Kevin’s Meandering Mind

I must be in a poetic frame of mind. So, how about Day in a Haiku, which we have not done in quite some time. You can go traditional 5-7-5 or veer off into your own creative Haku-ish world of syllables and topics. It’s up to you. Please reflect on a day or your week, compose a haiku and add it to the comment link for this post. I will gather up all of our haikus and post them over the weekend.

Here is mine:

Rain days drift upon
us as the summer’s sun seems
nowhere near us now

Peace (in the three lines),

Kevin

This week, Day in a Sentence shifts over to Jo’s site and her theme is appropriate enough for many of us in the United States who may be moving into vacation time. She is asking that we consider the concept of “transition” in our Day in a Sentence. Intriguing, right?

Come join us by heading over to Jo’s blog and adding your own reflective sentence. We’d love to have you in the mix.

Peace (in sharing),

Kevin

This week, we turn back to Voicethread to share out our sentences. You can do it with video, audio or just type in your Day in a Sentence. We hope you join us over at our voicethread. You can get there by following this link or by using the embedded Voicethread down below. Spread the word. Let’s see if we can fill up the square with voices.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Before we begin, I found a site called Sharetabs from Larry through his Twittering and thought it might be a nice way to send you off to the various blogs of contributors this week. Sharetabs allows you to collect websites and then open them all as tabs or link them from small windows.

So, click on this screenshot (or this link) to head to the Sharetab for Day in a Sentence contributors from this week.

Here are this week’s contributions for Day in a Sentence:

• Lucky to be in Kuala Lumpur for the Innovative Teachers Conference, I was placed in a group with a teacher from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Korea, where English was not strong, yet we completed together a student lesson plan on indigenous shelters, with fun, endeavour, confusion but determination. – Anne M.
• I had forgotten how tiring it is to keep up with a very active almost two-year-old little boy. – Cynthia
• Taking a day off from the mad rush of school to attend a conference at Stanford University on Microfinance, I filled my head with so much information it will take all summer to digest. — Delaine
• The last week with my students has been lovely, but I wish the adults would behave! — Karen H.
• I let my students turn their research papers in on the very last possible day, Thursday, which meant that I had only a day in which to grade the on-the-verge-of-failing students’ papers to find out whether they’re exempt from the exam or not (since our exemption policy this year is passing and not missing more than seven days per semester…); I’m now about halfway through the 87 papers received. – Jo
• I’m finally home as the classroom slumbers, rests, and rejuvenates for next autumn’s kindergartners- but there’s no rest for me with a summer agenda full of volleyball camp (Dear Daughter), a college move (Eldest Son), play dates (the Pre-Schooler) and deployment preparations (Dear Husband)! — Michaele
• Summer is coming, but there is still much to do, so I seek a new sense of balance in my daily life. – Lynn J.
• Lost in a game of musical chairs at a school Pep Rally, and couldn’t figure out if the resounding cheers were because students were happy I lost or because they appreciated my effort — Larry
• Autumn wrung out its day and let go what’s left of its colour as the mist vanished from the last gasp of a dying season. – Ken
• I returned to Dover Middle School today for a presentation on Assessment to find that our DS team is officially invited to present our project to the school board, for 10 minutes. We have to select 3 pieces from our library of 76. – Bonnie
• I’ve completed my eight hour hard labour sentence for the crime of impulse shopping on credit. — Val
• Getting (and keeping) a teaching job has become political, competitive, and just plain icky in the wake of California budget cuts. — Matt

And mine:

• How in the world will I pull off a claymation project about tolerance in the few crazy weeks that remain in the school year?

Peace (and thanks to all of you),
Kevin

How is your day? Your week? Consider joining this week’s Day in a Sentence. Just reflect on your day or week, boil it down to a single sentence, and then use the comment link on this blog post to share your thought. I will collect and publish all of the responses over the weekend.

To entice you to join us, I created this short Pivot Stick Figure Movie for you all. Consider it a welcoming invitation:

Peace (in your days),
Kevin

This week, Days in a Sentence had a numerical element to it, and as always, the contributors were wonderfully creative:

Anne arrived at a conference after many hours of traveling. I hope she blogs about the event.

After school on Wednesday, I drove 3.5 hours to Melbourne to catch the MH138 flight to Kuala Lumpur from terminal 1, gate 10 for a 7.5 hour flight, on a plane that was only 2/3 full, which landed me in KL at 545 hours for a 10 day break with 6 days long service leave and 3 days of MS Innovative Teachers conference.

And Nina, too, is conferencing this week. You just have to love the name of Webheads in Action.

In the 72-hour online marathon of the Webheads in Action Online Convergence I have so far logged 24 hours about evenly divided between Learning Times/Elluminate and Second Life; we are about halfway through.

