My Adventures in Education

As the title suggests, yesterday was the last day of class. With it comes a whole range of emotions. If you are a teacher, you likely know exactly what I'm talking about! If you are a teacher candidate, you'll know soon enough. Exhaustion has begun to set in - my brain knows that it's almost the summer break, so I have been hitting the snooze button more and I feel like I can't think/plan anymore! But end of year is also a little sad. I've really enjoyed my classes and the students that I have taught, so it's hard to say goodbye. Some goodbyes in my ESL class are permanent, as they are leaving for different schools or moving to different cities. This always seems to make it harder. ESL teachers are, at most times, more than just teachers. We are the first Canadian experience for many of our students, and they often come to us with questions about Canadian society, homestay/guardian issues, questions about classes and how schools work here, course selection ...

It has been a while since I last posted. Things have been very busy as the school year wraps up. For some reason June always seems to come out of nowhere, and things feel rushed and chaotic. It didn't help that my family and I chose to buy a house and have a closing date in the final month of school, but alas, life happens.  I always seem to find June a difficult month. I'm always questioning how I taught certain units, or whether or not the expectations that I had for a particular evaluation were fair. It's tough to see your students struggling without wondering if you could have done something differently. They aren't all struggling, or else it would be really clear, but I often think that if I could design the course in such a way that everyone could learn more easily, perhaps I could help the weaker ones, which still supports the strong students as well. The question always comes down to 'how.' The 'how' seems impossible. Every year, my student...

Just over a week ago I finally sat down and took my Google Level 2 Certification exam! And I am super excited to announce that I passed! It has been a long few months of training - I would sit down whenever I could find the time, so it was so fulfilling to finally be able to complete it. Truthfully, I was very nervous about this exam. There were a lot of new apps and material in this part of the training, and Sheets seem to be my nemesis. When I am practicing in Sheets, it seems to be okay, and it makes sense, but as soon as I stop practicing with pivot tables, etc. I forget it all! Needless to say, when I finished the exam, I sat there in nervous anticipation, waiting for the results. It was a flood of relief when the results stated that I passed! Now I need to reflect on next steps and how I plan to use my certification and the things I've learned to improve my teaching practice. I'm really excited to sit down and incorporate Google My Maps into my ESL and Spanish c...

Over the past few months I have been slowly chipping away at the Google Educator Level 2 Certification training modules. It has taken a long while to get it all done because, let's be honest, who has time to sit down and dedicate hours to training?! I wish I could, but I still have classes to teach, my kiddos to pick up, dinner to make, etc. - but that isn't the purpose of this post, so I digress . . . As I have been going through the training, I've been blown away by different resources that I just didn't know about! The thing I love most about pushing myself to get certified is that there is so much to learn, and so much I haven't explored. So it made me think: if I find these things useful, why not share them out? Heck, why don't I share out a list of resources that I have discovered along my journey to technology learning, and help out fellow educators who maybe have not yet stumbled upon these gems as well?! And so here they are: 1) Google My Maps - Y...

Every once in a while, we need to come down from our exciting, motivating high and realize that not everyone is ready for change, and that's okay! We all come from different lived experiences, with different motivations, and different goals, and it's impossible to make everyone happy all of the time. This is my latest lesson. I am beginning to realize that my excitement to learn new things and to challenge myself in areas that may not seem to connect traditionally to my particular courses are not always seen as useful or helpful by others. I get it. And while I want to advocate for teachers to have choice and control over their PD, I also need to accept that not everyone sees things in the same way. I always find that I have these conversations, and then I walk away, and five minutes later (or less) I wish  I had said something else! I wish I could be better at explaining things in the moment, so that these conversational regrets or what-ifs wouldn't happen. Life would ...

This past week or so has been crazy! It has been very uncomfortable for me, for all of the reasons that had me doubting this whole blogging journey to begin with - vulnerability and putting myself out there. It started when a fellow Halton colleague tweeted my blog out to the world - this scared me, and to be honest, it still scares me. I had only shared it out selectively to a few colleagues to get their input and to see if I was even any good at this whole blogging thing! I hadn't yet convinced myself that I was brave enough to put it out there for more people to read, especially if they knew me! Well, the cat's out of the bag - and many people have reached out to me about it. It amazes me how afraid I was of people reading these thoughts/reflections about teaching. I always try to do my best, but I also recognize that I am nowhere near perfect, and that I make mistakes just like any other human being. I think I was afraid that people would concentrate on the things tha...

Some days teaching feels amazing - the students are making the connections on their own, and you feel awesome  about the lesson or activity that you did that day. And then, there are days where you just aren't sure about anything - the students aren't engaged, you feel like you are pulling teeth to get an answer or discussion going, and it is just so forced. This week has been a mix of those extremes, and man is it exhausting! In my ESL C class, we started our book study unit. There are three different novels (each of a different level of difficulty). At first the students seemed excited to start reading a book all in English. As a class we read "The Paper Bag Princess" to learn the skills that they will then be using in their own novels - and they loved it! It was so easy for them - they created an awesome list of adjectives, they could find examples of direct and indirect characterization in the story, and they were so excited to take that knowledge and find tho...