It’s 5am the morning after Open House and I’m at school. My husband responds to this information with, “Of course you are.” He knows me well. This is how it will be for me for the next couple of months. I’ll be knee-deep in school work in my classroom when my alarm will ring telling me it’s time to get out of bed. I just can’t shut my brain off. (If you didn’t understand the “Teaching at 3am blog title, now you do!)
The first thing I did this morning was finish a decorative project I didn’t get done before Open House. With that off my list, I opened up my Notes app on my phone and sent all the notes I’ve been making all summer long to my school email. There were ten such notes. They vary in topic, length and value but many of them were recorded in the middle of the night when an idea just wouldn’t let me sleep. During a normal summer, I would have started working on many of the ideas in July, but this year just wasn’t normal and so it’s just now that I’m sitting down to go through them. One is already nagging at me to give it more consideration – a return to portfolios, which I will talk about more in the future, I am sure.
So I sent all these notes to my email but once I opened up my email I saw a recent posting by Jennifer Gonzalez from her website, Cult of Pedagogy. The title of this recent blog post, “Introducing the HyperRubric” caught my attention. Later today I will be attending a virtual conference with all kinds of topics and presentations and I know I will be learning new strategies about writing, so while I was in my email, I opened it up eager to see what I might already glean from the wisdom of other educators before my conference even starts in a few hours.
I started reading this post, a transcript of a podcast (it’s just too darn early in the day for me to have people talking at me, so I didn’t choose to listen to this) and within the first few paragraphs I was hooked. I heard myself utter out loud, “wow, yeah, right?” and I knew immediately that I had learned something this morning that would significantly change my writing instruction (and I haven’t even attended our district’s conference yet!)
I love this time of year. My husband and I are ships passing in the night and the night custodians believe I sleep in my classroom, but the start of the school year is always full of inspiration, creativity and excitement for me. These are the days when I can’t wait to get to school, when the moon is still high in the sky and I’m the only car in the staff lot for hours, I savor this optimism and passion. I hope my career always feels this way in August. When I stop feeling this motivation, this commitment, this enthusiasm, I will know it is time to try something new, outside the classroom. But for now, for today, I will run with it, for I know that the real work of teaching never sleeps. I know that this energy doesn’t last and doesn’t come often. But for now, it’s time to begin.
Teaching at 3am 