Are You Burned Out? - What To Do Now By Myesha Mebane, Science Department Chair at Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School It’s May and you may be experiencing “Burn Out”, what do you do now? It is too late to consider what you could have done to prevent burn out in the first place. What do you do? Symptoms of Burn Out You are exhausted. Your energy level is low and it is apparent because everyone says that you look terrible. You have pushed your professional clothing to the back of your closet and thought about wearing those Saturday sweats on casual Friday. Your tolerance for having to repeat your classroom expectations and your patience with the little noises and frequent giggles is gone and you have resulted to referrals to the office. Every single day you think about calling in sick because you know you need a mental health day. 10 ways to get you through the last few weeks of school There are a lot of things that you can do to make sure that you don’t cras...
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By Sandra Woodard, RAFT Membership & Green Room Associate St. Patrick’s Day has been celebrated in Ireland for over 1,000 years, but it was mostly a religious celebration of the Saint’s life and deeds. Today, many people of Irish ancestry in the U.S., and many others who consider themselves “Irish for the Day” spend March 17 th each year wearing green, watching parades and otherwise participating in this celebration of all things Irish. St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, brought Christianity to Ireland in about the early 5 th century. Patrick was from a wealthy family which lived in Roman Britain. He was brought to Ireland as a slave at about age 16. Having spent about half dozen years there he finally made his way to freedom, eventually entered the Church of Rome, and was sent to Ireland as a bishop. There, he is credited with performing many baptisms, and converting people to the Catholic Church. St. Patrick ...
By Amanda Amburgey M.A, Maker Science Teacher, Bulldog Tech What is going on in this classroom? There are kids everywhere excitedly making, testing, remaking, retesting, hot gluing, hammering, there is so much duct tape! This is what engineering looks like in a middle school science class. This is excited, meaningful learning. How did I get to this place where I feel comfortable facilitating such an active engineering process with my classes? As a science teacher I have had practice with hands on, inquiry based labs, technology and math makes their way into those labs easily. But, engineering had me stumped. How was I going to be an effective engineering teacher as required with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) when I knew so little about engineering? This is where RAFT and their STEM workshops really saved me and gave me the courage to start engineering projects. I started with a somewhat common misc...
By Jeanne Lazzarini, RAFT Math Educator/R&D Specialist - Published in CMC ComMuniCator, Volume 40, Number 4