A Long Overdue Post

I had hoped to keep a journal of sorts of my experiences as a teacher at a Charlotte Mason school. However, my experiences at that school have thus far prevented me from beginning that journal. To say that I am busy has been an understatement. This has been hard work, but the reason it has been so hard is because I am only now being exposed to so much of the rich curriculum. I had never read Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, which is a fantastically rich book, filled with humor, adventure, and wonderful ideas.

Days fly by. There is no "down time." Everything that is done is worthwhile, so much so that there sometimes seems like there aren't enough minutes in a day. Fellow teachers will know what I'm talking about when I say that the "transitionary periods" can normally eat up all kinds of time in a classroom. Those periods barely exist at this school. They can't. We need every minute of every day. So, while in my previous teaching jobs, the process of getting out textbooks could take 5-7 minutes between students who don't pay attention, the slowness of movement, stopping the chatting between classmates across desks, and answering the same question 9 or 10 times, our transitions cannot take that long. We don't do "busywork", another staple of most teaching experiences. No worksheets. No videos. No "research" projects where kids sit at computers and "sort of" look up information about topics. Every minute is valuable, and is treated that way.

More later.