Burman Catch Up - Spring 2019

I have been pretty quiet on here lately! I have been eyeball deep in novels, dance company, and planning prom. Let me do a quick catch up and ride the wave of crazy schedules into the end of the school year.

26 days left for the seniors.

English 9:

Last week we did a small lesson on Poetry and Persuasion. It was a fun time and there were markers, and coffee involved, so many students were having a blast.

Animal Farm is consuming our energy as of late. We as a class were so lucky to have Mrs. Cocoanower in to help us understand communism and her time living in Romania. We are in chapter 3 of the novel and working on Propaganda! Next up we will be working on Narrative Voice in the novel.

Publications:

This class, they amaze me. We are now in our last deadline span! We have the final "Senior Edition" of The Comet coming out in a few weeks and we are working hard to get all the seniors spotlighted in our social media postings (and in life). The Retrospect (our yearbook) is coming along and will be finished early June! These 9 students are really working hard.

We still need senior pictures, baby pictures, and yearbook order forms (or just order here)!

English 11:

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once." - Charles Lamb.

Enter my favorite book of all time. To Kill a Mockingbird. Cue the tears people. I love this novel and the change is can have on someones heart. We are actually finishing the novel this week and starting to watch a documentary that highlights so many of the fictional themes, but in an actual case, The Scottsboro Boys.

Tiger Dance Company:

We did it! We had an amazing show and raised over $1000.00 for The Andrea Rizzo Foundation. I am so proud of this group. This year the dancers took on more leadership roles as I have my plate very full, and not once was I let down. 

From the choreography, costumes, and music - these dancers deserve way more than a quick post, but for now - this is the best I can do! Thank you for 5 months of dedication and heart. 

Until the next update, happy reading, dancing, and counting down.

Creature of Cadence

I thrive on schedules, even when they are so tight I feel like I don't have any "me" time. With weather and the newness of classes and students, my normal weekly game plan has been turned upside down.

How do you do when you are trying to find a rhythm, but there is not beat? Do you just go with the flow? Do you get tense and snap at people? I searched for help this weekend as I realized yet another week would be starting with eLearning.

I stumbled upon an article written by Elizabeth Grace Saunders in the Harvard Business Review, though the article was published in 2016, I needed to read it.

I think as we enter another week of "off schedules" take time to create a cadence, no matter what:

Weekly Cadence

Projects, meetings, and commitments can vary week to week, but it’s helpful to have a general sense of the weekly cadence that most supports your work. You can think about this in the same way you would a design template. It’s a format that you can then build and modify as necessary for any given project — in this case, your week.

After a great deal of experimentation, I’ve found my best weekly cadence includes the following:

• Include ramp-up time on Monday morning, so that the first few hours of the week are blocked out for weekly planning and processing after the weekend.
• Schedule focused project time on Wednesday afternoons. I work on smaller items throughout the week but when I need to focus on a large project, like a new book proposal, it works best for me to block out a whole afternoon free from meetings. That way I can go to a coffee shop and get quality, uninterrupted work done. This turns moving a major initiative forward into something that feels like a nice mid-week mini-break from the normal day-to-day.
• Wind down on Friday afternoons. I block out about three hours to wrap up anything that took longer than I anticipated or to work on non urgent administrative tasks that are nice to get done before closing up for the weekend.
• At least one weekday evening, accomplish personal to-do items and recharge. I’m super social, but even extroverts need a day off.

I can, of course, adapt, adjust, and amend all of this as necessary. But this rhythm is what I prefer, and I find it leads to an extremely satisfying week with closure before the weekend.

eLearning - GIFs

As part of my Publications eLearning assignment, I asked for a gif representing what they were actually doing the rest of the day.

Enjoy the following representations of an eLearning Day through the eyes of a high schooler. I laughed so hard and I would urge teachers to get the students to do fun things on their days away from the classroom.