Inspire and be inspired

Most of the teachers I work with daily would tell you that I am passionate about math. Some might even say I'm a little too passionate at times! The irony of my career never escapes me. I had a horrible experience in high school with math and avoided certain majors in college because of my lack of confidence in math.  Alas, I decided to major in education and my focus was English. Yes, the Director of Mathematics was an English major. My second year of teaching, I fell in love with teaching math and I give full credit to my best friend and colleague at the time, Terri Guajardo, and to Dr. Charles Geer, a former professor at Texas Tech University. By the time I left the classroom in 2003, my goal was to inspire teachers to be passionate about math and to inspire their students to love math so it would never be a barrier for them the way it was for me.

Seven years ago my career led me to Castleberry and when I think about how far we have come in mathematics, I'm like a proud parent boasting about the accomplishments of his/her child. The teachers and students inspire me daily and I am always thinking of ways to improve the teaching and learning of math. Occasionally, I am referred to as a "nerd". In fact, Shannon Shea called me a nerd yesterday for my excitement over part-whole cards and how they will help our students learn number combinations. :)  Yep, happy to be one!

A year ago, our leadership team embarked on a journey to become digital leaders. We learned to tweet, curate, pin, backchannel, scoop, etc. Although we all started strong at the beginning of the year infusing technology into our meetings, professional development, etc. to model the infusion of technology for teachers, the pressures of our jobs prevailed and many of us stopped tweeting, pinning, curating, and modeling the infusion of technology during the course of the year. This morning, the leadership team came together to candidly reflect on this year and look ahead to the coming year, as well as learn about some new technology tools. Honestly, I was not too excited about attending the training this morning with all the things we have going on right now, but I have to say that by the end of the training, I was once again....inspired.