Welcome to Platform 9 and 3/4!*

Why...helllloooo blogging world!

This is my debut entrance to the blogging scene--short time follower, first time blogger. I'm about to enter my 2nd year of teaching on Chicago's Southwest side teaching 5th grade.

I started following a handful of teacher websites in Spring 2012 and have been itching to get started. What better time than the present?! Well, that mixed in with the lack minimal number of nighttime activities to do in Ann Arbor, Mi where I currently am attending a math conference.

You read right. M-a-t-h Conference. (More on that soon.) While attending this conference, I got reminded of a piece of advice I received from a former teacher. "It's not magic." That is to say, teaching isn't magic. (*Gold star for you if you were wondering why the title of this post doesn't actually make sense.)

Often times when first-year teachers watch a veteran teacher run a classroom, our jaws often fall to the floor while our hands go numb from writing or typing to jot down exactly "word for word" the veteran teacher said so that one day, in our future classroom, we can repeat it and expect for the same results. Will that happen? 99.5% of the time it probably won't.

Yet, what novice teachers (and even outsiders) sometimes fail to see is that while teaching seems like magic--with everything falling into place (somewhat like the orchestration of a symphony)--it really isn't.

Teaching is...

• an intense amount of preparation 
• creating, cutting, stapling, alphabetizing, ordering, grouping, analyzing--pretty much any word that ends with -ing, teachers do
• hours and hours of time scrutinizing minute details of which student to pair into which group, how to arrange the desks, labeling books, etc.
• a willingness to stay late after school to just work on "on more thing" before leaving in order to be "prepared" for the next day
• dedication

Five bullets doesn't even BEGIN to scratch the surface. But that's what blogs are for.

I'm hoping to capture a behind the scenes insight for what teachers -- specifically a 2nd year teacher in Chicago Public Schools -- do in order to make it visible that a well-run classroom doesn't just happen with magic, but actually entails quite a bit of elbow grease.

Hope you tag along and see if I gain any of Hermoine's talents this school year. 
- Kimberly