Taken from Poe's "Pit and Pendulum"

Darkness (Or, Writing while under guard by the Inquisition)

Darkness can become weighty,

an elephantine encumberance that descends.

It never ascends, never comes up from the floor to envelope us at the waist and creep its inexorable way into our throat and down, down, down to our belly, where it boils and sours.

It always falls from the absence of light. Must come from the place where the sun fills our minds. So darkness descends.

Darkness can become terrifying,

a cacophony of noises just outside of hearing,

a myriad of shapes just outside of seeing.

They congeal and dissolve on the edges and peripheries of non-sight,

bleeding into our eyes and up into our brains.

Darkness can become comforting,

when you can feel it soften just a smidge.

Turning from an anvil on our heads and a cloud in our throat into a downy pillow and a velvety coverlet.

When you cannot see the light, yet the darkness begins to gather itself, begins to prepare for its retreat into the corners and under the eaves, and just around the next bend. Darkness will stroke you as it leaves, leaving a reminder of itself as it endows you with the warming, perhaps coming, light.

New School Year

We have begun the 2012-2013 Academic School Year!

There are a few new items on my plate this year:

1. As a staff we are implementing an Advisory program for our 3rd, 4th, and 5th year students. Each teacher will mentor 7-9 students. The point of this program is to keep the students involved in the school, and to stay up to date with their academic progress. It should be an interesting program, although I am not sure how much it will change what students actually do in their college class.

2. Graduate School.

I am beginning the Masters in School Administration program at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. I am excited to be back in the classroom once in a while, and to interact with peers that are not in my school. I am a bit concerned about the added financial responsibility that this adds to my family, but it should be bearable. I sincerely hope that North Carolina starts giving our teachers yearly raises again, so that I don't have to be an assistant principal right out of grad school.

3. New Freshman! I guess that is normal, but this should be shaping up as my most prepared and effective year to date. Hopefully we can keep that trend up moving forward.

Gabe Davis

Juggling Master

One of the things that I am becoming more and more aware of in my second full year of teaching is how many tasks, duties, and activities a master teacher juggles at all times.


Clubs, Grading, Lesson Planning, Blogging, Trolling for new ideas, Administrative responsibilities, Parent Contacts, Field Trips, etc...

The list could probably go on for quite a while. It can sometimes be overwhelming, thinking about all of the tasks and responsibilities that are on my plate from day to day. It makes me very impressed to see teachers who seem to have it all together. Obviously, nobody is perfect, especially in the teaching profession. However, one of the marks of a master teacher is juggling all of these teacher/education tasks that appear in our Inbox.

I will continue to blog about what makes a Master Teacher, although I know that I am an enormous distance away from being on of THOSE.

Understanding by Design

In our school staff development meeting on Monday, one of the more experienced and wise teachers talked to us about Unit planning. As I am a greenhorn, much of my lesson planning has been finding a book and trying to come up with a project that would be beneficial. This has not necessarily been the most rewarding and productive method of planning.

The idea behind Understanding by Design is that you first must figure out the theme/overarching idea behind your unit, then fill in everything around that. For me, the biggest learning point was that I need to relate every single thing that we do in class to the main idea of the story. That can be small writing assignments, unit tests, papers, projects, etc...Everything that we do in my class should relate to the overall theme and lend itself to the answering of one of the essential questions.

It means a decent amount of work for me, but reworking my units is going to be incredibly beneficial for both my students and for myself.

Organization

One of the big problems that I run into as a teacher is how to keep myself organized, at least as far as a to-do list is concerned. I have tried keeping lists in a notebook and rewriting it every day, and I have tried to keep a digital list through the Stickies application on my Mac laptop.

Each of these options has its drawbacks, and I am suppose that either way is fine to use. How do you organize yourself?