Trying to find my groove!

Today was a great day! I am struggling getting my groove back after the Winter Break.  Wow, January has come in full force.  I came back to school running and can't seem to caught up.

What is truly getting to me it the lack of time I am spending in classrooms.  All of my tricks are not working.  I schedule time for it and an emergency happens. I am walking out the door of the office and something needs to be dealt with right now.  There have been 9000 meetings I have had to attend at the district office.  I am going crazy!!!!

Today, I managed to do it all, however, I am not sure how I pulled it off.  I got all by paperwork done by 8:29am.  Had 25 6th grade parents come and tour the school, It is shopping season.  Then at 10:3am I observe one of my fabulous new teachers that I want to clone.  He is so common core it hurts and the students drink it up.  I was in heaven for 45 minutes.  Then, I was only in my office for 15 minutes to send out my weekly parent newsletter before student lunch.  At lunch it was "name that tune" Disney style.  The junior high kids were singing and dancing.  Kenilworth became the happiest place on earth.

Before 1pm I had see more classrooms then I had in a month.  Now the challenge, how do I do this again tomorrow?

So, I am calling out to my PLN, help!  Any share any thoughts, ideas, tricks you do to make sure you get in the classrooms to drive instruction. Please!!  I need a repeat of today before any more gray hairs show up.

Sacrifices we make...

This week was the #gafesummit in napa.  I love the #gafesummit.  It is the best PD I have experience in my professional career.  I have attended two summits in the past 18 months.  I was honored to attend the first #gafesummit ever in July of 2012.  I am all about learning and being a life long learner.  I am a google freak.  I can't get enough of google and all that it what's done to change education.

This week I sent 11 staff members to #gafesummit.  They had a blast and learned so much.  I chose to stay behind and make sure the 925 students were ok and that the school survived 1/4 of the teaching staff being gone.  Someone needed to stay, so I put on my big girl pant and did it.  I had to take one for the team.  At first I was bitter, I mean really bitter.  I refused to go on twitter and didn't want to answer text messages from people at #gafesummit.  I wanted to distance myself from the whole thing.

What I discovered after talking to my friend, I needed to get over it.  I was only hurting myself by avoiding my PLN and going into my cave.  So, I went over twitter.  I learned so much from what people were posting on the #gafesummit hashtag, it was great.  

I was reminded about two things from this experience:

1. I need to get out of my own way. (My pearl of wisdom)

2. You can learned anywhere with the technology we have now.  I am sure I would have learned a ton at summit, but I still got something out of it on my sofa at night.

But, I will be at the next summit, I can't miss two in a row!!!

And @mrsfadeji, thanks for the sunshine award.  I will work on that next :-)