Teacher Appreciation Week

As we celebrate teacher appreciation this week, I’ve been reflecting on what appreciation has looked like during my career so far. The biggest trend is that appreciation is shown as support. I realize support looks different for different teachers and in different years. In the support, expectation and consistency play a big role.

While teacher appreciation is 1 week, the support is needed all year long. Support for my classes looks like ensuring my co-teacher can be in the room for class each day. Support is protecting our planning time several days a week. Support is setting realistic expectations for teachers. For example, we often need more than 24 hours to respond to all the emails we receive in a day.

One of the biggest things I've seen change for the better is work time. In the beginning, we worked long hours and several weekends at the school. If you weren't able to work the weekends they wanted to know why. We were paid for coming in and tutoring/teaching on the weekends. In more recent years, there has been a push for only working contract hours and nothing more. I started doing this and it's freeing. It also requires support and understanding. I'd encourage you if you aren't working only contract hours to start. The first step for me was not answering emails outside of contract hours, in the beginning, I set an out of office reply so parents and students knew that I would get back to them when I returned to work in the morning or on Monday's after a weekend. The next step was making my daily to do list and doing as much as I could from it and being okay with what didn't get done that day and had to wait until the next.

I hope you have a great teacher appreciation week.

Comments

Baby Yoda Pixel Art Template

This template is set for 3 sets of answers. I have the answers that are currently set, you will need to reformat them to use with your content. Baby Yoda Pixel Art Template Be on the lookout for this activity given 2 ordered pairs and asking for slope, y-intercept, and the equation of a line. I'm also formatting this for converting between percents, decimals, and fractions. If you want to reformat it before I post the above activities here is how.

Blooket Game

A week ago my students kept asking to play Blooket so I looked into it. Blooket is much like Kahoot and Gimkit but they earn money. Blooket has several different game modes and the students LOVE IT. Once a student has been eliminated they will keep playing to earn more gold which they can use to buy rare items. Each week Blooket has a theme and those rare items can be bought for the week and then they are gone; the items include accessories or special characters they can play as. My students will play for hours if we let them. When we finish a game they are ready for another round. Blooket has a FREE version which has been enough for my class but you can also upgrade to a paid version. They have games that are already made or you can create a new game. My students love the battle royale mode and the gold quest the best. If you haven't given it a try I would highly suggest it.

Gimkit Tag Domination

Gimkit came out with a new mode called Tag: Domination. This is currently one of my students favorite modes(fishtopia is the other). This game is similar to physical tag. Students are split into 2 teams. To earn energy to run and get upgrades, students must correctly answer questions. The time to tag and run away alternate and students can see which one they are in on the top left of the screen. At the end, the team with the most tag win.

Pi R Scared

Search This Blog