This school year is turning out to be pretty crazy in a lot of ways. I’m now in my ninth year of teaching and am working firsthand with a third year teacher on a regular basis teaching 6th grade beginner band. I also have the opportunity to work alongside a first year strings teacher, a second year choir teacher, and also in the same district as a first year band director. So my hands have been pretty full trying to fill the role of mentor in some ways with these folks.

In addition, my efforts at running have slowed down substantially as I got a stress fracture on my foot in July, continued trying to run despite the pain (and reduced pace) for about the next two months. Then finally about four weeks ago I gave in and took some time off. As soon as marching seasons ends I’ll be on my feet much less and be able to really recover much more effectively. Oh yeah, and also marching rehearsals and some evening dinner/mentoring time keeps me working pretty long hours these days. So the blog has fallen along the wayside some. But on a side note, it allows me to start seeing things again from a rookie teacher perspective again. Expect some good stuff in the upcoming months!

Tomorrow, I’ll post some real quick one-liner pieces of advice that might be useful to a new teacher. But today, I want to mention that the Education Buzz Carnival’s Sixth edition is out. Check it out!

I used to hate running. But I tried it this year and have become convinced that running is the gateway drug of the fitness world. You can walk forever without feeling the need to do anything more. I find it exceptionally difficult to make a concentrated effort of running and not have visions of marathons, triathlons, or being in South Africa playing for a World Cup team.

Back in January, I came up with this crazy idea to set out to run a 5K. I say it’s a crazy idea simply because I was somewhere around 100 pounds overweight. Simply the thought of running anywhere was absolutely unreal. But I have a handful of friends who run marathons and I figure if they can run 26.2 miles, I must be able to run 3.1 nonstop.

So I started.

I decided to use the Couch To 5K Running Plan instead of going out there and winging it. I figured being on a plan is the best way to start anything. So out I went. The first day told me to walk 5 minutes, then run 1 minute, then walk 1 1/2, then repeat…for a total of 9 1-minute running intervals.

I knew that was too much for me. So I found a slightly longer plan that started easier. I decided to use that for a few weeks to try to get me ready for C25K Day 1! The first day I walked 15 minutes. Simple. Then on Day 2, I walked a few minutes, ran 1, and walked a few minutes more. That minute of running about near killed me. Then I looked at the plan again and realized I was actually supposed to repeat the 1 minute run. So I went out and did it again the next day. The next day of walking was a welcome change of pace.

“Do you really want to die?”
I decided that the running was going to be the death of me at that point, so I changed my plan of attack. Throughout the months of January and February, every time the plan told me to run, I would actually walk at a slightly “peppier” pace than I had been walking. Even so, I continued fighting through leg cramps, lower back pain, upper back pain, chest pain (nowhere near as fun as it sounds…), breathing troubles, lung pain, knee pain, ankle pain, foot pain, a pesky heel spur, arm pain (I still can’t figure that one out, but it happened more than once). I also “ran” in wind gusting over 40mph, freezing winds, rain, and freezing rain.

Lose the battle, win the war
There were plenty of times that I wanted to quit. There were days when I’d set out to run and get there and start, and the pain would just get the better of me. During these times, I would tell myself that it’s better to lose the battle to win the war. I stopped, felt like a failure, and decided I would just live to fight another day. And fight I did.

Running for real
Beginning in March, I decided to start the C25K plan over again, but this time actually jogging the intervals. I don’t know how fast I went, but I do know when I started, I was actually “running” slower than my walking pace. Seriously. I could walk 1/4 mile in 5 minutes and run the same distance in 5:15. But I never let that dissuade me. Like Forrest Gump, I just ran. March was a great month as I saw a whole lot of progress. I ran nearly every day. On days I didn’t run, I’d just go out and walk.

I finally fell in love with running in March.

I finally came to grips with the fact that, though I don’t look like it, I am a runner. My mom bought me sweet running shoes over Spring Break. I also downloaded the RunKeeper Pro App for my iPhone. That is without question my favorite iPhone app. The web interface is amazing. It appeals to the math nerd side of me. Big time. It maps my route, it graphs my progress, it determines my speed, it posts to Facebook and Twitter. It even allows me to distinguish what I’m doing each day. If I’m running I choose that, I can also tell it that I’m Cycling, Mountain Biking, Walking, Hiking, Downhill Skiing, Cross-Country Skiing, Snowboarding, Skating, Wheelchairing, Rowing, working out with an Elliptical, or even Swimming (really?). It would let me use a treadmill and input my info as well.

