First Day Back

Today was the official first day of school for this year, and that seemed like a good a reason as any to actually start writing here. All we did at school was move from meeting to meeting, and we don’t actually meet with our classes until Friday. I still honored my two first-day-of-school traditions:

1 – I didn’t sleep well last night. Ever since I was a little kid I have had restless nights before school starts. It is a mix of excitement, nervousness, and general anxiety. I’m not sure I will ever get over this and I’m not sure I want to do so.

2 – I listened to the album 8 A.M. All Day by the band Chisel on the ride to work. They were a campus band at my university, and I’ve been a fan since I first heard them play at a “Farewell to Bush” concert in October of my freshman year.  (And that was the first President Bush, by the way.)  8 A.M. All Day came out a year or so after they graduated, and among my friends it had the power to generate spontaneous dance parties when the first chords poured forth from stereo speakers. When I started teaching 8 years ago, I decided that would be my first day music as it was positive, upbeat, got me moving, and brought to mind positive memories of being in school. This turned out to be a habit that stuck.

This year I hope to generate a few habits that stick for my students. The two big ones are that homework is worthwhile practice and that it is okay to make mistakes while learning. The former is inspired by a number of other math teacher bloggers writing about standards based grading and the latter comes from something one of my AP Calculus students wrote in his end-of-the-year reflection last May.

As for me, I figure that after 8 years of trying to teach well, getting frustrated with falling short in various areas, and jotting down the occasional journal entry in my handwriting that frequently toes the line between recognizable letters and abstract line art, I should start organizing my thoughts by writing in a more formal venue. True, a blog is about as formal as a tucked-in polo shirt, but it’s better than the dirty t-shirt and flip-flop world of scattered bits of inked paper. One of the highlights of my time earning a Masters in Math Education was being required to write weekly reflections for my practicum course. My main motivation in starting this blog is to get myself back into that habit.

And so we come back to habits. I named two habits I want to stick with my students. Writing regularly is a habit I hope to make stick with me as I move through what will hopefully be a challenging and rewarding year. This year I plan to implement SBG, be more thoughtful in my lesson planning, get the students doing more of the work in the classroom, and try to wrench myself out of the rut of routine that it is much too easy to slip into after close to a decade in one school. To steal a phrase from the end of the story Basil the Dog by Frances Sherwood, it is time to “learn to do serious battle.”