Fellows!

As things have been extremely busy lately, I haven't had much time to update you guys on the teaching part of my Fellows experience. Recently we passed the "quarter" mark. Grades were tallied, report cards were distributed, and the year is officially 25 percent over. I know that it's going quickly, but how quickly is difficult to grasp sometimes.

Two weeks ago I had my very first set of parent-teacher conferences. It was nerve-wracking, over-whelming, and in the end, a good experience. As with everything in education I spoke with people whose feelings fell on both ends of the spectrum, but overall, was blessed with a number of fantastic, supportive, parents who are definitely on my team. I can't tell you how happy I was for that to be over though!

With that said, we are forging ahead into second quarter (we're actually two weeks in already). My juniors are in the midst of their third writing assignment of the year, my sophomores are wrapping up their novel, Night, and my freshmen are forging their way through To Kill a Mockingbird.

As for the student side of Fellows, I've been swamped. We are all enrolled in a number of classes (I am in six right now) whose due dates vary from weekly to monthly. I just nailed down my action research topic, which is pretty exciting! As Fellows we conduct an action research project starting in January and going through May. I've decided on the following question:
What happens to student engagement when additional resources such as articles, maps, videos, photographs, and more, are used to support classroom texts?
This is a topic I'm really interested in, so I'm excited to see where it goes!

Other than that, it's day-by-day. I'm busy, but I know in the end it will be worth all of the stress and long days!