What happened in January...

All the things I should have been blogging about this year, but wasn’t...

Week ending 13 January

My complete inactivity in this week was largely the reason I didn’t get blogging... It was total R & R.  We had headed back home from spending New Year at the in-laws and my partner had started back to work after the Christmas break. I slept a lot, I read a lot of trashy novels, and I completely ignored my ‘to do’ list!  I do think teachers need some down time like this, though.

Week ending 20 January

Apart from my friend Beth coming for two days to reorganise part of my book collection at home, this week was dominated by the NCEA results coming out and by the time I spent poring over them and thinking about them. Who had done well and why? Who had not? Why? What did we do right? What do we need to improve? What did I teach well? What did I obviously not teach well? For once, even though I obsessed about the results for days I didn’t get depressed by them. There were plenty of good news stories to counterbalance the dismal outcomes for a certain cohort who will remain nameless... 

In addition, a lot of time this week went into thinking about our teaching programmes in the English Department and what, if anything, needed to change as a consequence of analysing the NCEA results.

Week ending 27 January

Senior Management and Ash doing a mail out 23 January

I spent most of this week doing a massive clean up in my classroom. I went through every box file and got rid of many bins of paper for recycling from the train wreck which was my desk and the floor around it! I filed till I dropped and I got out the bucket and the cleaning gear and cleaned all the shelves and the desks and the whiteboard and yadayada. While this may sound mundane, having a clean and organised classroom makes a huge difference to my mental and emotional health, not to mention making teaching and learning easier in a classroom environment a bit more adapted to its primary purpose! 

The other thing that happened this week was that we had a voluntary PD (professional development) day around information technologies, which was held at our college on the Friday (25th January). I ran a session for this on using MyPortfolio to record evidence of professional practice and reflection against the RTCs (Registered Teacher Criteria). I somehow have become the school expert on MyPortfolio by starting to use it before anyone else did...  I am running this training again soon so I will post in detail on it then, with links to my handouts and templates, etc.

At the weekend my partner Sean and I did the Waikanae Garden Trail:

And suddenly, my holiday was over...