Human Voices Wake Us

Well, I’ve accepted a position as an assistant principal of an elementary school.  This is significant, to me, because I have spent all 15 years of my educational career working with high school students.  Now I’m going to the other end of the spectrum.  I think I’m delaying the hysteria by telling myself the following: my husband’s an elementary principal (but he doesn’t have that many words to use a day, so I don’t get a whole lot of information), my sister-in-law used to teach first grade (really lame), and I have boys at both ends of the elementary spectrum- 5 and 12.   I think my glimpse into hysteria came yesterday when my husband mentioned “cold lam,” and I had no idea what he was talking about.  (He used about 10 words to explain.) 

Truthfully, I’m very excited to start my new adventure with little ones.  I’ve been told by many that elementary teachers are very different from high school teachers.  (Concrete sequential vs random abstract)  Another weird thing is that my new school ( I love saying that) has about 22 teachers and the high school I came from had 120.  I think I’ll enjoy actually recognizing all the faces, though. 

I’ve informed my husband that I have to go shopping to #1 buy things for my office and #2 buy shoes without heels.   Yea field day!

One of my bosses suggested that I keep a chronicle of my first year, a “secondary person in an elementary world,” so this is how I’m going to do it.  I hope you enjoy my adventures, and, please, I’m open to any and all advice from those of you already living in Elementary Land. 

I don’t Twitter or do RSS feeds or anything else that updates me every minute.  I figure I don’t need to be a slave to that kind of immediate “look at me now!”  I know I would drop whatever I was doing and check out the latest.  And, yes, I’ve read the blogs about how great Twitter is and how the man Twittered he was arrested and had tons of people automatically working to get him free.  Seeing how I don’t plan on going to Egypt anytime soon, I figure I’m okay with a regular cell phone.  The thing is, I don’t want to be in touch 24/7.  I want to choose when I want to read my blogs or check my email.  (My husband gets email alerts on his cell phone, as I’m sure many do, and he is constantly looking at it when it buzzes.)   I use Bloglines. Whenever I feel like it or have a few extra minutes, I can check and see which of my favorite blogs have new posts.  I like the fact that I control that, not some electronic notification.  I love technology and all that it can do.  I’m in total support of all those tools.   Everyone should keep using them if they make people happy.  Frankly, I have enough stuff going on in my own life to need to know each minute what’s going on in yours.