Wow. Unbelievable that there are only 5 weeks left until I pack up this bad boy and send it off to San Antonio! It feels like I've been working on it forever....and yet I can't believe I only have 5 weeks left. I am still working on Entry 3. I have dragged butt on it so much. It is the one I feel least confident with. Life has gotten in the way, big time, over the last month so I have not done a ton of work on my portfolio. But it's crunch time now. I don't want to send off something that isn't my very best work and thus, I need to work on these entries daily until they are done, have a friend or two read them, and then make my own revisions. My goal is to be all set with my portfolio by March 23. Then I can spend that last week packing my box. I will do one envelope per day Sunday-Thursday. I am going to do them one at a time over the course of that week because there are SO many forms, papers, etc that go with each entry and I don't want to get a bad score because I was missing one paper or something.
I will be very, very, VERY glad when I am mailing that box off and it's out of my hands! April is mine. Allll mine. I am trying really hard to talk The Husband into taking March 30 and April 2 off as a long weekend and go open up our cabin. I have zero issue spending my entire Spring Break there, even if it is snowing. There is no phone, no internet, nothing to district me or bother me. I can SLEEP, relax and just catch my breath. He kind of laughed when I said that but I was so serious about the sleep part.
Earlier this week one of my colleagues told me that I never should have done National Board this year with switching grade levels. In my mind, it was the smartest time to do it because who knows if Mrs. Principal will move me again. She doesn't consult people about grade placements, she just does it because she's unprofessional. And I know she has been targeting 4th grade like crazy this year so it isn't unlikely that she wouldn't put me there next year to split them up. I don't know. But I think this year, teaching 2nd grade, doing National Board has been the BEST thing I could have done. Yes it is challenging, time consuming and overwhelming, but I have learned so much about myself as a teacher and about making my lessons more developmentally appropriate for my younger students. It wouldn't have been any less of a challenge to have done it while teaching 5th grade that I know so well. This way, being WITH a younger grade, I'm much closer to the lower end of the developmental scale which means if I get a kindergarten writing sample on one of my assessment exercises I'm not going to panic that I don't know what to say about it because I have kids at that level this year.
I've kind of learned that to this particular colleague, if she doesn't see the value in something, it's "worthless". Well, to be frank, who asked you?? I sure as hell didn't ask for your opinion. I honestly can't wait for her to eat crow when I DO certify (she did NB years ago and didn't make it so she thinks it's a waste of time, even though she wouldn't redo the one or two parts she needed that likely would have allowed her to pass). I really have a hard time respecting people who think just because something wasn't right for them that it isn't right for anyone else either. I won't send something off that I don't think is my absolute best work. And I have two personal days coming up in March that will be used for the sole purpose of working on National Board so I am not too worried.
It's only hard because when I'm home I am tired. When I am tired I don't want to work. On anything (NB or otherwise). Once this part of the process is over, it'll be relaxation time until I begin to study for the AC and honestly....I can not imagine those will be harder than the portfolio!
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