Take 5 - 8/25/06

This week's motivation levels are a bit lower. Those first few days are hard - checking out lockers, going over expectations, student being added and dropped to classes like no one's business, etc. I am ready to get going.
I am not sure if I am doing this blog thing correctly. Jessie was telling me about bloglist? Is that something I should be subscribing to? How do I start a class blog? Is that something we will learn in class? I wish more people in my department were involved with this so we could bounce ideas off of each other. I feel kind of lost right now. Motivated with confusion - that would be me right now.

Take 5 - 8/17/06

This week has flown by. I absolutely loved the Shift Happens PPT. I don't know if it was the music, stats, thought provoking ideas or hormones but I started crying and couldn't stop. I feel motivated for the school year. I hope to transfer what we have learned into my lessons and on to the students. Change is good.

The World is Flat

The first chapter of The World is Flat was hard to get into. I kept thinking this is going to go somewhere, really. As I continued reading the book revealed some scary truths in our society. It's all things I knew were there but hadn't thought how it would affect our future. In our society so many people expect things to be given to them instead of earning them. Most of us haven't experienced a world outside of our own and when we do, we know what is waiting for us at home. Is our society (Littleton, Colorado) so protected and privileged that we don't challenge ourselves to our full potential. In thinking about teaching, I kept wondering HOW can I, as a teacher, challenge my students to challenge themselves? How can we see beyond Littleton, Colorado and out into the world when we haven't experienced it ourselves?
I want to push myself and my students to see the big picture, to see that we are all connected in some way, to see that world events do effect us even though we don't experience it immediately.
In Physical Education, a push the students to find physical activities they enjoy and would want to continue through their lifetime. Technology has brought us new and innovative ways to measure our heart rates and new machines to exercise on. The future will only bring more and I want to be able to share that with my students. Who knows, maybe one of them will create the next treadmill.