Your Day in a Sentence — Post-Turkey Day Edition

This week’s Day in a Sentence includes some new friends, as I posted a call for responses over at the Classroom 2.0, just to see what might happen. (My fear was hundreds of posts but that hasn’t happened … yet). Without further ado, here are your Days in a Sentence (with no podcasts this week — darn it):

The holiday break was on the minds of many this week, including Delaine, who wrote about finding some time away: “A holiday getaway to our San Francisco highrise made me giddy with pleasure.”

Sue, who comes to us via Classroom 2.0 and who has launched her own site called MasteryMaze for teachers and students, had a residue of good feelings from meetings at her school: “This week’s resounding applause from parents and students at parent teacher conferences reinforced my belief, as unpopular as it may be to many, that you can reach them best if you are courageous enough to step into their world!

Durff, whom I seem to run into all over the Web and who is doing some amazing things in many different format, posted her comment on Classroom 2.0 for us. She writes: “This week could be wrapped up by saying it was a week of great loss, great gains, and great rest: the great loss was Monday when a good friend died; great gains when 17 faculty went to ACSI; and great rest for Thanksgiving holiday in USA.

My colleague, Susan, of the Western Mass Writing Project, is still energized by the meetings in New York City. She writes: “There’s nothing more satisfying than connecting people with people and opportunities that support their passions, their great thinking minds, and their vital voices; it’s like living your life in hyperlink!

Ben is nearing fatherhood (whoo-hoo) and realizes that being away from home is not so great a thing, as he muses: “I realized that using the NWP/NCTE New York conference as a exciting, if not poetic, deathbed for the final weeks for the pre-fatherhood epoch in my life was useless because I missed my wife almost as much as I missed seeing my unborn sun bulge in her belly.” (Editor’s Note: Did he mean sun? or son? I didn’t change it because sun seemed poetic to me).

Amy‘s words kept coming, beyond a sentence, and who am I to edit the rush of the writer? She writes: “This week we had our Thanksgiving Morning Ex at school. (Morning Exercises are all-school assemblies that occur once or twice a week.) The Thanksgiving Mex is always highlights fall service learning projects that have happened in the lower, middle, and upper schools. I am the service learning coordinator for the lower school, and although it is a lot of work to put together, it went really well. Today I am baking pies in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities! (Sorry that was more like a paragraph than a sentence!)

Larry (whose blog site you must read regularly — it is wonderful) comes to us with a possible solution for a practical problem, and some learning, too. He writes: “The highlight of this short week was the classroom management success of giving two VERY active students soccer “stress balls,” with the caveat that they had to jot down at least one time each day when they used it (so they might eventually see a pattern).”

Bonnie seems a bit rested and then disturbed by real life, and it comes in the form of filling up the tank. (Is there a metaphor here?) She writes: “Coming back to life without a workshop to prepare for is nice, just a chance to breathe and devour some turkey and wonder just how high the cost of gas will go until someone screams out: I WON”T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Cheryl (who co-created the podcast-friendly Seedlings Ning for the K12 Online Conference) continues to spread her knowledge and skills with others, as she notes, “I presented about Moodle in 4 different workshops and teachers moved on with Moodle, I am a happy presenter.

Ginny, who has been forging her way into podcasting with the Seedlings Ning site started by Cheryl, is looking closer at student interaction, explaining: “I have discovered how peer assessment, that is students assessing students, contributes to deeper learning and is a fairer way to recognise contribution to groupwork for example.

And then there is Nancy, a virtual friend with whom I met in real life in NYC, who writes: “This week, I went to bed early nearly every night, recovering from a weekend of volunteering and being professionally developed, and practically gave up on teaching my Juniors, those little buggers; thank goodness Thanksgiving is finally here.

So there you have it — a great expanse of writing and thoughts. I encourage you all to follow some of the links to each other’s blogs, and begin a conversation — start a friendship — connect.

Peace (in shortness),
Kevin

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