This year I am even more determined to move and teach abroad than last year.  Last year and this I have been applying to jobs and contacting recruiters, getting letters of recommendation and updating my CV.  However, this year I am determined to focus on everything I need to do to prepare, especially getting rid of a house full of stuff.  Like many people, the less clutter that I have around me the more focused and happier I feel, the easier it is to find things and focus on the important stuff in life.  

On Christmas Eve, I read many inspirational blogs and a magazine article about people living a minimalist lifestyle.  Two days later I got started.  Here are the strategies I followed:

Sometimes, I can be a bit of a perfectionist.  I want things to be aesthetically pleasing, neat, error-free, etc.  But I also struggle to have a life outside of my job, as many teachers, especially elementary teachers, do.  So, I look for models of exceptional teachers who instead of taking painstaking hours to create class books or classroom displays, hammer out the many projects that I dream of doing.  Why don't I find the time for all the projects I want to do in my classroom?  Probably, I waste my time striving for perfection on just a few projects.  

This is a thought provoking and entertaining piece by, Sir Ken Robinson. I'd love to know peoples reactions and thoughts, so please comment. Thank you!

Sept. 24, 2010: UTLA welcomes education scholar Diane Ravitch

From: http://www.utla.net/ravitchspeech

Below is a video of nationally renowned education expert Diane Ravitch speaking to UTLA members and interested members of the the education community on September 24, 2010.

NOTE: This is the entire speech, so the video may take a few minutes to load.

(If unable to see the video, please upgrade to the the latest flash player)

From: http://www.ted.com Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

  In many classrooms, there are never enough materials to do our job.  So we teachers go to the library -school and public, we borrow from other teachers or our home and we especially create materials.  Unfortunately, teacher created materials take a lot of time.  To lead a balanced life, teachers must work to become more and more efficient without lowering the quality of our instruction.

There are so many terrific books and therefor so many terrific read alouds.  Most of them, with a little ingenuity, can be used for various comprehension think-alouds, turn 'n talks, stop 'n jots or stop 'n acts.  What can be tricky is when you're trying to find a book for a particular comprehension strategy.  For example, if I want to do a reading workshop unit on making connections because my 1st graders have a limited understand of it, or because I want my 5th graders to go deeper into activating their background knowledge and making text-to-text and text-to-world connections that matter, then I need to find books that allow me to model the strategy through a think-aloud AND allow my students to access the material, find relevance and make thei

For literacy, I love this school district site: www.wrsd.net/literacy 

On this site, I find scripted mini-lessons for those really important lessons and a year-long calendar of readers workshop minilessons which contains the meat of a teaching objective.  Go to the left-hand side of the page and hover over Elementary Curriculum, then look at both the focus lessons, which are scripted, and the unit trajectories, or curriculum maps. 

I graduated college a year ago and have been looking for a teaching job ever since.  Right now I tutor and substitute teach.  I also have been on a few interviews but it always seems to go to people with more experience then myself.  I live in the LA area which is a tough place to find a teaching job with all the layoffs.  Does anyone have any tips or know of any websites in which to make me a more successful candidate?