I have been working for about a month now on redesigning So You Want To Teach? I want to make it even more reader friendly. I’m excited about the changes that will be coming this week. In fact, the redesigned site has now made its debut! If you’re reading in a RSS reader, come check it out. Let me know what you think.

Wow, look at the colors!
I have changed the color scheme and the heading graphic a little bit. The goal is to add some more color and make the site more inviting and more reminiscent of actually teaching children.

Why is there a question mark next to my comment?
Because you haven’t set up a…

This blog has brought some exciting and unexpected things into my life. In this article, I’ll discuss some of the biggest surprises that have come about as a result of this.

A brief background
It was about a year ago that I first began to really get into blogging. I knew of blogs and actually had a few on livejournal and myspace for a few years. I was vaguely aware of RSS back in 2002 when it first came on the scene and began to gain some popularity. I just had never really gotten into the whole blogging thing.

I began reading blogs some and started learning. I was inspired. But I still never ventured into the “edublogosphere.” In…

In continuing my review of the year, I am looking today at some of the articles that I wish were more popular. They may have received a handful of comments, or they may not have received any. The most common cause for their relative obscurity is that they are older articles and have gotten lost.

Even so, many of them haven’t received a whole lot of traffic. So I’m dusting them off, polishing them up, and repackaging them here.

A dozen overlooked articles of 2007

1. A Customer Service Oriented Classroom Experience February 24th, 2007
2. Be The Best Teacher In The World May 19th, 2007
3. Reading May 29th, 2007
4. Finding Excellent Educators To Emulate June 5th, 2007
5. Where Have All

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On Sunday, we looked back at some of The Loneliest Articles of 2007, today, we’ll go to the other extreme and look at the busiest articles of 2007. These are the articles that generated the most comments. I’ve gone through the articles and found those that received the most comments. After boiling down that list, I have come up with the 15 most commented articles.

1. 148th Carnival of Education December 5th, 2007 (9 comments by 9 authors, 4 trackbacks) (13)
2. The State of the Blog: 08/01/07 August 1st, 2007 (11 comments by 11 authors) (11)
3. 5 Surefire Tips For Handling Misbehavior September 12th, 2007 (8 comments by 7 authors) (7)
4. The Purpose Of A Personal Mission Statement July 26th,

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This is a guest post by Pamela, who doesn’t currently have her own blog. Pamela teaches elementary in Michigan.

Ideas for organizing your subcategories
In part 1 of this series, I talked about the shortcomings of traditional to-do lists and the increased productivity that results from using a to-do schedule. With a to-do schedule, your list is organized by day, and each day is broken down into subcategories. The schedule makes it easy to plan ahead, since you have a list for each of the next 7-10 days. Today we’ll talk about some of the subcategories you might use for your daily lists.

One way to organize your day is by using time of day categories

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In the Christmas break, I am looking back at this blog’s growth and development. I began writing a little bit for the blog in February, but didn’t officially launch it for real until June. Since that time, growth has been pretty consistent. I now seem to regularly get a small number of comments for every article I write, with some eliciting more than others. As I look through the blog’s archive, it strikes me that there are some articles that have either been buried deep in the archives, or for whatever reason, have gone unnoticed by my readers.

So I am giving all of those articles a chance to redeem themselves, come up to the light of day. Here is…

In this article, I’ll revisit 10 of my 25 Tips For Less Stress that I have found to be most helpful for me over the last two weeks or exponentially heightened stress.

Christmas is coming, and with is seems to be incredible stress for a lot of people. Perhaps it’s because I am not married and have no children, but Christmastime has never brought a lot of stress into my life by itself. Health concerns have, however, brought about some immense stress into my life a couple of times in December.

My college had a two semester student teaching process (one semester of extended observation, and one semester of down and dirty residency). I was fortunate enough to be able…

I don’t normally do these kinds of things, but this week has been far from normal! I was tagged by Carol to share 7 random things. It goes something like this:

The rules are:

- Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
– Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
– Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
– Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

7 random things about me

1. I love the Bible. The Word of God used to not make any sense to me, but I

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This may well be the first time I have written about my teaching life without really setting out a solution or providing much helpful information. Let me know what you think.

Last Friday, the other band director I work with had a mild stroke. He is recovering and is at home resting now. The doctors told him to not return to work for six weeks. As you might imagine, Christmas is a terrible time for band directors to be out like this.

I got to take his band on a Christmas Tour on Thursday, and my band today. We have to make arrangements with other band directors to come over from other campuses to cover the classes that are here…

This is a guest post by Pamela, who doesn’t currently have her own blog. Pamela teaches elementary in Michigan.

Traditional to-do lists
When I think of a traditional to-do list, I think of a sheet (or scrap) of paper with a list of all the things you need to do. This is a good start, but there are a few problems I’ve found with this type of list:

1. There’s no organized pattern
   As soon as you think of something else, you just add it to the bottom of the list. As tasks are completed, you cross them off. Before long, the list is difficult to read and important tasks are overlooked because there are so many scribbles

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The common classroom management wisdom we all hear is, “Don’t smile before Christmas.” I believe that advice is good advice when taken metaphorically. If taken directly as written, it is about the worst advice you can follow.

Good advice
In the middle of my fourth semester of teaching, when I was learning how to really get a handle on classroom management, I asked lots of questions. Among the answers I got was this little gem:

Never smile before Christmas!