Moving Forward
As the month continued, I just kept running and running. On the Tuesday of Spring Break (March 16th), I ran in my new running shoes for the first time. I ran 90 seconds, walked 90 seconds, ran 3 minutes, walked 3 minutes, and repeated for a total of 9 minutes of running. I set a goal to run 1 mile before my band went to UIL on March 31st. To get there, I started accelerating the program a bit and pushing myself hard. I also worked my band hard. I remember one day we had a rehearsal until 7. I stayed at school an hour waiting for one kid to get picked up, then I went home. A friend texted me to go run with her, so I changed clothes and went out at 9pm (on a school night, mind you) and ran 3 six-minute intervals. Then I woke up the next morning and ran 10-minutes nonstop at 6am. Two days later, I woke up early Sunday morning and went out and ran a mile before church.

The amazing feeling of accomplishment
After three months of working hard on pushing myself both physically and psychologically, the realization that I could now jog a mile was pretty amazing. I mostly walked in a 5K on May 5th and I was able to complete the C25K plan by running my third 30-minute run on May 20th (a tad longer than the prescribed 9 weeks). Over the next three months, I have continued the running habit and it has simply become second-nature for me. Now I am setting my eyes so much higher…

The background
It took me about three years. I heard rumblings of Twitter way back in the fall of 2006 when I was getting into blogs. “Who cares what you ate for lunch?” So I ignored it. I finally got on in the spring of 2008, but never really got around to doing too much with it until then.

Evidently my first tweet was something about an enjoyable weekend. How fun. It was so much fun that I blogged about it. This all came less than two months after I reached a subscriber count of 150. I was excited.

Fast forward
Now even despite the incredible slowdown of RSS subscribers (and even RSS reading in general) due to Social Media, the blog is pushing 1,500 subscribers and garners between 5,000 and 7,000 hits each week. Additionally, over 1,450 Twitter users follow @sywtt and over 250 Facebook members like SYWTT there. Obviously there are some duplicates, but I don’t think it would be out of line to say that up to 2,500 people are regularly accessing information from the site!

This is fantastic news, but it poses a bit of a problem for me personally. With the growth of the blog and the shift from just complaining writing about first few years of teaching to more of a teacher resource center, the way that I originally used technology to communicate has to change. My methods do not scale. This was a big part of my problem for the past few years as things changed from a very personal nature to a more corporate type feel. I didn’t like it. And so I considered shutting it down entirely instead of changing my approach.

Moving on
So that being said, I have experimented on and off with Twitter and at times just blocked it out entirely. Sometimes I would unfollow loads of people, then they would in turn unfollow me. I got sad. So I’d follow everyone who followed me and then my feed would be useless. This week, I posted my 2,500th Tweet on my personal account and decided to stop. I was posting mostly just about what I ate for lunch or other inane things. So I stopped.

Sometimes

You

Just

Have

To

Stop

Times are changing, folks. It’s time to get out there and work your butt off to educate the kids you teach. It’s time to get out there and LIVE YOUR LIFE. That’s what I’m doing.

This isn’t to say that I won’t blog any more, I will. But I’m going to stop worrying about doing it right. I’m going to stop worrying about offending anyone. I maintain relative anonymity on this blog for a reason. Not because I’m a horrible person or because anything that goes up on the blog is horrible. But because it provides an added level of liberty.

With that being said, I’ve been working over the last few weeks on cleaning up the comment system here. Comments are back on. I still have about 1,000 older ones to weed through and I anticipate doing that by the end of next week.

We have already gotten a few guest posts for this summer, but the invitation is still there. If you want to write about what you’ve learned about teaching or what you want to learn, bring it on. Or anything else. Go here for more info.

For the third time this week, I ran 30 minutes nonstop this evening. I walked in a 5K a couple of weeks ago. I am learning a whole lot about myself through the process of running. I will continue posting more updates over at Can Wii Do It? over the next few weeks, if you’re interested.

