Election Day 2008 – Planning for the Fall

In Illinois, it is hard to get away from politics. Tonight was President Bush’s final State of the Union address and in eight days, on February 5th, I will be participating in the primary during Super Tuesday. It is hard not to think about the upcoming campaign. During my weekly planning meeting with our Lower School Head (Lower School Principal), our agenda switched to continued planning for the upcoming 2008-2009 Academic Year. I mentioned that one of the items we needed to add to the list was what plans our 4th and 5th grade classes had for the upcoming fall […]

EduCon – A Great Conference I Need to Attend

When Chris Lehmann first announced the dates of EduCon last summer, I was disappointed by the fact that I would not be able to attend, since there were already two other activities that were on my calendar, the first was to accompany and coach our High School Science Olympiad team at the first event of the year and the second was the annual Northern Illinois Computer Educators (NICE) Mini-Conference. I was already torn by which I should attend and the addition of EduCon really made this more of a dilemma. As the year progressed and more events were added to […]

Multi-faceted Refractions – The Greatest Hits

Since I was on hiatus from blogging, I missed the 1st anniversary of my committing the the process of blogging. It has been an interesting journey.  Developing my inner voice has taken time to allow the style and rhythm to emerge. Like all creative artists, it is nice to look back and assemble a set of postings in a greatest hits package. Some of the selections were popular as decided by readership, some are selections which generated the greatest amount of conversation after the fact. And there are nuggets which the artist loves which may have gotten buried at the […]

The Importance of Sharing Our Passions

When someone asks me, “Why do you waste your time blogging? How do you know if anyone is reading what you are writing and if they really care?”, I was not sure that I always have a great answer. I know that the process of writing provides an opportunity for me to reflect and forge the fragments of thought into a solid idea. This is a process solely for me and not necessarily meant for others. While this may be helpful to others who are working through similar problems and projects to help shape their ideas and solutions for their […]

Looking Forward by Looking Back

Personally, for me, 2007 was a year full of professional and personal growth. I could not imagine today that I would have had the successes (and failures) that I did during the year. Just from sheer numbers, 115 post over the year meant that that on average, I wrote something once every three days. Even when you subtract the live blogging posts, this meant that I was reflecting and sharing at least once a week. I am amazed by this fact, as I have always found it difficult to write. Also, this practice is consistent with what we ask our […]