summer is approaching its end. this fact saddens me and fills me with anxious anticipation, but also excitement for the upcoming year. to be quite honest the summer could not have gone much better, and i believe that the things i have learned and experienced this summer will help in making my second year of teaching much better than the first. so what are these “things” i speak of you might ask? well allow me to share a few...
1. i will be teaching keystone (refer to previous blog posts for an explanation of what that means) next year, but i still am weirdly passionate about algebra. i think this passion mainly grows from the fact that it is a high stakes test, and i want to see my kids do well on it. as luck would have it, i am going to be able to teach lots of algebra standards in my keystone course (maybe even half the year). because keystone is all about goal setting, we will be setting goals pertaining to performance on the algebra end of course test. this excites me
2. i really enjoy thinking through, writing, and delivering an organization of thoughts known as a sermon. i was able to deliver one of these to the members of savannah FUMC last sunday, and i think it went pretty well. i had about a million and one things i wanted to say, but managed to fit it all into a twenty minute block using the strategy of staring at my watch the entire time. i had perfected this art in the classroom this past year, and it sure came in handy. it was a blessing to get to speak to my home church, and i am very thankful for the opportunity. since the sermon, i have been told by more than a couple of people that i need to make this art of sermonizing a part of my career path; we shall see :)
3. the act of reading, thinking, and writing may be the most underrated practice in the world. i have spent so much of my summer at uptown restaurant drinking coffee, journaling, reading, etc and man has it been great for my life. we are taught from an early age in our society that success is measured by your ability to keep going and keep producing. i believe this is a fatal flaw in our culture which leads to lots of empty lives of chasing after nothing. periodically putting a hold on the constant chase for more allows us to refuel. we weren’t created to live without rest. now, this is all easy for me to say when i have the summer off. we’ll see if i can put what i have learned into practice this upcoming year.
there’s a few things. i know there are many more, but i will leave you all with that for now. i sincerely miss the presence of the “funny stories about my students” portion of my blog updates. i suppose that means i sincerely miss my students, at least in a way. well, they are coming soon, and we’ll see just how much i miss them after a week of “mr. rah, don’t nobody know this stuff. why you always be tryin to make us do all this work mr. rah?” haha.... ohhhh the children. as a side note. if anyone is interested in reading my sermon, i’ve got the text in a document i can send to you. hope everyone is doing well. peace.
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