The Brain Drain

This week is another short week for the public school system.  Today, on Halloween, the teachers conveniently have a planning day.  The teachers are in their classrooms, cleaning off desks, grading papers, and making lesson plans for the following weeks to come.  This is a day set aside for teachers to catch up and reorganize their plans for instruction.  Although this week feels like a shorter week for me, since I will only go to my school on Wednesday and Friday, it is also a big week for me.  On Wednesday, I am being observed for the first time by one of my professors and am wanting to make a great impression.  Also, on Friday, I have an introductory meeting with my student teaching supervisor and my CE!  This is exciting, yet a little intimidating.  I feel as if my brain is already on overload this week, and being introduced to all o the expectations and requirements upcoming for next semester hopefully will not overwhelm me too much.

With all of life distractions and still having to manage course work, on top of juggling to meet the weekly time requirements in our clinical placements, it can be difficult to fit it all in.  This week, especially since I am going out of town for the next two weekends, I am having to submit all of my assignments by Thursday, I feel like I am having to do and work on several things at once. Every time I do homework, I make a habit to have several tabs open on my computer and will switch back and forth from one thing to another.  However, I found an article on Edutopia that suggested that might not be the best way to get things done in a timely manner.  From the article, I learned that it takes more brain power and energy to multitask than to just do one thing at a time and take regular breaks every so often.  This completely shocked me, because often times I feel like if I can juggle several things at once it will take less time to accomplish all of my tasks.  The article suggested several tips in order to help the reader focus when doing homework.  I a going to try these out this week since I am  in such a time crunch with a ten foot long to do list.  If you would also like to check out some tips on how to do a task more efficiently, here is the link to this awesome article: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/conquering-the-multitasking-brain-drain-judy-willis

This blog post best relates to NCTCS to one, three, and four.  The teacher is responsible for taking leadership when in their classroom, as well as taking leadership when planning curriculum with their grade level teams, etc.  They can display this leadership when planning by knowing the content and knowing how their students learn best.  My CE's lessons are not going to be exactly like the other third grade teachers because not all of their students in their classes learn best the same exact way.