After a complicated family event yesterday, I forgot an important meeting this morning. Following my usual routine, I forgot to check the calendar. If you had spent the day with me yesterday, you would not be surprised that I forgot the meeting as it was a day of multiple unexpected twists and turns.
My shared teaching team planned the meeting together. We readied the documents and set the time. The building administrator planned to be there too. When I entered the building this morning, I saw my team leaving the meeting and that's when I remembered. "Oh no," I responded.
They answered, "No problem at all, we covered your part."
"Thank you so much," I said, "I am so grateful."
All year we've been working at our new shared model of teaching. The teachers on the team have been an incredible source of learning and support, and together, I believe we've been able to teach in ways that none of us could have achieved in the one-teacher-one-classroom model as it takes a team to teach almost 70 fifth graders well.
The intersection of our personal lives and teaching lives is a fine weave, one that we have to attend to carefully. For the most part, I attend to personal matters outside of the school day, but every so often, such as yesterday's event, home life trickles into school life, and much more often, school life trickles into home life too.
Working together as a team to support one another can enhance the home-school weave in ways that benefit both our efforts at school and our lives at home. So I write at this break to acknowledge my gratitude to the team today, and my commitment to continuing this team teaching approach with the best that I have to offer. Onward.