To read my latest post, go read Joel: I did it.

For the first time since started my blog three years ago, I am going to be taking a break for at least a month. No writing, no checking stats, no emails, no nothing. In fact, I’m pulling the plug on my cable modem as soon as I finish writing this.

This is not just a blog issue, but I am going to be away from Facebook almost entirely for a month. In fact, I deleted Facebook from my phone a couple of weeks ago and noticed a substantial improvement to my productivity at work. My free time isn’t spent checking to see who else is slacking off at work, but rather in avoiding the temptation to slack myself. I’ve been visiting some of the 6th grade band classes, making copies of sight-reading music, listening to recordings, studying my scores for contest and planning sectionals in addition to cleaning up the band hall and getting much more organized.

Little things slip through the cracks and it’s easy to overlook so many of them or just put things off till later.

My time at home will be much more useful as well. I’m excited that I am going to get my house cleaned up, continue running, begin working on a push-up program to do some cross-training along with the running, read like crazy, and spend a lot more time reflecting on things rather than having noise and information thrown at me.

Oh yeah, my DVR is going to be saving up some shows and I’ll catch them all later. More noise gone. More focus gained.

Will you do anything online then?
I am going to continue checking my personal Twitter account through my iPhone. I can send updates to my personal Facebook account that way. I also will continue reading some blogs and other stuff online and sharing it on Twitter. Aside from the fact that I won’t update my blog, you probably won’t notice the absence. Oh yeah, I will also pay a few bills (electricity and water) online.

But I will notice it. And I need it. Already, I have a sense of liberation as I realize that I’m actually doing this. The liberation will give way to desperation and regret soon, I’m sure. But the end result will be amazing.

Why would you do something like this anyway?
I am a fairly impulsive person, and I often need extremes to shock me back into reality. Over the last few years, I have allowed more and more online activity to creep in that really just keeps me in front of the computer so much of the time. It drives me crazy.

So over the past few months, I have been implementing things to allow myself to be able to take a few weeks (or more) off with minimal damage being done when I return.

• I use Instapaper to read articles that might be interesting. If I find that it is, I star it. When I star it, it gets sent over to HootSuite, which then occasionally posts those interesting articles to my Twitter account. If it’s not what I thought it was, I delete it. The beauty is that all of this can be done from my iPhone without even logging into Twitter.
• Most of my bills are automated.
• I have shifted most of my document-making from home over to Google Docs, so I can access my personal budget from home or work or anywhere else I might be. Or my iPhone.
• All of my emails end up at one single Gmail address, and I strive to keep my inbox completely clear. If it requires follow-up action or is something I want to read later, I’ll star it. I can’t access Gmail on the school computers, but the webapp for the iPhone is pretty sweet.
• I also removed commenting from my blog, which substantially lowers the amount of time needed to moderate those. I miss the conversations, but do enjoy the reduction in spam.

All this sounds like I’m going to be glued to my iPhone the entire time I’m home, but I assure you this is not the case. I have a lot of running to do, and have quite a few great books that I got last time I was in San Antonio. Maybe I’ll write a few articles to post on the blog when I start logging on…nah, that would defeat the purpose entirely!

And yes, I am continuing working my way through Tom Anselm’s novel You’re Never Too Old For Space Camp. I do enjoy his writing and now I have time to actually read it.

Good-bye, my blogging friends. I shall see you again soon…

Oh yeah, if you get bored this month check out these articles from March in years past.

2007

• 6 Motivation Techniques
• How Not To Waste Spring Break (or Summer Vacation, or Christmas Break, or Saturday, or Tonight!)
• Do You Run The Risk of Becoming Successful?

