(Saturday) Day 1 of Essay Construction Day 155
Sat, 01/05 08:56 AM It is Saturday morning, and in retrospect, after two days back at school, the week (if you can call Thursday and Friday a week) was more stressful on the last vacation days of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, due to a false apprehension of how things were preordained to transpire. Here I note, what I have discovered is that being your best in teaching, as a profession, almost always occurs when it is an instinctive or unconscious act. Which makes it so more difficult to assess why things went well, as opposed to why things failed in a teaching practice. It's really easy and always kind of obvious why things go wrong in the scaffolding of a lesson plan. But when things go favorably, it's harder to figure out why a lesson has been successful and what distinguishes these practices from days when things are not going so well. So, in an attempt to start writing my essay, I'm will dictate excerpts of this thought process, by dictating through an app called Otter several times a day, in the moment, as I make those realizations, throughout the day. Daily, I will go to the effort to think out loud, in a stream of consciousness, as I mitigate the stress of only gaging unsuccessful moments of my work. It has been an ongoing discovery for me, as a visual learner, that when the stimuli has been removed, my brain functions more effectively; the synapses in my brain are engaged in divergent ways. One of those times, is when I am in the shower; it allows me an opportunity to verbally work through ideas which I struggle with when putting “pen to paper”. Otter allows me to sequester myself from the visual (maybe not the shower) while allowing me the freedom to edit and wrestle with my ideas, questions and problems more constructively. I will try out this new methodology during January, then reassess its effectiveness at the February break, allowing time to plan next steps.