The 20th of September

The other night I was watching a Ted Talk with Daniel Levitin: How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed.  About 6 minutes into the show he starts talking about the medical industry and how they prescribe medicines for people even when the odds of the drugs working well are slim.  The way he tells it a person is much more likely to get a side-effect from a medicine then to get better.  However, what he is trying to teach is that it is important to prepare for stressful situations because our brain doesn't always think clearly when we are stressed.  If we run through some of these scenarios that could happen before hand we are more apt to remember the right questions to ask.  He had a fancy term for it but it kind of boils down to what would future me do, think, ask?  These are slightly different than my daughter's query of how will future me feel?  It is something I should have asked myself before having a cupcake for dessert tonight.    

The reason I watched that particular Ted Talk is that I was looking for tricks for not stressing in the classroom.  There are certain things that I am saying that I feel could be worded different.  I also am not learning things as quickly as I would like to be able to help the students.  Having never made a blueprint I think I am doing OK but not as well as I would like in guiding the students.  I feel that I will get there, but I want to be there now.  There are still students that I am having a hard time remembering their names too.  Seriously working on that and calling them by name to help me remember.  

There is a competition going on between the 3 grades at the school to raise money for field trips.  Pennies are worth a penny, but every other denomination are worth negative their face value.  The 7th grade appears to be doing well with pennies but it is hard to tell.  I don't envy the people who will be counting it all.  My happy for today is that I remembered to bring in $8 worth of pennies today to help.  I may put more in before it ends on Friday, we'll see how it goes.  

 Sky... ignore the road.