I usually try to avoid making New Year's resolutions. Like most people, they really don't work for me and since this blog has more of a professional focus I really don't want to list a bunch of things that I may or may not actually be able to follow through on. And being on the school/acadademic calendar since I was five, I never really view January as the start of the year.
Despite all of this, here are few fun resolutions for my life as a principal.
1. Finish my dissertation in the 2009 calendar year. Ok, maybe not so fun but I really have to get this done. I have been able to work on it some during winter break this year and it feels good to be doing that. Finding the time once the school year gets going again will be tough but I will apprise you all of my adventures with time management.
2. Get the children's garden and hiking trail going at my school. I should not describe these things as solely my responsibility because they certainly are not but I am a big fan of the good old great outdoors. I have skimmed the book about Nature Deficit Disorder ( I am capitalizing it because I will pretend that we can really diagnose people with this illness) and kids need to be outdoor more, in the woods, planting stuff, etc. We have made some headway on this already this school year and we hope to make more.
3. For my next resolution, I am not sure how to describe it exactly. For a professional development day earlier this school year, we had Steven Levy of Starting from Scratch and Expeditionary Learning fame speak to all of the elementary schools. Anyway, I won't get into his presentation that much except for one thing. He talked about how he sang every day with his class and how it built community. With our implementation of Responsive Classroom this year, there is more community building type activities and in a few classrooms more singing. We need to do more with singing because the kids seem to absolutely love it. And I am not talking about music class, I am talking in homeroom morning meetings. It brings me to a This I Believe link on NPR in which Brian Eno (awesome music producer) discusses his belief in communal singing.
4. I need to bring technology more into my professional life and the lives of our students. I will post more about this one later.
Those are all of my resolutions for right now.
Ok, one more.
More visuals in this blog!
Happy New Year-I have enjoyed reading your most recent posts.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip on Dangerously Irrelevant.
Way to keep things real-it is refreshing to read about a leader who values the importance of singing in the classroom, reminds us all of what is the real work of teachers, and is continuously dedicated to improving the quality of public education.
I look forward to future posts, and seeing what gets accomplished in 2009.
Probably not much I can do to help you with that first (or last) resolution, but I'm on board to help with the reduction of nature, singing, and technology deficits at Greer.
ReplyDelete