Okay, So Why A Blog?
After our son was born and I spent many weeks at home loving on him, going back to school proved to be harder that I thought it would be. I had just gone through a huge lifestyle change and now, here I was having to go through a huge teacher lifestyle change. I used to be the teacher who stayed late every single day preparing and grading and visiting, etc. I spent time in the teacher's lounge and enjoyed the company of my team. Knowing that I had to get home to feed and play with my baby completely transformed my school routines. I was quickly becoming the "teacher mama" that I consider myself today.
Through this transformation, I realized a few things:
1. Teaching and mothering can both be very isolating. When you're at home with a young child all day (as I often was on the weekends and am now in the summer) there is very little contact with the outside world. Yes you love your baby, but you also love having conversations where you feel like you're not talking to yourself, or conversations at all. Teaching can be the same way. Sure you have your team, but really it's just you in that room all day long. For me, there was an added layer of isolation this past year as I had to use any kid-free time to pump in my room.
2. I love teaching! I love it so much. This past year was my best yet (that might have to do with the fact that it was my third year, I hear those are magical). Either way, I had genuine relationships with my kids and we just had a blast.
3. I love creating and sharing teaching resources with others. I found myself offering resources and tips to student teachers at our school, loving the community of instagram teachers I found, and actively engaging in an inspiring teacher group through Trinity University, where I graduated from.
All of these things collided when, at the end of the year, my principal told me that she wanted me to move from second grade where I had been for my three years, up to teach fourth grade writing and science.
Now, I will admit, as a second grade teacher, writing and science were not my teaching priorities and didn't get the attention those two subjects deserve. I was much more focused on getting my students to read and add and subtract than write and dig deeper in science. But, I am always up for a challenge! Here's the thing though, I firmly believe that to teach something, you've got to be actively engaging in it. I haven't actively engaged in the art of writing, as in truly engaged and done my own writing in a long time. That's not to say that I don't like it, I just wasn't doing it.
At various points in my life, I can recall being obsessed with writing. I remember in first and second grade (and I truly do because I have a scary good memory) cutting stories that I had written in class in half to tape in extra paper with new parts of the story I'd added. I transformed the book The Frog Prince Continued into a full script for my friends and I to perform for my class. I wrote and illustrated a book about a jellyfish named Piper who was in the FBI. I wrote another story about a dog walker and all the dogs she walked. I read the book What My Mother Doesn't Know and wrote my own version of it in my spare time. Then when I was in college I wrote ridiculous blog posts about who even knows what and my friends would read and comment on them. Then I got busy, as college students do, doing other things and the writing became writing papers out of necessity and not stories or commentaries out of the love for writing.
So here I am, beginning a new adventure of my teacher mama blog. My hope for this blog is that I can address some of my passions: teaching and sharing teaching resources. I hope that by sharing in this way, I can break free from some of the isolation that teachers so often experience by inviting you to look into my classroom and hopefully looking into yours. And ultimately, I hope that as I hone my craft of writing, I touch my readers in a genuine, thought-provoking way.
I hope that you will join me on this new journey! Thanks and I love y'all lots!
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