A Bit About Me

Welcome to Teachers At Risk. OK, I’ll admit the name Teachers At Risk is kind of a strange name for a blog. It’s not really up-beat or cool. I’ll be the first to admit that. But, you know it’s really appropriate. I got the idea for that name Teachers At Risk from my son, Chris, who said to me one day , “Mom, your always talking about students who are at risk and all the things you do to try to help them. What about the teachers? Teachers are at risk too. I don’t hear anyone talking about teachers at-risk. What’s being done for them?” Good question I thought.

Part of my job as a special education teacher is to support students and their teachers by sharing any strategies and insights that I’m aware of that will help teachers help students. I was fortunate enough to have wonderful mentors early in my teaching career, and it made all the difference. I still love teaching (well, maybe not the paper work part of teaching) after more than twenty years in the classroom working with teenagers who are troubled, troublesome and troubling.

I’ve had some wonderfully interesting and challenging teaching assignments. I’ve taught teenagers in jail, in an open custody situation , in a vocational school, in regular public high schools and in a private school. I’ve learned a lot from my students and other teachers, and I want to share the insights and strategies that have earned me a Teacher of Distinction award. I want to mentor other teachers. So with moral support from my husband, Kurt, and technical support from our two children, Lisa and Chris who are just soooooo computer savvy, I became a blogger and Teachers At Risk was born at the beginning of August 2006.

The past three years or so has been absolutely amazing. Readers are so encouraging and generous with their support. It’s one thing for family to say well done-I mean they’re family after all and you kind of expect some moral support from them, but when people you don’t know give you positive feed back and encouragement that’s a different thing.

There were lots of exciting moments in the last three years. Here are some

The very first comment I got for my very first post was exciting. – thanks Jason.

When Google Analytics told me that I had 100 977 visits a year from readers in 102 countries. My husband Kurt and I had lots of fun looking at the map of the world to see where everyone came from.

When David Synder at The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development gave Teachers At Risk a favourable review. That was exciting, too. I’ve gone to their conferences many times and bought many of their publications. I really respect ASCD. It’s one thing for family and friends to say that your doing a good job, but when ASCD says that well… ASCD also published a short piece I wrote about differentiating homework.

Getting emails from readers during the last two years was pretty exciting too, especially the one from Sage Publishing saying that they wanted to purchase two of my articles from my blog to put into a textbook for preservice teachers. What a wonderful way to mentor teachers.

It was great to be able to share all the cool stuff I’ve learned about the technical aspects of blogging and other digital technology with some of my colleagues at school. I don’t expect everyone to be as excited about the whole thing as I am. But, it’s nice to see the interest growing.

Another exciting offshoot of Teachers At risk was my class blog. I thought that since my students practically live in the digital world with text messaging, face book, MSN and what not that I could bring the classroom to them through digital technology so I stated a class blog and the kids loved it. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done to engage and motivate my students. I’m really looking forward to the new school year.
Becoming part of an on-line community that shares with and supports one another is also exciting.
Being nominated for Edublog’s Best Individual Blog for 2008

After rereading the part above about the exciting moments, I was thinking maybe I’ve over used the word exciting. But, then I decided I hadn’t . It was exciting. What can I say.

Dislcaimer

These are my personal views and not those of my employer.
Search for:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Archives