldn’t get it out fast enough. That has changed over the last months as I have settled into this new gig. When it comes to the community I feel like I have been teaching there for ten years. I am trying to re-imagine this little space and what I do here. It is a part of what I do and I want it to be an extension of the community I have at school. I’m just trying to decide what that means.

My thanks to those who have kept coming back to check and see if I still live in the edu-sphere. Where I go from here is something of a mystery. Hell, who knows maybe nothing will change, but with my new atmosphere I can’t see how The Smithie will be the same.