So Many Firsts

Hmmm. I’ve never done this before…blogging I mean. I have spent the past few weeks, since my beloved announced I would be joining him, settling into my new job teaching seventh grade Reading and Language Arts–a challenge; settling into newly married life; and finishing moving in–I still have one box to unpack and most of our thank you notes to write (Dave just noticed I am writing and is literally jumping for joy in our tiny kitchen). Needless to say, I hope, I haven’t had much time to begin this new thing.

I love trying new things, but I struggle with firsts. I like comfort and familiar things. I have lived in ten different places in the last five years. Life really does move fast. In retrospect, however, the times when life moved more slowly the memories created held more meaning. My most recent memories are so blurred, whereas I can describe in detail several events that occurred in my life before I was even in the second grade.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the trend of poorly performing students. Not to sound cliche, but when I was in school things were simpler and I learned so much. Is there an information overload? A professor I know told me it used to take somewhere between fifty and a hundred years for the world’s knowledge base to double, and today it takes more like five, if that.

Should we limit knowledge?

Or required knowledge?

Should our government regulated public schools be in charge of those limitations?

I am struggling to make the material I am required to teach interesting, and it is ridiculously difficult to be creative when the county dictates which texts must be taught at each level. Most of these texts have no personal connection whatsoever to the students I work with. How can they learn if they are bored and embittered?

Oops…Crossing Jordan is on…have to run!