Blessed to Teach and Read

As the school year started back, in-person, at the end of July, this was me a lot of the evenings when I got home: The stress was seemingly unreal and mostly from me expecting too much of myself with too little time to do it.  Since school had closed mid-March, I was not able to finish genre labeling the remaining books in the fiction section (F SNI - F ZZZ), which meant trying to do it all during preplanning.  It also meant moving 4,000 books into their new sections by myself.  I insanely, and very briefly, considered doing a full inventory of our books, since I was supposed to have done it at the end of the previous school year, but thankfully gave myself permission not to do it. 😄 Deep breaths. To accommodate some changes to the way our library would function this year, I made and shared a Bitmoji Virtual Help room with lots of different links for both virtual and face-to-face learners.  I also made a Google sign-up calendar so teachers could bring their entire class for library ch

A couple of nights ago, as I was getting ready for bed, a song from decades past popped into my head.  It has a dissonant, forlorn tune*, which somewhat matched my mood.  I think I sang it as part of high school all-state honor choir.  Its lyrics are from George Eliot's poem, "The Choir Invisible".  I found myself singing the last stanza of her poem: May I reach That purest heaven, be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty, Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world. The poet talks about what she hopes her legacy is after she dies.  Think about the many who "live again" when we remember the legacy that they leave us.  Someone famous?  A loved one?  Someone taken too soon by a disease or by violence? The start of her poem is: O may I join the choir

This January kicked off with one of the best birthdays - ever!  Lots of students gave me cards and birthday posters.  Several classes sang to me.  Had a blast!  January also brought the start of an Educational Specialist degree in Instructional Technology, completely online, through The University of West Georgia.  And now that it's UWG's spring break, I am finally making time to update my blog.  ('Cause updating my blog is much  better than doing our taxes!)  In Issues in Instructional Technology, one of the assigned texts is Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns  by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson.  It was first written in 2008, but my copy is an expanded edition from 2017.  I LOVE reading current texts, especially since technology has changed so much year to year.  We just got to chapter four, "Disruptively Deploying Computers" about how there are areas of non-consumption, where there