Hello, world!

Evening, y'all!

Welcome to my corner of the internet, where I plan to write as much as I can over the next school year about the ups, downs, and in-betweens of my first year of teaching.

You can learn a bit about me in the 'About Me" page up top, but to give you a quick summary: I just earned my Master of Teaching in Elementary Education from a school on the East Coast, and am going to be teaching third grade in a large school district on the same coast. I'm writing this blog under a pseudonym in order to keep my personal and professional lives separate, but everything I write here will be as true to my experience as I can keep it (no student, parent, teacher, principal, or school names will be used, though, because that's not cool in my book).

My hope for this blog is to serve a couple of purposes. First, I love to write, and while I will certainly write in a journal about teaching (thoughts for myself, you know?), I also want to carve out a space online to share with others going through the same year. Second, I want to be super-clear: this is not a crafty blog. I was born without the Creative/DIY Gene, and that's just how it is. If you are looking for blogs on how to create a gorgeous bulletin board, 79 Things to Do With Carpet Squares, or free downloads of well-drawn flipbooks on the life cycle of amphibians, I am not your girl. But you should share those blogs with me, since I need ideas. I want to write about the things that happen in my first year that teach me lessons - if a lesson backfires horribly, I want to focus on what that can teach me. If the lesson goes fabulously, same deal. One of the things my mentor in student teaching told me was that every day holds valuable lessons for a teacher - at any point in her (or his) career. With that wisdom in mind, I want to approach this year reflectively - and hopefully use that reflection to prevent myself from feeling like a colossal failure (because, let's be honest, there will be days and weeks where it all goes awry and I do a lot of panicking).

Right now, I'm about a month out from starting school - the kids come back after Labor Day. Next week, I'm going in to sign my contract (I need to use a PC for that and I only have a Mac and really, I feel like perhaps there is some grant waiting to be written to make school tech compatible with all computers), then I have a day-long PD event at my school. I am not sure what the PD is focusing on, but I know it matters to my principal (after all, she specifically arranged for it) - and really, I'm desperate to meet people! I know there will be a lot of new teachers at this school, and I'd love to meet them. And I want to get a feel for the veteran teachers - and perhaps find someone who will be a good shoulder to lean on from time to time. At the moment, there are a lot of unknowns (I'll write about them later), and I'm trying to remember that the unknowns aren't bad - they're just out of my control at the moment, and that's okay.

Before I sign off - I want to encourage y'all to make your voices known - comment, sign up for posts via email (little box off to the right), follow me on Bloglovin' (icon coming soon), and give me feedback. If you're a newbie like me, say hi - and if you're in your 30th year of teaching and have advice, OMG please say hi.

In short: let's do this.

xoxo
Miss Zee