For everything there is a season

The snow is falling fast outside, big heavy flakes. I woke up after the sun today, for once, which is a wonderful luxurious feeling. I felt doubly grateful to know that I didn't have to drive to Topeka today when I saw the snow piling up on my car outside. I and all of the 501 district have today off, thanks to parent teacher conferences for the past two days.

Parent teacher conferences were a blessing as far as time off from teaching, and time to put lessons together for the next couple weeks. I love preparing lessons most of the time; mostly because it consists of studying and reviewing German, or gives me an excuse to pursue my own historical and cultural research interests.

I'm currently preparing a unit for my advanced German class--and this "unit" has research requirements similar to those of my senior seminar paper in college. It's a sort of review of literature, movies, and national monuments that shed light on how Germans have attempted to redefine their cultural and national identity since World War II. One of my main resources is this book, which I am happily reading straight through:

One of the mantras that people tell first-year teachers is not to reinvent the wheel. That phrase haunts me as I spend hours reading, summarizing, and putting into high-schooler-friendly form. I wonder sometimes if I'm bending over backwards for nothing.

I feel, though, that putting together my own lessons in my own way satisfies a couple of my needs that regurgitating others' lessons wouldn't meet: One is that I want to continue my own education, and this is my way of showing myself that I've learned something new or reiterated something old, sort of like self-assigned homework.

The other is finally getting to experiment with some of the psychology that I found to be the most interesting part of my education in education--thank you Rodney Frey and Paul Lewis. I tell my students regularly that they are guinea pigs in my continuing education. They're usually ok with being experimented on, because it sometimes means they get to do things like running around in the court yard with verb forms written on white boards.

One of my main energy- and time-vacuums is about to dry up as the end of the Scholars' Bowl season approaches. Last night, in an intense 12 rounds of competition, my team qualified for state tournament next Saturday! It was touch and go--Jenna was beside herself with nerves, Stuart maintained that the questions were poorly written, Cameron had lost his voice due to a cold, Brian's calculations were off, Kris was flustered by the dearth of US History questions, and Henry's lucky bow tie was crooked... but they pulled it off in the last round.

In a panic that I would find myself bored with nothing to do in the February and March evenings, I've signed up for a weaving class next week, learning to use a new kind of loom. I've also started weaving guitar straps to sell at music store around the corner from my house.

And that is the story for today. Maybe one of these times I will convince myself to write briefer messages so that I can do them more often. Bis dann!