Being a career educator in K-12 always makes New Year interesting. New Year is a great time to start over and focus on meeting your goals or making new goals altogether. And yet the week before winter break we started a lab in my Science classes that we are finishing this week.
It’s only been one month but we started a lab in 2015 and are finishing it in 2016. Seems pretty cool when you think of it.
If I had one class of students all day I might have spent more time our first day together of 2016 reflecting and thinking about the new year but I only briefly mentioned the new year and asked if everyone had a good break with my first period class. Then we went right to business on the second part of our 2015 lab. I really hadn’t thought much about the new year, I was just really excited about continuing our lab investigating the force of gravity by distinguishing between mass and weight and designing a short experiment to analyze the relationship between mass and weight. Even short experiments are fun.
Personally, I have been thinking of the new year. I’m not big on resolutions but I do welcome the opportunity to reflect on my goals and to work on them full steam ahead. I have a lot of exciting projects coming up that I’m going to be working on and I’m looking forward to them. Part of me hopes I haven’t signed up for too much but that’s part of the excitement! I’ll be sharing my experiences and learnings in future blog posts. This weekend, thanks to the OSPP I’m working with, I will be at a Common Core training with the Washington Core Advocates Student Achievement Partners. Two days in Seattle working with great people is going to be fantastic!
So I’m starting 2016 thinking about all the things I have to be grateful for:
- My wonderful family – I have an incredibly loving and supportive wife and daughter that I treasure.
- My school – I really do enjoy working in Chimacum Middle School. I work with awesome teachers and I’m having a great year with my 6th graders.
- My health – I’ve been working hard to get my calves strong enough to be able to run injury-free. So far I started off 2016 by running a New Year’s Day 10K and I got a good time for me without hurting my calves! I am trying to get back into my training for a marathon. If I can start running 10K’s without injury then I’ll work towards another half marathon by the summer so that maybe next year I can try a full marathon. I want to try at least one!
- My career – I’ve been joining some fantastic groups, attending great trainings, and presenting more and altogether those activities are keeping me revitalized to be the best teacher I can for my students. I’ve been getting more grants to provide more for my students and I have a few proposals still out there. I’m finding that I am living a growth mindset by using failure as a learning experience and not letting anything stop me from doing what I want to do and accomplish what I want to accomplish!
I’m sure there’s more to be grateful for but that’s what is most present in my mind. 2015 was a great year and 2016 is already looking to be even better! I’m just happy and excited at all that 2016 has to offer so far, and I’m sure it’s just going to be better.