I asked further questions for clarification, and my mentors advised me that basically my job as a teacher is to educate the children. It is not to be their friend. The funny thing is that when you are strict, they…

Welcome to the 148th edition of the Carnival of Education! As is one of my signature styles, I want to present this carnival in list format. We’ll begin with a Top 5 list…

The Main Attraction
Obviously the process of creating any “Top 5″ list is subjective and open to argument and debate. With nearly50 submissions, I had a handful of options from which to choose. I narrowed it down to about 8 and did a little bit more weeding down to come up with my favorite five articles from this week. Some are from blogs that my readers and I read, others are brand new discoveries for me. Either way, I enjoyed these.

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This is a guest post by Jane Little of My Many Colored Crayons. Jane teaches third grade in Los Angeles, CA.

I teach in a school that has more than it’s share of challenges. Low morale is just one of them. About a year ago I started blogging with this post. It was a raw and honest account of a low point in my teaching career. The problems some of my students faced were heartbreaking to say the least.I had to chuckle when Joel said, “As I read your stuff, I just imagine you being someone who wakes up each morning with a smile on your face. I’d like to see how that plays out in reality a little bit…

As we come to the conclusion of Reader Appreciation Month, I want to summarize some of the things that we have learned. Today, I’ll focus on some of the reasons my readers have shared with me about why they love their jobs. Here are 50 reasons to love your job as a teacher.

50 reasons to love your job as a teacher

1. Sharing my experiences
2. Helping inexperienced teachers solve problems
3. The ability to help children achieve their best
4. Inspiring them not only academically but personally
5. Getting up on my stage and performing for them, too
6. The thrill of a good and well thought out lesson is incomparable
7. The kids energies; their inquisitiveness makes me want to go and teach

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As we come to the conclusion of Reader Appreciation Month, I want to summarize some of the things that we have learned. Today, I’ll focus on some of the character traits of people who were indicated by my readers as their favorite teachers. Some of the character traits were mentioned by multiple people. We’ll call these the Top 5 (Plus 14) Character Traits Of Superior Teachers. If you want to be a great teacher, these are the things you should begin to develop first.

Top 5 Character Traits of Great Teachers

1. Inspired me and never let me settle for anything less than my best (10)
2. Compassionate, caring, made me feel important and welcomed, made a personal connection

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As we come to the conclusion of Reader Appreciation Month, I want to summarize some of the things that we have learned. Today, I’ll focus on the incredible depth of blogs that readers have told me they read. So here are the 47 blogs that my readers are reading.

1. A Teacher’s Education
2. Adventures of a Christian Collegian
3. Bionic Teaching
4. The Blue Skunk Blog
5. California Teacher Guy
6. Confessions from the Couch
7. Copyblogger
8. Dangerously Irrelevant
9. Dave Sherman
10. David Armano
11. dy/dan
12. EdNotesOnline
13. Education in Texas
14. The Education Wonks
15. FlyLady.net
16. Fred Klonsky
17. Frumteacher
18. Head of the Class
19. History is Elementary
20. huffenglish.com
21. Joyful Jubilant Learning
22. Learn Me Good
23. Lorelle on WordPress
24. Ms. Frizzle
25. Ms. Whatsit
26. ms_teacher
27. Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher
28. New Scientist

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As we come to the conclusion of Reader Appreciation Month, I want to summarize some of the things that we have learned. Today, I’ll focus on the incredible wealth of knowledge that we have learned about classroom management.

I found that when I put all of the tips together, I had over 70 suggestions. I combined a few of them and broke them down into categories. The tips all fell into four categories: Personal, Student and Parent Relationships, Organization and Teaching, and Behavior and Rules. After consolidating, I came up with 50 classroom management tips I have learned this month.

Personal tips for effective classroom management

1. Find out who you are as a person; find your strengths, weaknesses, and

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With all of the great responses I have read with the Reader Appreciation Month, I decided to go ahead and fill out the survey as well.

Name: Joel
Location: The border of Texas and Mexico
Occupation: Middle School Band Director
Blog: So You Want To Teach?

Tell me some of your favorite things about your job
Inspiring children. Spreading my passion for music, life, and learning. Watching the students grow year after year. Recruiting kids into my program. Being creative with the music. Transforming students from knowing nothing about how to play an instrument to being able to perform complicated (for them) music by the end of the year. Demonstrating the value of long-range planning to achieve crazy…

November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? Today’s featured reader is Pamela.

Name: Pamela
Location: Michigan
Occupation: Elementary Teacher, Reading Specialist
Blog: Blog may be coming soon, but none yet ;-)

Tell me some of your favorite things about your job
Some of my favorite things about teaching: I enjoy sharing my love of learning and my passion for certain topics. It goes beyond just teaching the material…it’s about making a personal connection with the students. Along those same lines, I love sharing the excitement of a good book. When I introduce it and starting talking about it with excitement, the students can’t wait for me to start reading. When it’s time to stop…

November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? Today’s featured reader is Jonathan.

Name: Jonathan
Location: The Bronx
Occupation: High School Math teacher
Blog: JD2718

Tell me some of your favorite things about your job
I love kids and I love math. How many jobs can combine them? I guess the guy at the carnival who counts the kids getting on the rides, but he has to clean puke, so that’s out of the question. Honestly, I can, in the space of 55 minutes, (on a good day) get booed for telling a bad joke, discuss planetary motion or the etymology of “radish,” clearly explain how a new-for-them algebra technique flows from their previous knowledge,…