General

Let me be honest with you about something. For a long time, informational text instruction felt like the part of the year I had to get through. Textbook passages. Dry articles about topics nobody — including me — actually cared about. Students staring back at me with that look. You know the one. And then I started asking myself a different question. Not what standard do I need to cover? but what does my student actually need to know how to do in the real world? That question

If you're a teacher, you already know the energy of back-to-school PD week. The enthusiasm is... palpable. 😄 Nobody is thinking about PD. We are thinking about our classrooms, our lesson plans, our students, the actual work waiting for us on the other side of whatever PowerPoint we're about to sit through. But there we were, the entire district, filing into a rented venue for what would become two of the most chaotic professional development days of my career. Nobody warned

February of 2025, I sent my principal a formal email, requesting a new classroom. One of our more seasoned colleagues was retiring, and his classroom was now up for grabs. I'd honestly been quietly coveting his space for quite some time... Our building is old - built in 1939, I am sure it has seen better days. What it has also seen is an influx of students over the years. As such, classrooms are sectioned off with partitions, rather than walls. The moment my hiring principal