Burning Out

Hola amigxs:

Something with which I have struggled is separating my life from my job. This week, I have been so devoted to getting everything graded to give back to the students the next day that I forgot to sleep. All week, I've been telling myself that turning down plans with friends and working on all this feedback (of which I am proud--don't get me wrong) meant I was devoted. Obviously, that is true, but it is very hard to be fully present in the classroom without enough sleep. For the first time in my life, I have been relying on coffee. Yikes.

I think that this is something people don't always realize about teachers. We go home and have to still do work. Most people get to leave work and be done with work until the next day (not saying that other jobs are not stressful!). We have to assess, plan, worry about students, etc. If I'm not careful, I work from 7 AM until 9 PM. That was my problem this week. I really do believe in getting the students back their work with really valuable feedback the next day. Otherwise, the feedback isn't as meaningful. However, sometimes I need to remind myself that it's okay to take two days if I need. I think I will struggle with this for the rest of my career, honestly.

In great news: my seventh graders have been working with Puerto Rico, and I am loving what they are doing. The curriculum calls for teaching "ir" and "er" verbs at this point. I was struggling with that. How do I make it so that the students don't feel like they are learning and practicing a grammatical concept? How do I make this communicative? Well, I did this through Puerto Rico. They are making connections between animals, places, people, etc. in Puerto Rico, and they are using "er" and "ir" verbs while barely even realizing it.

I'd like to give one example: the students have learned some things about the Taínos--the indigenous people of Puerto Rico. At first, they were talking about the Taínos in the third person plural form (The Taínos are...they write using...). Then, I had them imagine that they were the indigenous people, so they were using the first person (we are...we write using...I am...etc.).

Their assessment on this is going to be a speaking assignment. I am giving them the pictures of the many things we've discussed with regard to Puerto Rico, and they have to explain some of them.  Our goal is that they will make connections between the items/people/places. Instead of simply defining each person/place/animal, they will also discuss how they are related. Some of the students have already built some connections that I hadn't even expected. I am really excited to listen to the final results next week. This is something I got from Ronie Webster; she did this when I was her student with "La comida mexicana," and I remember how powerful I felt after. It's nice to be able to connect ideas as opposed to just spitting out facts.

Thanks for reading! <3

Timothy