BulgingButtons

Not bad for a fat girl

Tag Archives: Education


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Split Personality

aheadsI’m at an impasse. I’m not sure what to write about. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say. I ALWAYS seem to have something to say. It’s just that I’m not sure in what direction I should go at the moment.

This blog began as a way for me to bitch and moan and then celebrate a little about how I was treating my body. I was going to get fit, dammit! And I was going to be accountable along the way by sharing my trials and tribulations with all of you out there in blog-land. Naturally, I would digress from time to time, but that was fine, especially since I planned to be completely anonymous.

Well, it didn’t take long for me to start writing about my family of origin, and my current family situation. After all, this is my life, so welcome to it. Again, I was anonymous, so whatever raw emotions I was feeling I spilled out onto the screen and didn’t think twice about hitting the publish button. I am what I am, take it or leave it. Something like that.

Then I started to sneak in some of my professional life. I’m a teacher. Teaching is an all consuming profession. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about SOME aspect of my profession. Lesson plans are swirling around in my brain, the endless to-do list nags at me at the most inopportune times, and I’m constantly thinking about how I can be more effective. It’s impossible to be me without also being an educator, so again, into the blog it went.

One of my education pieces got picked up by Scary Mommy, and that was a lot of fun. Thousands of readers took in my words, and honestly that was a rush. The piece was also translated into Greek and posted on no fewer than 8 Greek language websites. That event also marked the end of my anonymity.

Now in addition to an educator, I’m a writer. As time has gone on, I’ve come to realize that writing is something that I’m meant to do. I’ve been writing, reading about writing, learning about writing, and writing about writing. And yes, I put that into the blog too.

So now what I have is a big ‘ole mess. The blog has turned into a giant mish-mosh of stuff, from fun fitness for fat chicks to fabulous books for fourth graders to my childhood memories of gingerbread to my feelings about frito-pie and standardized testing. I’m afraid that as I’ve spread out my topics, I’ve lost some momentum. I feel like I’ve lost my edge by wandering around discussing this topic and that. I feel like I need to narrow my focus and find my niche, but I’m not sure I exactly WANT to do that. I like writing about a little of this and a little of that. And I don’t think I have the energy to run several blogs at once.

Even if I did, what would I call them?

BulgingButtons – or how two years later I’m still fat and struggle with making good lifestyle choices

All the Pretty Words – The Journey to Becoming the Writer I Believe is Hiding Inside Me

Give Kids a Chance – My Take on How our Education System Ought to Help Kids

Past, Present, Future – My life as it was, is, and hopefully will be

I know bloggers who have revamped their blogs, or started additional blogs to address new topics. What do you think? Shall I soldier on? Make some changes? Rein in some of my topics? Avoid others all together? I’d love some feedback, and if you’ve been with me for some time, thank you, your support means a lot.

 

 


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I’m Practically Famous (Again) – Thoughts on Student Engagement

We-have-all-been-thereA while back the Education Week blog put out a call for writers. I applied, and was given an assignment to write about student engagement.
I was to explain what it meant to me and how to achieve it, all in 300 words or less. Yikes!

If’ you’ve read BulgingButtons for any length of time, or even just glanced through it, you know that most of the posts are quite a bit longer than that. Usually they run closer to 1,000 words, but for topics related to teaching they can be significantly longer than that. A 300 word limit was a challenge for me, but I did it!

I submitted my piece and that was that. I didn’t hear anything else about it. Not until today, anyway, when I received a tweet with the quote from the article and a link. Cool.

So if you’re here from Education Week, welcome. I hope you stick around and find something else on the blog that interests you. If you’re a regular BulgingButtons reader, I hope you click over to Education Week to see what student engagement is all about. I did notice that the other contributing educators didn’t seem to stick to the 300 word limit, but then again, maybe they had a slightly different assignment. Mine is the short piece at the bottom of the page. Either way, I’m glad you’re here sharing these fifteen minutes of almost fame with me.

Posts that may be of interest to educators:

Ten Essential Back to School Supplies that Money Can’t Buy

A New Way of Looking at Old History

An Open Apology to Fourth Graders

The Gift of Time

 


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A New Way of Looking at Old History- A Social Studies Success

Real live student samples

Real live student samples

This afternoon I had the pleasure of teaching a social studies lesson to my fourth graders. I like social studies. I like history, geography, civics, economics, and all that fun stuff. Well, at least on a fourth grade level.

I do especially enjoy history, though. I actually majored in it in college. American Social History around the turn of the century, to be exact. Of course, at that time, we didn’t say WHICH century. Yes, I’m that old. I’m fascinated by the advent of industrialization and how it affected social structures. I have an interest in the development of child labor laws, and I could go on and on about Jane Addams and Hull House. And don’t even get me started on public education, that’s a whole day, at least!

In my experience my students have always loved history too. They just need good story tellers to keep them engaged. Today, I was lucky. Today I had a good story to tell. I started with the Mexican American War and ended with the Gadsden Purchase. In half an hour. Yep, it was quick.

I’ve taught this lesson before, but today it was different. Today my brilliant colleagues handed me a Thinking Map that they had created on Friday while I was jet setting. It was a flow map (sequencing the events) with a few multi-flow areas (explaining causes and effects) thrown in for good measure. It was GENIUS! I was immediately taken by it, and couldn’t wait to use it with the kids.

Off we went with our social studies text, on which I elaborated as necessary. Every few minutes we added more information to our maps. Sometimes we discussed causes of events, and put them in their appropriate spaces, other times it was effects that we analyzed and noted. The kids were even more into the lesson than usual, and they really started to GET it. The information was organized in such a way that it was visual and really made sense to them.

What a delight for a teacher to really feel like her students are not only grasping new material, but are excited about their learning. I’m so thankful to my colleagues for developing and sharing this way of organizing the material. It turns out that even history can be made brand new.