Friday, July 22, 2005

I'm home...

but only for 24 hours. I'm tired like I'd been in a foreign country for a week! And I leave for California (volcanoes, vacation) early Sunday morning.

Despite my whiny posts, I learned a lot this past week. I listened, thought, and talked a lot. I thought about psychological and educational theories, and played with applying them to my teaching and my school setting. I thought about which children in my school might have undiscovered talents or talents that we have only begun to discover, that might, like icebergs, float mostly below the surface. I thought about which children in my school might be underachieving, and why, and what to do about it. I talked for hours with my two colleagues, bouncing ideas off of each other, testing theories, arguing, playing devil's advocate, alternately wanting to throw out the whole thing and wanting to embrace it all. We talked about leadership, change, what is possible, the best ways to go about sharing what we've thought about with our colleagues. We talked incessantly about ourselves, our learning styles, our Myers-Briggs profiles (two INFJs including me and one INFP), classes where we underachieved, our experiences with gifted programs and regular classes as children, and on and on. We talked about what makes a program like Confratute successful and valuable, and what makes it frustrating.

I will do my best to share some of this with you today and over the next few weeks. I'm not sure how much I'll get to write during my visit to CA. I don't think I'm going to have much internet access during the volcanoes class, and after that I'll be camping and hiking and will not have any internet access at all. I'm kind of looking forward to being off the grid for a while, to tell the truth. But I will miss this writing space. I'm not very good at paper journals.

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