Teaching – Becky Boer

My Classroom Non-Negotiables

July 21, 2018

In my last blog entry, I considered ways that my beliefs have changed since I started teaching back in 2004. There are a lot. And of course, that’s a good thing. If there ever comes a point in my career when I stop learning, growing, and changing, I need to leave the classroom. One of the things that seems particularly striking to me now is how much my beliefs have changed regarding lesson plans. During my student teaching, the second grade team that I worked with used a gridded ...

Teaching

No Longer a Teacher… But Still Very Much a Teacher

June 19, 2018

Yesterday, I remembered that I have an Edublogs account. In the summer of 2007, I was entering my third year of teaching, and started a blog to help me reflect on my teaching and improve as an educator. I maintained that blog for exactly 18 days before getting back into my classroom and promptly forgetting about it. Things have changed a lot for me since then. I now live in another country (O Canada!), for starters. I was a teacher for ten years before moving, and have essentially been a ...

Teaching

Blog Challenge Day 9: My 3 biggest accomplishments

August 1, 2016

Write about one of your biggest accomplishments in your teaching that no one knows about (or may not care). This is a hard post to write. Teachers don’t usually toot their own horns, y’know? We do what we do because of the output, not the input. Still, though, it’s important for every teacher to check in from time to time and reevaluate what he or she gets from the job. It’s a good way to recenter yourself. The three accomplishments I’m most proud of, after ten ...

Teaching

When Those Who Can Maybe Shouldn’t (How Negative Teachers Bring Us All Down)

July 20, 2016

I am tired of teachers who complain about their jobs. I get it. Being a teacher is really, really hard. It’s one of the few jobs where the better you are, the harder it is. After all, it’d be easy to be one of those teachers who just sits behind a desk all day while his or her kids do worksheets. Boring, maybe, but easy. It’s a lot harder when you’re invested in your kids, when you spend evenings making crafts and coming up with lessons, when you spend nights staring at your ceiling, not ...