Blog #5 Contribution to Learning

Combining innovation and excellence in the classroom is quite the conundrum for teachers.  I have discovered that many teachers struggle with this because of the inflexibility of administration as well as taking the time and neglecting the prescribed curriculum to do it.

Sara L brought up some excellent points about how important it is for the teacher to build relationships with their students so the teacher knows how to bolster passion in the classroom.  I tried to be an encouragement to her by saying that we all are challenged to balance time, energy, and curriculum expectations with the idea of being innovative in the classroom.

Reading Thomas’ blog took me back to the days when my family was young and I struggled, like he is now, with balancing my time at school with my time with my family.  As a husband of 32 years with 2 adult children, I tried to give him some advice as to the importance and priority family should have.  It is very difficult to say, “No” to administration, parents, or coworkers when there are jobs to do, but those jobs take you away from your family.  But, being able to turn down after school work once in a while does two things:  1)  it shows others that your priority is your family, 2)  it shows your family that they are the most important...you always win when this happens.  I also suggested to Thomas some ideas that may help lessen his time doing schoolwork.  He had a great idea of using audio books in his classroom...I am excited about trying this in my high school English class.

As I read Megan’s blog, I was able to look at a new teacher’s frustration in the classroom when they try to be innovative, excellent, and get through the curriculum...all at the same time.  I tried to encourage her with the awesome things a new teacher brings to the classroom and school. Finding time to be innovative is her struggle right now and I tried to encourage her to use small bits of innovation rather than step into huge projects that take lots of time, energy, and money.

As far as our group #2 project, I tried to be an encouragement to the students at Vicki’s school by praising them for the awesome job they are doing, but also giving them bits of advice to fix some grammatical issues in their writing.  I also worked at cleaning up my “instructions for teachers” in the use of the rubric by reading comments and then correcting and streamlining some things.