Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Developing

Part of being a teacher is obtaining professional development hours. We're supposed to have at least 24 hours each school year. These are hours outside of the normal school day in which we attend various sessions in order to better ourselves as teachers. Like most things (for example, communism), it's a good idea in theory. But at the end of the day 24 is a lot of hours.

At the beginning of the current school year, I signed up for a series of professional development activities designed specifically for world language teachers. There were supposed to be 2 or 3 full day sessions in which we would collaborate with other world language teachers. Well, we ended up having one of the sessions and then somebody dropped the ball or something. This would've been the bulk of my PD hours for the year. But instead, I found myself up PD creek this semester in desperate need of hours.

This results in me signing up for every available PD course offered by the district; whether the topic applies to me or not. I've sat through quite a few sessions that were very interesting (and others that were not remotely interesting, let's be honest) but there was no practical application for me as an elementary Spanish teacher.

So in practice, the concept of earning these professional development hours is tricky. I currently have 19.5 hours. After today, 20.5. I'm slowly creeping towards the requirement.

That's not a particularly interesting topic, but I'm killing time here and have felt like a lazy blogger as of late. I am proud to say that my student quotes blog is coming along quite nicely.

I'll be closing with a random thought. The other day I determined that there has to be a section of hell in which you're just trapped behind a slow moving vehicle on a tiny two lane road and it's impossible to pass them. I know when I'm in that situation, it's hard to imagine anything else.

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