I realise Stackers are a different breed. Other people will wanna get out of the rat race, but it seems that you guys don’t have that pronounced aversion towards work. Case in point: my rambling-style post about my perfect work day about 7500 sats.
Now that I have distilled the elements of a successful work day, I can explain to you more rigorously why today turned out to be perfect for me. Let me count the ways.
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high-impact: So I opened up my classroom. And three colleagues, including my Vice-principal came to observe my lesson. I’m actually not the kind who dreads being observed. I welcome it because this makes my lesson preparation more worthwhile. Like upping the V4V, you know
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fun + unorthdox: So, in order to expand my students’ emotional vocabulary for sadness, I showed them the word cline so that they could learn more difficult words associated with this emotion. Then I got them to choose one sad word; one student chose the word melancholic! Then, they were tasked to write about an incident that made them feel that particular sad word. The second part of my lesson involved getting them to practise empathy. So I asked all of them to stand up, move to the side of the classroom, and then go to a different seat so that they could read one of their classmate’s problems. It was the first time I tried rotational learning stations, so I think it worked out reasonably well.
-illuminating: I designed this lesson because I noticed that my students confuse the past tense for the present tense. Actually, some aspects took up more time than I expected - I naively thought that they would magically write everything in the past tense because my prompt was to write about an incident in the past tense. But some students still wrote in the present tense, so I got to correct their grammar. In fact, if I were to do this differently, I would have skipped the word cline and zeroed in on the past tense. But I can’t say that it was an unproductive lesson because I took away something valuable from it.
-learning a cool fact: My ex-colleague messaged to inform me that we can use AI within WhatsApp itself. Since I was the AI champion of my student, I duly informed the entire school staff of my newfound knowledge. It’s cool to spend each day accumulating more knowledge than the last
-decluttering: I had time to consolidate my waste papers and take them to the paper recycling machine. Granted that I only earned 5 cents for my Herculean effort, I’m glad to have the energy to carve out some time to work on my pursuit. Every $10 I earn would go towards funding my son’s college education haha.
So, through these two days, I have come up with a formula to describe my perfect work day:
personal learning + professional growth + white space + earning side money = beautiful workday