Just Another Quarter Gone By

Nine weeks ago I wrote about how glad I was to finish the semester. The end of the 3rd quarter is here, and I am glad to be finished with it, too. This whole year has felt like a wild ride on a treadmill. It's been an incredibly frustrating year, and although much blame must be placed on my apathetic students, I can't help do some finger-pointing right back at myself. There are all these things I know I could do better, but I just get so overwhelmed and cannot do everything. I can't stand another depressing post, so how 'bout I focus on the things I'm trying to do to improve my teaching?

• I read as much as I can from edublogs. Wish I could comment more, but sometimes I'm just doing drive-by readings to get a little fix. Food for thought. It really helps!
• I took two online classes in February. One of them was on using the Internet for research. I learned so much and attempted to take much of my newfound knowledge straight into my classroom. I hate teaching research, so anything new was bound to beneficial. My students were quite interested in learning how to be smarter researchers and wished they had known some of the information I passed on to them sooner.
• I'm going to an IB conference in Texas this summer, and hopefully I can get a better understanding of what I should be doing within the program. (BTW, several of us were hoping to go to one here in Las Vegas this summer, but it's the wrong training for what we need. Our second choice was to go to one in October, but the district won't pay for substitutes. They don't mind us taking 5 days out of our summer break, though.) I think I'm doing pretty well with it, but since I've never been officially trained, I might find I know very little! In any case, I'm definately looking forward to getting some inspiration!
• I joined our school's newly-formed assessment team. It's more about formative assessments than summative ones, which is a good topic to become more acquainted with. I feel pretty low after the meetings--mostly discussions at this point--because I know plenty about assessments that I don't use regularly like I should. I feel like better techniques in this area would be the magic pill to heal what ails some of my classes. I know I'm delusional, as it might more like a nice vitamin rather than a miracle pill, but I'll take that!

Lately, I've been having many thoughts of other jobs I could do. Yup. I'm that frustrated and annoyed, but this meager list reminds me that I am not giving up yet. I'm still interested. I'm still in the game.