Peregrinations

I gave my first keynote speech today.  I have been working and stressing over it for about a month, tweaking, revising, and just generally driving my friends and family insane with drafts and slide decks.  I got to the convention center early enough to set up my laptop and practice one final time. I was the closing speaker at a three-day conference, so I knew what the audience really wanted was for me to be fast so they could enjoy some of those precious post-conference moments of food, shopping, or other blissfully responsibility-free activities teachers always seem to enjoy.   As I waited for everything to get started, the 2012 Teacher of the Year came up and introduced herself.  She had such kind and wonderful words of support. She knew exactly what it was like to be sitting there still more or less awestruck that any of this was even happening to me.  Her encouragement exactly what I needed to hear before I stepped up to present.  I hope that I can...

Daruma is sold in a state without eyes, and it is common that the person who bought it to paint the eyes. It is understood in Japan that you should paint one eye as a wish and paint the other eye as soon the wish comes true. Basically, you should make a wish and then paint Daruma's left eye (the right side if you face it) and finally paint the right eye once the wish comes true. Daruma's eyes are said to represent AUN. The left eye is A which means the beginning of things, and the right eye is UN which means the end of things. taken from Artisan: JTB USA Online Store ------------- As I was pulling in to a slightly too small parking space near Weidmann's today, I heard the alert for an incoming email.  Since I was just a few minutes early, I took the time to check what had come in.  It was news I have been waiting more than twenty years to get; once again, I am a grad student. When I was finishing my MA at Indiana, I wanted to go on to a PhD.  I even spent time talking to ...

 One of the things I have been proudest of about winning Teacher of the Year is being able to select a graduating senior who is going into education to get a $5000 scholarship courtesy of Kids First Education.   After looking through the applications, I selected someone, and we all went to lunch at Weidmann's today to celebrate the award. The application process asked each candidate to write a brief essay talking about their connection to teaching.  The winning student's essay related that she is, like me, a child of teachers.  As we had lunch today, so many things she and her mother shared struck familiar chords.   Even though she is at the beginning of her career, I can already tell she is going to be a good teacher. She has that undefinable something, that aura of calmness and strength that teachers share with healthcare professionals and other "people-heavy" fields that so often means the difference between staying in the job and leaving.  This you...

Peregrination refers to a journey or pilgrimage, often religious in nature, that involves traveling from one place to another. It can also mean a wandering or roaming, often without a specific destination or purpose. The term is derived from the Latin word "peregrinus," which means "foreign" or "stranger."    - courtesy of the MerlinAI add-on ---------- This isn't my first blogging rodeo; I had another long ago, almost in another life one could say.  It was something I kept pretty diligently, but I stopped writing it over a decade ago.   It wasn't a planned thing.  The voice of that version of me just went silent.  Today at a lunch meeting, someone suggested I might want to start a blog or some form of record about my upcoming time as Teacher of the Year, and I realized I had been thinking about writing again sort of out of the corner of my mind's eye.  Blogging has always been a good way for me to process what I am going through at the momen...