Success?

Well, here I go into the wide world of blogging.  First, a little about me.  I am a new teacher, just finishing my last three weeks of my official first year of teaching.  That’s right.  My experience in teaching is 1 year of grad school doing coursework, 1 year of internship (simultaneous with grad school – that was a rough year) and 1 year of actually being fully employed as a teacher.

And, after my first year, I have to say I am pretty not happy with how I taught that first year.  Oh sure, I tried some different things, and I had some pretty happy kids who did some pretty amazing things and learned some math pretty darn well.

But …. was I successful? ….

How does one define success in teaching?  When I was a manager in business, success is pretty obvious; did sales go up? did expenses go down? did profits go up? good job!

But teaching … how do I define success?  I know how I don’t define it.  I don’t define success as having to tell learners to constantly sit up and not sleep.  That is not success.  I don’t define success as having a homework turn in rate of around 20 to 30%.  That is not success.

So I started doing some research outside of the M.Ed. that I am working on.  I started reading blogs. Lots of blogs. I read Dan Meyers blog http:blog.mrmeyer.com and I realized that there is about 10 million things I can do differently in year two.

So, why am I setting up a blog?  So that I can use it as a tool for feedback and reflection on how I am teaching. I WILL use video and sound to teach math.  I will be using some of Dan’s ideas and methods.  I will come up with some of my own.  But I will improve.