Progress

The good news - I am no longer as concerned about mere survival as I once was. The thought that there are only two more days until the weekend is not as comforting as it once was. I've started to worry about more important things, which is great, but the worries are often more profound than those that they replace. For example, "how do I make it to Friday while keeping kids on task enough that they don't riot?" was a real worry of mine for a long time. But now that I've mostly conquered that question, the others coming in are nearly as immediate and much more difficult to solve. "How do I teach all of algebra I, with new frameworks and a new test to pass, in 3 and a half months?" "What can I skip from the frameworks and still give the kids a good chance of passing?" "Why don't kids ever understand when I explain something?" "How do you get anything close to an hour and a half's worth of learning out of a 98 minute block?" "How do I differentiate instruction so the smart kids don't sleep or start a mini-riot?" "How do I differentiate instruction to deal with IEPs?" It's amazing, after a year and a half of this, how much I still have to figure out.