Bullfrog Bulletin
February 12, 2016
Things to Come:
TBD (as scheduled) --Individual Principal Meetings
Thursday, February 18th--District Administrative PLC--Principal Data Presentations
TBD (as scheduled)--Individual Coaches Meetings
Friday, February 19th--Instructional Coaches Meetings
Coming Soon:
Wednesday, February 24th--Instructional Rounds at Effie 8:30 am
Thursday, February 25th--Scheduled Individual Principal Meetings TBD (as scheduled)
Friday, February 26th--Scheduled AP/Coach PLC @ 9:00 am
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.
LWISD Navigators (New to Teaching) Meeting--Monday, February 8, 2016
New teachers met with teaching and learning coaches on Monday, February 8th to begin a book study using Todd Whitaker's What Great Teachers Do Differently. They also spent time sharing why they teach.
Let us remember: one book, one pen, and one teacher can change the world.—Malala Yousafzai
We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.—H.G. Wells
“I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illumined by the lightning-life of the mind—then teaching is the finest work I know. But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused—and I am so powerless to do anything about it—that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then the enemy is everywhere: in those students from some alien planet, in that subject I thought I knew,
and in the personal pathology that keeps me earning my living this way. What a fool I was to imagine that I had mastered this occult art—harder to divine than tea leaves and impossible for mortals to do even passably well!
“The subjects we teach are as large and complex as life, so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. Second, the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole, and respond to them wisely in the moment, requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve. If students and subjects accounted for all the complexities of teaching, our standard ways of coping would do—keep up with our fields as best we can and learn enough techniques to stay ahead of the student psyche. But there is another reason for these complexities: we teach who we are. Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one’s inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge—and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject . . . When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life—and when I cannot see them clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject—not at the deepest levels of embodied, personal meaning.”--FROM THE COURAGE TO TEACH BY PARKER PALMER