Ms. M's Tales of a Teacher: My Personal Teacher Blog

Greetings everyone! It's the height of the holiday season and I'm feeling both tired and excited. I'm sure you are too! I look forward to our weekly inSpiration posts and my blog time to share my thoughts with you. It helps me to reset and feel connected to my week ahead.  We've been spending some time working on our challenges, and tackling our "bad habits" (aka) our negative thinking the past few weeks. So far, we looked at how even the most fierce pirates get seasick when the tide throws them off their game, how we should try to avoid tempting situations. Since that's not only possible, and we don't want to back away from challenges, I reframed this for those tempting moments when I fall over into a negative mindset that traps me there, and I want to avoid giving in to that moment. We also looked at starting new positive habits and replacing the negative ones. We should continue to do activities that bring out our self-confidence, and learn ways to ...

We are back teacher friends! I am so excited for out topic this week as part #2 in our inSpiration mini-series. I realized this week that my weak moment has begun a huge learning curve for me, and I'm grateful for it because it's inspired me to create this mini-series to help all of you who may be struggling with the same feelings. Last week we discussed the first step in changing a bad habit; avoiding the tempting situations, and how it’s not always possible to do that with our work. What we can do is avoid diving deeper into the moment the negative mindset begins if we think about how far we’ve come and we are offering a service to help our students. Valorie Burton says that for leaders, thinking of serving is one way to help take the pressure off and avoid focusing on what we didn't do well, but instead on what we did. It's easier to lead when we feel we are serving others.  Today, let’s think about another step we must take to break this bad habit; replace unhealthy...

Welcome back friends! This week has certainly been a busy one, and to be honest one of mixed emotions for me. I'm enjoying my time going through my practicum, and I am learning a lot, however I had a moment this week when I lost confidence in myself and worried if I was good enough.  This happened when I worked with a new student to test his literacy skills and advise his family what interventions I suggest. This student is struggling in reading, and I was looking forward to assessing his skills, but it was a while (since my graduate coursework) since I used one of the assessments (the IRI). The moment of panic came over me, I read/studied for two days like cramming for that college exam. I can now say I knew I was having a case of  imposter syndrome, and I spent a full evening being upset with. myself. This was the first time I ran a session like this and I felt like I wasn't prepared. In hindsight, I know what I want to do going forward to be better prepared.  Thankfull...