2008

• TAKS Day
• Not The Best Day Ever Revisited
• Catching Up
• Entering the Twittersphere
• Around The Blogosphere: No Child Left Behind
• An “Online Magazine Rack”
• Whitespace
• The Deep-Seated Problems With Public Education
• You’ve Been Teaching HOW LONG???
• Video: You Think You Pay Attention? What Else Are You Missing Out On?
• Carnival of Education #163: Spring Break 2008 Edition
• Parents, Students, And Teachers…Whose Right Is It Anyway?
• Principals Gone Wild
• The State of the Blog 03/30/08
• Audio: 03/28/08
• Do I Really Want To Teach?
• UIL Sight Reading Success

2009

• 50 Online Reference Sites for Teachers
• The Hunt For The Missing Carnival
• Standardized Reading Testing
• Information Overloaded? 10 Quick Tips To Tame The Tide
• Spring Break Is Here…What to Do, What to Do…
• When Is It Time To Relocate?
• Seven Years Later: 7 Things I Would Do Before My First Year As A Teacher If I Knew Then What I Know Now
• Student Teaching 2009 Update
• Recession 2009 And Its Impact On Teaching
• Last Minute UIL Concert & Sight Reading Preparations: 10 Things I Am Doing To Try To Get Sweepstakes
• Welcome to Education: Now Change Your Plans To Fit OUR Schedule

Carol Richtsmeier made me do it. She has pretty much shamed me (guilted me perhaps?) into blogging through my weight loss this year with her. I’m doing it because I want to run a 5K. She’s doing it because she’s tired of dragging along the extra baggage. Well, me too. She’s done all of the legwork and I’ll do some design work when I get a chance, but she’s set up a blog call Can Wii Do It? to track our progress. I suggested there might be others who would be interested in blogging through their journey (either with a Wii or without). If you are, she would probably be the person to contact since she’s doing most of the administrative stuff for it so far. Just hop on over to the blog and shoot her an email and maybe we’ll see if it’s possible to do it. Wow, it’s way past my bedtime. And I have morning duty tomorrow. Good night!

The picture speaks for itself. It’s the new year, it’s time for a change. My little Wii guy isn’t going to look like this much longer. He’s going to get closer to a healthy weight. Wii Fit tells me that a healthy weight for me would be around 140 pounds. That’s more than 100 pounds away. But a weight of 10 pounds less than now is a healthier weight than whatever he currently weighs.

Weight loss
I have a friend who has lost over 20 pounds in about two months. I asked him about it, and he tells me he is severely limiting how much he eats and exercising a lot. But over the holidays, he continued exercising and ate like normal and still continued losing weight, but obviously as a slower rate.

Inactive lifestyle
But the weight isn’t the problem as much as it is a symptom of other problems. The problem is that I lead a sedentary lifestyle. That and I eat like a racehorse. Put those two things together and you get pretty dismal results.

How it all began
If you remember back in August, I discovered that I had pretty high blood pressure. I went to the doctor, got it checked, and have been on Micardis for a few months now, and it has pretty much solved that problem. Additionally, my cholesterol levels were elevated as well, so I got some medicine for that.

Even before all this, I noticed my asthma beginning to give me trouble much more than it has in recent years. I developed a respiratory infection in September that has lasted on and off since then. Methylprednisolone did a great job for a while, but it came back about 6 weeks later and I got on a regimen of Cipro that ended on Christmas Eve.

After talking with my family over the break, I’ve come to believe that I’m suffering from some pretty intense allergies (to dust, mold, and possibly some sort of food allergies). I got my blood drawn about three weeks ago to test for food allergies and now that I’m back in town, I’ll call the doctor tomorrow to figure out what they found from that. All that background really simply to say this:

My band doesn’t read rhythms nearly as well as the ones I’ve taught in the past, some administrative changes have been happening throughout the year, and my health has been suffering. Needless to say, this has been a difficult semester for me!

Where it’s all going
So we’ve come now to January 2010. I typically don’t do New Year’s Resolutions in the traditional sense. Usually, I simply come up with an outline of where I believe God is leading me to focus throughout the year. This year has felt different now for a while, and for good reason. I’m sick and tired of being beaten up by my health. It’s time for me to take control of it. Here’s where the little Wii guy comes into the story…

Where the Wii guy comes in
I have been considering getting a Wii for the last few years since my little brother got one. The price has always been the thing that stood in my way. Then Nintendo lowered the price in October, and I ordered one almost immediately. I ordered it through Amazon and chose the option to get free shipping so it took a while. It finally arrived the Friday before Thanksgiving break. I didn’t even have time to take it out of the package after school because I went out of town for the weekend. I finally was able to get it set up later in the week and began my Wii Fit adventure. I haven’t worked out regularly on there, but I have usually done 3-4 days a week. Then Christmas break happened and I was out of town for a week and the last week has been tough getting back into the routine. But no longer. I got some inspiration over at the Wii Fat Marathon blog this afternoon.

