Brief Shift in Focus

 WELCOME BACK!

It has been nearly 2 weeks since I last updated everyone on what is going on and my oh my life is still busy as ever...

Books

In the last 2 weeks I have put a small dent in my book list (3/28 read and 1 on the go). These books have been insightful and quite good reads. Of the 3 that I have read the best laid out one had to be The Millionaire Next Door by Tom Stanley. As a whole it is well written, flows nicely and one feature that I really liked was that you could read any chapter in any order because they were stand alone for the most part. Reading it in sequence the first time through is definitely beneficial but to go back to certain chapters you did not need background knowledge to capture the picture the author was painting. 

School

The last 2 weeks have been quite a hand full for classes. For context if you are just joining the feed, I am in Teachers College currently. Most of my classes want us to complete entire unit plans with a variety of lessons and resources. The time it takes to build there tend to be a couple hours but to ensure they are uniform and flow nicely take significant thought and revisions. The most recent unit I have been working on is my grade 10 academic science: physics. I have not taken any physics that is not related to human anatomy and exercise physiology since grade 10. It has been a lot of searching. Thankfully it is slowly coming to a close and I can begin focusing on my own personal goals once again.

Teaching Preparations

I have been in a little bit of a slump as of recent with school. It is that time of the year where it feels tedious and pointless. I like to be mentally stimulated and the continuous repetition of the same content is starting to be challenging. In this mind set it is hard for me to be productive. By reflecting on this I have decided to start preparing for when I am out of teachers college and bein to teach on my own. Many teachers I have talked to that are new and veterans have said the first couple years are the hardest because you are making all of your lesson plans while settling into the new role. Knowing this I have sorted through all of the content that I can possibly teach based on the credentials I will have after finishing teachers collage and begun to make unit plans and lesson plans for myself.

It is only the beginning but I have all of my files organized and begun with my grade 10 science curriculum since I have already started the physics unit. It is nice that I can use the same outlines for all of my lesson plans and just need to fill in the information. I have started to work on creating a hand full of slide shows and to be completely honest the first couple were rough. They were boring and ugly. I started to play around with the format and much like video creation they are starting to be more appealing and engaging.

I have gave myself a time line and I am hoping to complete all of the grade 10 academic science curriculum, lessons, and outlines by end of April. Additionally, I plan to get a wide variety of games, sports and other resources organized for my physical education open classes as well.

Coaching

Coaching has been on the back burner other than working with the hand full of athletes that I now have. It is an exciting time because I am helping one to prep for a mock meet coming up in 2 weeks. We have been working together for the last couple months and it is nice to see his numbers steadily climbing. We hope to have a strong performance in our mock meet and begin the next phase of training with some updated one rep maxes.