Freezing Rain

School was cancelled today due to freezing rain. We missed our training on brain-based research. We were supposed to bring a lesson plan with us that demonstrated the ways we have been incorporating research on the brain since our last professional development. Putting that lesson down on paper was not easy for me. Yes, I plan for each day and post my plans on my teacher website, but the level of detail planning that goes in to the kind of lesson plan we all had to write for our Master's degrees is not something that experienced teachers do on a day to day basis. It is good for us to be reminded that we should know "what we want the students to learn" or what the "essential questions" addressed in each lesson are. We should consider the time spent on each activity and if it is during the peak retention time or not. We should consider each individual student's, all 70 of them, learning style and prior experience. I could go on and on. I really buy into all of the ways that this research could and should make teaching better, but I have to confess, it is also overwhelming. There are those gifted teachers who seem to manage all of it with ease, but what about those of us for whom the teaching dance is not a natural step. I want to be the best teacher that I can be; I absolutely love my job, but there is so much to do that I am constantly feeling inadequate. It's not so very different from being a parent to more than one child - someone is always getting short-changed, it feels. Add the parenting to the teaching and you have one tired, often stressed, but ultimately happy, person who just wants to do the very best she can.