Shep's World

This summer I had my first real "crisis" as an educator.  After working 12 years at a high school teaching World History and 6 years teaching AP World History I was voluntold that I would be moving down to the middle school in order to teach American History with only a couple weeks left in the year.  As you can expect I was not exactly thrilled and my real crisis was that after 12 years I had become a little to content and way too comfortable doing what I had been doing for a long time. In retrospect I don't know that I had grown much as an educator in the last 4-5 years and was probably well on my way to the dreaded condition of teacher burnout. Where are you going with this you are probably wondering.  Well after the move was finalized I had to begin to reexamine the way that I taught my students (or perhaps reflect on the fact that I mostly taught AT my students) and it was in this moment that I realized this move was just the opportunity I needed to jump into

photo courtesy of:  http://www.lucidica.com/blog/how-to-guides/blogging-for-beginners/ I have a confession to make I never even considered blogging as a useful tool for education.  The idea of having my students surf the web endlessly searching for blogs filled with information from unvetted sources really intimidated me.  As I look back I am beginning to realize how wrong I was and in fact I followed blogs all the time and didn't realize it because I was following specific people based around a specific interest that I am on some level knowledgeable about.  I follow a man in Spain by the name of Arnaud Cousergue who is a high ranking shihan in my martial art.  I visited his blog all the time to pick up his insights on the martial arts and why I never bothered to even look towards individuals in my own profession now seems ridiculous at best or hubris at its worst. There is really no denying that the field of education is definitely in a major period of transformation.