COVID-19 Working From Home Day 1

COVID-19 Working From Home Day 1… It’s a lot quieter than the multipurpose room at Fitzgerald & I can wear sweats and no shoes and be perfectly “productive.” Here we go…

Video Fridays: The Many Smiles of Ms. Merz

It probably seems odd to non-educators that decisions for teaching positions for the following August/September have to be made six-months in advance, around the February/March time frame. But we’ve entered that time of year, just after the mid-point of the school year… and it can make the last ten weeks feel like a “goodbye tour.” Oddly personnel changes can also

More Job Search Fun… Or Not

I happened to see an open position at Apple, listed on my feed the other day via LinkedIn. This afternoon I was running into some difficulties setting up an interview within the district, so while I waited I tracked down the Apple lead… “Apple Professional Learning Specialist, Nevada.” That piqued my interest. I pulled down the info, opened a tab

Fitzgerald STEAM Lab Year 3 Debrief

Fitzgerald STEAM Lab Year 3 Debrief White board note: Don’t do content & new tech skills in the same lesson… It’s been about a month since I turned in my keys and got off this past school’s years challenging teaching treadmill. I’ve been very busy taking care of the very many of the things that got neglected over the past

Thoughts from the “Mountain” – My Kingdom for A Single Grade Level

Thoughts from the “Mountain” – My Kingdom for A Single Grade Level Is it a bad sign that after 18-years as a teacher in an ongoing series of “Specialist” positions that I’m thinking about the virtues of having a single grade level (aka, my own class)? It must be this cold/sore throat that I’m attempting to fight off… in my

The Next Chapter

Over the past couple weeks I haven’t posted all that much, except for tweets from my daily walks, because I’ve been quite busy pulling together resources to create my new, much needed, resume page/website. It took more than a few days to get over the initial shock of becoming just another government statistic. I love how life can change courses

Helpin’ a Brother Out

Recent events have reminded me of the John Lennon quote, “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” I came out to Florida in 2008 because it was an opportunity to put all the things I’d learned at that point into practice and to step up my potential teaching influence. Now I’ve been given another opportunity to consider

Incomplete Beings [short story group]

Intro: This week my short story group assignment was to write about a “real life” incident, so I re-edited a previous reflection from when I was beginning treatment for what would later be diagnosed as CIPD. Enjoy(?) April 13, 2012 8PM – Waiting for my MRI for a possible pinched nerve that’s interrupted my life and my sleep for over

Lightening the Load

This past week when I went into the office I left the ranks of the computer-backpack downtrodden. Over a year ago, back when I was ill, I had to carry everything in a bag because I needed both hands to support myself with my walker. It was bad enough to have to use a bag just to carry a water