OK, this is it, I have finally achieved the academic and personal life equivalent of "vapor lock". I have so much running around in my head right now from my practicum, from trying to develop some lesson plans for a unit that was supposed to take a month, and must now be two weeks, projects from students that have not been graded, my other UC course, HIOL 531, that I am in such a state that I feel that I can get nothing done. Zilch. Nada. Null set. (Oh, did I mention that I have a formal observation tomorrow from my principal?) There are simply not enough hours in a day. I think in the last two weeks I have spent a total of two hours with my family in the living room enjoying a show together. Forget about anything more than that. What does that have to do with anything? A lot actually. Don't tell me that this situation will not affect the quality of my instruction. It will!

Don't tell me to step back and take a deep breath, I've done that. Here's the solution though:

- Tomorrow, call UC and tell them I am withdrawing from HIOL 531. I refuse to turn in slipshod work to Dr. Wake. I enjoy the course too much, and love the subject too much to do that. I owe him, and those from the past that cannot speak for themselves that much.
- Step back and just do the best I can on my practicum. Without HIOL 531 hanging over my head, I should be able to concentrate more effort on EDOL 699. Dr. Gibson can't kill me and eat me, it's against the law. :) (She wouldn't like it anyway, I'm too old and tough.)
- Just do my best tomorrow during my observation. If I fall flat, I just do. The good Lord has seen me through this far, I don't think he'll drop me in the ditch just yet. Hopefully not.

OK, back to teaching. Sometimes you find inspiration in the oddest places. Well, not really odd. I was having a tremendous problem this weekend coming up with something to do with my kids on my unit on Europe. With only two weeks, neither they nor I are real happy with the speed, and the lack of depth of the material. I spent almost 6 hours at school looking at things, soul-searching, walking around outside and inside the building asking the teachers that were still hanging around for inspiration. (My school is haunted, I've experienced it first-hand.) I walk in the door to the house, feeling pretty dejected, and see my wife grading some papers from her 7th grade reading class, found poems. Eureka! That's it! Everything I was looking for! It has student choice (they will get to pick the region/country in Europe they do theirs on), depth (they will have to read the relevant section quite closely), and they will have to pick out the main idea. The really big point I wanted to make from all of this though is this: try to think outside of the box when it comes to your curriculum. Just because you might be a math teacher does not mean you cannot use proven methods from reading/LA, social studies, etc. With my teaching social studies, it is a little easier to do this, since Social Studies is the mother of all academic disciplines. :p