Running
I have quite a few friends who either run regularly or have run in marathons or half marathons over the past few years. I have other friends who do a lot of cycling and just basically get out of the house and do stuff. With all of the allergies that I’m experiencing, maybe getting out and moving is one of the best things I could possibly do. Plus, it gives me goals and motivation. So I’ve talked with a friend and am now making plans to run in a 5K in April. I’m excited. That Wii guy is also pumped, you can even see his little grin!

I have 14 weeks until the 5K, but I’m starting this 12-week training program today, if you’re interested in joining me…also, read more info here: How to Run Your First 5K

The new year always brings with it a certain air of excitement and a new set of challenges. 2010 is no exception. With the first major chunk of the 2009-2010 school year out of the way, I’m looking back on where it has taken me and there are, quite honestly, a great number of changes that I see as being pressing needs in my life. Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be looking more in-depth into some of these changes and really digging into where I see things headed.

Entering this year, I am 31 years old. While this isn’t old by any contemporary standards, I also look at some of the notable people throughout history and realize that many great accomplishments had been attained by the time people turned my age. As I consider this, I wonder just what kind of a legacy I am preparing to leave behind.

I have been thinking about this for a while. Are He was a great teacher or I was inspired by his blog posts or His Twitter updates were amazinlgy poignant really the kinds of things I want to be remembered for primarily? Sure these may be good things, but are they the best things? I bet they are for some of you, and if that’s you, more power to you! But this isn’t where I see myself really intending to go. It just seems to be where I have found myself. With this in mind then, I want to pass on a story I heard years ago that has really been bugging me for a while now.

The power of planning
From Developing the Leader Within You by John Maxwell:

William James said that the art of being wise is the “are of knowing what to overlook.” The petty and the mundane steal much of our time. Too many of us are living for the wrong things.
Dr. Anthony Campolo tells about a sociological study in which fifty people over the age of ninety-five were asked one question: “If you could live your life over again, what would you do differently?” It was an open-ended question, and a multitiplicity of answers constantly reemerged and dominated the results of the study. These were three answers:

• If I had it to do over again, I would reflect more.
• If I had it to do over again, I would risk more.
• If I had it to do over again, I would do more things that would live on after I am dead.

A young concert violinist was asked the secret of her success. She replied, “Planned neglect.” Then she explained, “When I was in school, there were many things that demanded my time. When I went to my room after breakfast, I made my bed, straightened the room, dusted the floow, and did whatever else came to my attention. Then I hurried to my violin practice. I found I wasn’t progressing as I thought I should, so I reversed things. Until my practice period was completed, I deliberately neglected everything else. That program of planned neglect, I believe, accounts for my success.”

I’ll share with you later on what some of my goals are, but I’m curious what your plans for 2010 are.

Over the last decade, I have read a handful of great books that forced me to think and consider a lot of things about the way I was living. I’ve mentioned some of these books before on the blog, but this week I read another one of those kinds of books and thought I would share more with my readers about some of these amazing books.

1. 1999 – How To Win Friends And Influence People (buy on Amazon)
   Back when I was in college, I didn’t know much about social interactions at all. I was horrible with remembering names, I didn’t really make much eye contact, and I just sort of needed this book to really open my eyes to the incredible power that I had to really impact the lives of other people.I remember some of the people I knew in school laughing at the fact that I was reading a book about making friends. Since I occupied leadership positions through high school and college, most people just assumed I knew something about how to establish relationships. I didn’t. This book helped me get started in the right direction more than anything else I had ever done. It was also my first real experience with reading outside of a formal or even informal educational setting.
2. 2000 – The Bible (buy on Amazon)
   I grew up attending church, but never really had much of an understanding of what exactly the point was, besides because my parents made me go. In the fall of 1999, I began to realize the need to get back involved in church and in the spring of 2000 I made the decision to go to church every week. Over the course of that spring, there were some challenges I went through, but around March, my eyes finally opened to the truth of the gospel:

    

   Jesus lived a sinless life, took upon Himself my sin, paid the penalty for my sin (death), thereby atoning for my sin. He conquered death, rose again, and ascended to heaven, thereby clearing the way for me to spend eternity in heaven with Him.

