Sunday Coffee

These past few weeks I have been much more the teacher than the reader and blogger. I've missed my blog. Thanks to those of you you've stuck around; I'll try to reward your loyalty with something interesting to read pretty soon! Would you believe that we have already had progress reports? We like to start our school year early in the south, and the first quarter will be over in a couple of weeks. My students are writing in their notebooks (and I am writing with them), and we are developing our classroom routines.

This week was an especially busy one. We had Back to School Night on Monday (that's a 13-hour day), then National Honor Society induction, and a meeting for English teachers that kept us at school until 5 p.m. I always find it funny when I hear people talk about how teachers don't really work a 40-hour week. I had two days this week that stretched to 13 hours, and one that stretched to 10 hours. And that's not even counting the night I voluntarily stayed until nearly 6 p.m. planning and grading. I'm probably preaching to the choir, but I wish that the general public understood how many hours we put in. And I'm really not complaining about working those hours-I just dislike the assumption that teachers have it easy. (By the way, that's the title of a book: edited by Dave Eggers).

Next weekend I'm presenting at a local conference. I hope people show up! My presentation is on using writer's notebook as part of writing workshop. I love writing with my students. It can be challenging to work it all in. Not just the writing in class part of it, but modeling assignments and doing the work of writing alongside my students while also delivering instruction. My creative writing students get it, but they are predisposed to want to write. This year I am doing writer's notebook in all of my classes, and I'm really hoping to see some progress in my students: not just in their writing, but in the way they see themselves. One of the goals is to have all of my students see themselves as writers.

I brought a TON of papers home to organize and grade! Why did I do that? Oh, it's because I didn't grade all week, what with meetings and long days and whatnot. Also, it is really difiicult to find uninterrupted time for grading during the school day. So today there will be a few hours at the kitchen table with piles of papers. I'll be glad I did it.

With the crazy busy summer I had and the crazy busy beginning of the school year stuff I really feel as though I have become disconnected from my book blogging universe. BBAW came and went (I think). Challenges and other fun stuff have passed me by. It seems as though my reading/blogging groove is no longer grooving. I'm so far behind in reading my favorite blogs-how long has it been since I left a comment? Aaarrgh. I think I might even have missed some important national events, like "talk like a pirate day."

I will get my reading/blogging groove back.

Check back tomorrow for an unpdate on what I've been reading and what I plan to read. But I have to holla at PK of Aisle B for making sure I got a copy of To Be Queen by Christy English. I'm finally reading it! Wow, just started it yesterday, and I'm almost halfway through. In fact, To Be Queen represents a serious threat to my grading pile....

Check in tomorrow to find out how and what this teacher reads (and how I find the time). Hey, if you're reading this and you have a blog, what did you do when you lost your blogging groove? What did you do to get your blogging groove back?