Navigating the High Seas What/who is your Kraken? Keeping motivation and enthusiasm ALL year. How will you defeat the kraken? If I am not motivated to teach it, I need to find a new way to present the information. If I am not enthused, you can dang well guess the students will not be! This last year I had my first child. I will tell you what! I had a hard time keeping up. Finally after a month of not grading a single paper, and scrambling to be prepared for the day, I asked my husband to take the baby every Saturday for a couple hours so I could go to school and get caught up. This helped so much. Prior to this I would always going on the weekends. I did not realize how valuable that time was. It is even more valuable now that I cannot spend 6 hours at school on a Saturday. I have three. I better make the most of it. Once a teacher said that you cannot possible grade every single piece of paper! (I broke out in hives after hearing this) And I have had a retired teacher mention to me before that he regrets spending so much time grading. Ahh what!? Isn’t that what we HAVE to do?

Navigating the High Seas What/who is your Kraken? Keeping motivation and enthusiasm ALL year. How will you defeat the kraken? WHY? I know my kids. We always joke at lunch that we are going to do Zen grading and just assign a grade. Well guess what? I bet they would end up the same because we actually know our students. Not that I am recommending Zen grading, but maybe I could cut back on the graded work. Lets look at why I grade? 1- to measure their understanding, 2- to put value on the assignment so the kids completes the task, and 3- to show we are actually teaching stuff and not watching movies?. Lets break this down… 1- I can glance at the assignment, or look at one or two sections and know if the student has a level of understanding. 2- if I am doing my job and using our new library of hooks, they should want to participate. If they are not, I need to evaluate myself, not the kids. 3- ask the principle to come in and participate in a lab, send s home to parents.

Navigating the High Seas What/who is your Kraken? Keeping motivation and enthusiasm ALL year. How will you defeat the kraken? There are other ways to show you are actively teaching students. Maybe I do not need to grade every single piece of paper we touch in a day. That would free up a lot of time to design awesome engaging lessons which I would like to be my #1 priority. How do I plan to keep my motivation through to the end of the year? I want to put more energy into the beginning of the lesson, rather than the aftermath.