Motivation comes from lots of different places. Today, I am motivated to look at my blog after I visited Dawn Hogue’s Polliwog Journal. I’m not going to get to it right away because I have an appointment I have to leave for, but some time today I will change my blog’s look and feel.
Motivation to be spending time on things other than planning and grading comes from the fact that I am on spring break this week. There is nothing more motivating to do extra work on school than having a few days away from regular school. As a first year teacher, I get so bombarded with all the state and district requirements, as well as the regular first year stuff like planning, management and grading, that I neglect time for things I’m interested in and want to spend time on. So now I can spend some time changing my blog, researching blogs and wikis in the classroom, listening to Dawn’s radio interviews, and preparing information to go to my administrators about 21st C literacy and how I want to take Clinton High School there.
Motivation, then, is both external and internal. External motivation for me comes from reading online sources, watching other English teachers’ steps in the cyberworld, and participating in the English teacher list-serv discussion. Internal motivation is my desire to bring my kids to a place they haven’t been brought before and where they need to be brought, which is why I’ll spend my spring break working on stuff for them (and a little bit of time on stuff for me).
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