Jo’s equation here is a struggle for her as she juggles kids and computers when the numbers don’t quite add up.

My smallest sophomore class has 21 students + I have 3 student computers in my room + the 1 available computer lab is closed for testing + the library houses only 13 computers and was only open to me for 2 days (due to testing) = 1 huge headache from finagling resources to get research projects done.

Ken goes the route of using numbers for words in his creative way. Which, of course, is what I always expect from Ken.

This has been 1 busy week that, 2 put it bluntly, has 3 aspects to it that will bring 4th at least 5 separate issues, the 6th derivative of which precedes the 7th as you might expect by the same margin that exists between 8 and 9, and if you feel there should be a 10th part to all of this, then you subscribe to a pre-20th century concept, that of decimalisation.

Ykes! Janice is hit by the Number Plague this week.

33 is the number of sleepless hours I’ve spent this week worrying about all the math concepts my grade 6 students still don’t know, and 3 is both the number of school days and the number of math periods left before the dreaded EQAO test that will remind them of all that they do not know, $450.00 is the amount of money I’ve spent so far trying to get rid of a ridiculously annoying plantar wart on my heel, 10 is the number of weeks I’ve been visiting the foot doctor hoping for said persistent wart to DIE, 49 000 000 is the number of dollars I did NOT win in this weeks lottery, and 5 is the duration (in seconds) of my long heavy sigh as I think about all these things!

Illya sees two plus two equaling four, even if the first two may not quite equal the second two (confused? read on).

Out of four days of vacation, I happen to be in bed for two of them, leaving two more to have fun on, hopefully.

Paul also gets creative with the number-word conversion system.

1 day left 2 the 3 day weekend be 4 the last 5 weeks of school.

The countdown for Art is underway.

The last 5 days of school I find myself more restless and ready to leave than many of my students.

The ol’ Email Timekiller hit Connie. I know that one all too well.

After three cups of black tea, pondering which of my 34 overnight emails to respond to before 8:30, I notice a pattern: one email led to 2 others, which led to 3, then 5, 8, 13, 21; suddenly I feel dizzy like I’m spiraling into the day as a Whirling Dervish.

Gail P. has little ones moving up. I love seeing her and her students in our building. They are darn cute.

17 kindergartners from my class will move on to 4 different grade 1 classrooms in 25 more school days, or is that 24 now, but who’s counting, right?

Bonnie was all about digital story celebrations earlier this week as her ongoing work with a local school paid dividends when the kids shared their work with their families.

I created a digital story focused on celebrating the digital stories of 76 very cool 6th graders but when the numbers were counted officially , it was really 79 digital stories of 79 6th graders with the support of 2 classroom teachers, a tech teacher, a substitute teacher and one HVWP TL.

Thanks to all of you for sharing!

Peace (in the number line),
Kevin

I was thinking it might be cool to try to add a numerical element to our Days in a Sentence. See if you can work some sort of number into your reflection this week. It could be a countdown to something. It could be a tally. It could be some creative operation that shows something else. It could be just about anything.

As always:

• Reflect on your week or a day of your week;
• Write it down as single reflective sentence;
• Share it through the comment link on this post;
• I will gather up and publish them over the weekend.

Here is mine (as a podcast):

After many floating deadlines have come and gone, 74 students who spent 17 classroom periods (about 15 hours of project planning, writing and construction) working on 39 digital science books are almost completely done.

I look forward to yours.

Peace (in the numbers),

Kevin

This week, Day in a Sentence became Day in a Question. I’ll just let the questions speak for themselves this week. (What? No answers?)

• What impact did I make on the lives of the twenty-one WCCA seniors who graduated Friday night? – Cynthia
• When much of what we have taken as truths are being questioned, how do we prepare our students for an uncertain future? – Mary F.
• Through what hoops will the state make us jump in order to make sure we haven’t left any children behind? — Chris
• Why does it pour when it rains? — Eric
• Do I avoid a stressful situation I seem to have extricated myself from (a football team worthy of a box-office dramedy screenplay), or jump back in with the promises from them that it will get better? — sara
• Is the craziness surrounding Portfolios really worth the product? — April
• Who helped you in your learning this week? – Tracy
• What are the elements of a class’ atmosphere that the students would say are most important for a feeling of safety-in-learning, collaboration, creativity, comfort, joy, and risk-taking in learning? — Connie
• What is the sound of 100,000 teachers not clapping? — David
• If I stop engaging with the Luddites, then how can I help my organization move forward? – Kathryn
• At this time of the year I always wonder if being in a child centered project based classroom this year will really prepare my kids for the lecture based teacher centered classrooms of high school? — Paul
• How do you put aside a “blah” week and start anew? -- Me.

And two sketchcasts from Jo and Ken:




Peace (in collaboration),
Kevin