Fair warning: there are a lot of parentheticals in here, because I’m basically cracking open my skull and writing it down. Apologies in advance.

I’m fully in the 3rd-year weird realm that is a combination of constant innovation to improve my teaching practices and reach students combined with the millionth-COVID-year teacher that is constantly innovating to deal with student absences/distraction/whatever, while at the same time trying to institute this fictional thing called a “work-life” balance. It’s…a mixed success. 

The constant push (internal and external) feels like that classic thing you hear about sharks: that they have to keep swimming, or they’ll die. In this case, I see science education Twitter (thanks to a great Alludo mission!) doing amazing things, and feel like I need to implement them because it’s PERFECT for my current unit and current students- which means late-night lab creation and early morning shopping. Or I see Nicole Padia find an amazing way to integrate stop-motion into her Physics class and realize it would be the *perfect* thing for my students to show their understanding of gases. Or I know that my students are going to struggle with the math part of this unit (because they do every year), so I feel like I need to rework it again to try to differentiate for different students to give a variety of access points. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love (carefully curated) EduTwitter, and my crew has made me a far better teacher than I was (shout-out to Differentiation Crew!). They have both also made me see millions of ways to that I need to (or maybe just can?) tweak or recreate things to help the students in front of me- which being the person I am, means I feel the need to make it perfect-adjacent now.

Here’s the example that Elizabeth subtly alluded to in her previous Alludo post (pun definitely intended): Our crew decided to focus on using small group instruction, so I decided to try doing a station rotation for a final unit review day for students.  The students had a variety of stations to rotate through: one for doing color-by-numbers using the unit skills, one for self-selected EdPuzzles, one for a game to practice skills, one for leveling-up practice questions (thanks again EduTwitter), and a final one to meet with me.  I grouped them into sets of 3-4 who had similar rubric scores and similar past struggles with concepts, because I figured that they would ask similar questions. When they got to my station, they were all able to receive instruction about the same level of concept at the same time, AND they were able to prepare questions based on having visited all of the other stations first! The students with the most struggle saw me last, so they had a chance to get help through EdPuzzles, try practice problems, and really hone in on where they were stuck. This was a fantastic way of combining all the differentiation concepts, EduTwitter ideas, gamification, and other amazing concepts, and I really felt like the students were able to get the help that they needed at the level and focus that it was needed; it was also a massive amount of work.  Yes, I’ll be able to use it again next year. And. This was only one class session, and there is literally no way I can put this level of preparation into every single class period and maintain any sort of sanity. 

I know that EduTwitter and EduFacebook is going to show the best things that people come up with, as with any other aspect of social media. I simultaneously wonder about what my students are missing out on if I don’t implement the different teaching strategies, which pushes me to keep swimming, always keep swimming. Frankly, I’m exhausted by the constant push (internal and external) to innovate as much as I’m excited by it, and I know I’m not the only one. While I’m trying to hold the line and generally not work at home, it’s simply not possible to not work at least one day on the weekend and some weeknights if I’m going to be able to roll out curriculum and labs that are thoughtfully designed and that account for a new bell schedule – I literally haven’t had the same bell schedule any of the years that I’ve taught here, which means that even if I were to simply reuse lecture material, it simply cannot be thrown up onto a screen, because it won’t fit the time block or end at a place that will leave the students less confused than when they walked in.

Then there are the other days, where I’m reminded by all of the same resources and people that sometimes ‘just keep swimming’ means something else entirely- a day for students to work on a project without specific programming, or maybe letting myself use something that’s worked ‘okay’ in the past without worrying about it incorporating all of the eduspeak things.  

I don’t have any interesting conclusion here – but I do think that I’m not alone in this. So how do you decide when it’s okay to ‘just keep swimming’? How do you reconcile the push to keep innovating with the need to preserve some sanity and sense of self?

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In an interesting twist, I found out that the ‘fact’ that sharks have to keep swimming or they will die is actually a MYTH for many sharks! How incredibly appropriate for this blog post. Even better: the reason that they don’t have this problem is that their cartilaginous structures don’t compress under pressure, so when they sink to the bottom they don’t get crushed like fish would. Instead, they can simply rest under the pressure, then wake up and rise up the water column when they are rested. If that’s not an amazing analogy for this entire thing, I don’t know what is.