New Year’s Resolution: complete the two blog posts I missed a while back 🙂

Thinking back (way back, it seems) to that October PD….I wish I could have another one! Maybe one this spring? Pretty please? Just kidding. October’s PD really came at the perfect time; I remember receiving a scary graph at one of my first-year-teacher meetings that illustrated beginning teachers’ feelings about their job at various times in the year. I don’t know how “scientific” it is, but I did find the same graph on several sites, so that makes it scientific, right…?

Even though this is specific to first-year teachers, I feel it applies to the veteran teachers I know as well. As the graph shows, we start off the year strong, then our lowest point (“disillusionment,” yikes!) occurs around October/November. So really, by having a PD in October, Kenan chose the exact right time to take us away from the classroom for a second and get us pumped up.

Courtesy of Ellen Moir from the New Teacher Center, although I have seen this graph many times over the years.

The October PD marked a stark contrast in my year. Just a little over a week later, my father passed unexpectedly at the age of 63. This was at the exact time that a big part of our project (the implementation of the statewide survey) was supposed to be happening, but as the Scottish poet Robert Burns said, “the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” As a result of having to leave school for almost two weeks to help my family, I have had to cut back on so much of what I wanted to accomplish this year, including withdrawing from National Boards. However, I have kept moving forward with the project, and happily, we have experienced success with the survey implementation (almost 4,000 responses!!! ahh!!!!) and have great plans for our next steps.

I talked to my father a lot about the Kenan research project and sought his advice with it. As a man of science raising a bunch of humanities-oriented kids, he was beyond thrilled that I was doing something so….science-y. With all the hard work still left to go on this project–writing up a manuscript for publication, putting together presentations and an FAQ for DPI–it is nice to have the comfort that me doing this meant something to him.