The Posts Unblogged & A Life Less Ordinary

These are strange days. Despite everything that is happening in the world, we remain optimistic and thankful. With the world changing around us (and my own roles shifting, again), it has been hard to open the WordPress and just write. It has been ages since I last posted, and life is rushing forwards.

I’m nearing the end of two weeks’  It’s now three weeks since I got home from two weeks of isolated quarantine, alone in a hotel in Beijing. Super thankful that the family could do their quarantine at home, I had lofty goals of finishing up some old drafts and notes. But the laptop represents work: posting and creating slips aside in the need for balance.

So this is a post about the posts unblogged. To do them justice is more research and drafting than I can spare time or cognitive load for. Maybe the collection of titles tells its own story. Some would have been useful, to someone, about the time I was planning to write them. Maybe. Now I’m purging them to clear some head-space. More to come.

• LibGuides are awesome. Your teacher-librarians know that. Do you know them?
• The long tail of a painful burnout. Moving on and getting my mojo back.
• Back in the game: picking up the MYPCo mantle once more.
• On two seasons of coaching for Creating Cultures of Thinking online.
• “Crossing the Bridge” (MS-HS) through the ATL’s – a work in progress.
• Little fires, always burning.
• Mythologizing the past.
• Changing roles (again): Dir. Innovation in Learning & Teaching.
• Continuous Partial Attention*: learning to prioritize, prioritizing learning.

*read Nadine’s post.

………..o0O0o………..

A Life Less Ordinary

As the campus closure kicked in over Chinese New Year, with very little notice, and people scattered worldwide, we needed to get online and ready to keep teaching and learning. We thought it would be short, until it wasn’t. We will be finishing the year this way.

If you want to see some of what we’ve been up to over the last few months, visit WAB’s Online Learning Portal here: www.wab.edu/online-learning.

A personal impact of this was the need to pick up next year’s role (Dir. Innovation in Learning and Teaching) on top of this year’s (MYP Coordinator, Curriculum Coach, Teacher), as well as some tech leadership as we got over the first couple of months. Two huge jobs (plus), with a lot of responsibility, uncertainty, no transition, displaced and parenting has been a challenge. I’d say this remains the hardest thing we’ve had to do professionally and personally during my career, but lessons learned from hard yards previous have been invaluable.

I’m thankful for all our colleagues and friends who have really stepped-up as educators and humans, keeping learning going and spirits up. I’m thankful for the way the school has looked after all of us; we feel safe and secure, despite the difficulties.

Most of all, I’m thankful for my family. They’ve been troopers throughout this. Even though it has had emotional moments, it could have been so much worse.

I wonder how we’ll remember this time when they’re grown up.