   When that became clear to me, I wanted nothing more than to read everything I could in the Bible. I remember there were times that I’d have 10 minutes between classes, and I would go sit outside and read a few more verses in the Bible, just soaking it all in. It was an amazing time in my life!

3. 2001 – Mere Christianity (buy on Amazon)
   After
4. 2001 – Tortured for Christ (free from Voice of the Martyrs)
   I remember reading Tortured for Christ while I was student teaching and just being blown away by the things that the author Richard Wurmbrand went through in prison. Up to this point, my only real understanding of Christianity was what I had seen in the American church. I was shocked by his accounts of torture and mistreatment that he underwent at the hands of the communist government in the Soviet Union.Around this time, I also read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (buy on Amazon) and read of the horrible treatment of Christians throughout history. The amazing thing is to read of the reactions of these martyrs despite the atrocities inflicted upon them.
5. 2004 – Spiritual Leadership (buy on Amazon)
   As I came to the understanding that my role as a teacher was one of remarkable leadership, I was struck by the weight of that realization. My pastor recommended J. Oswald Sanders’ book Spiritual Leadership and through a series of succinct chapters, he digs deep into the heart of what it means as a Christian to be a leader in the world.
6. 2006 – The Total Money Makeover (buy on Amazon)
   One afternoon in the spring of 2006, I came home to discover that my power had been shut off. I was usually pretty good about paying bills, but because of my work schedule and my habit of living on the edge financially, I had overlooked one late notice too many. At that point, I made up my mind that I would no longer live that way.After some research online, I kept coming across this Dave Ramsey guy. I had heard Dave Ramsey on the radio a few times before, but never read his book. I immediately subscribed to his podcast and picked The Total Money Makeover up the next time I was at Barnes & Noble. I read it in a matter of a few days and began implementing his Baby Steps as quickly as possible. Since then, I have yet to have another incident with the power being shut off or not being able to buy something because my credit card is declined. The feeling of power is a great thing!
7. 2006 – 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (buy on Amazon)
   After listening to Dave Ramsey for a while, I realized it was time for me to jump in deeper into the personal development books and the one that kept seeming to pop up more than most any others was 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. So I bought a used copy (Dave’s impact on my life) and began reading. It was pretty meaty and difficult to get through at times, but I plowed through the book in the summer of 2006 and it profoundly changed the way I approached many things.
8. 2007 – Revolution In World Missions (free from Gospel For Asia)
   While this book is available for purchase from Amazon, it also available for free directly from the publisher, so I’m once again not including an Amazon link to this book. The basic premise is that Americans are blessed financially beyond most of the world’s comprehension. So much of that money gets wasted when we send people overseas as missionaries and could be far better spent by simply sending the money overseas and letting native people minister to the natives of their nation. As a result of reading this book, I began contributing to help support three missionaries in India. These men live on $90 a month. Can you imagine anyone from the western world trying to live anywhere for an entire month on less than $100?
9. 2008 – The Pursuit of Holiness (buy on Amazon)
   The Pursuit of Holiness is one of the many gift books that I have received over the years. I got it, placed it in a bookshelf, and almost completely forgot about it. Then one afternoon I was looking for a new book to read and picked it up. What a monumental book! Jerry Bridges says some things in here that fundamentally challenged what I had accepted as true up to that point. To say that I underwent a slight change in regards to my view of the holiness of God as a result of reading this book would be a vast understatement.
10. 2009 – Blink (buy on Amazon)
    I bought Blink one week ago and finished it yesterday. Blink is about the immediate feeling we have about seeing someone or something. It is about the power of making snap decisions based on understanding rather than waiting to make decisions based on knowledge. I found no less than five things in the book that will directly impact the way I teach from now on.

So have you read any of these books? What are your thoughts? What other books would you recommend for me or other readers?

This is a video of Dave Ramsey presenting his 7 Baby Steps. Following the summary video are 10 more videos with more specific details. If you haven’t heard Dave Ramsey before, you need to subscribe to his podcast. Now.

The Baby Steps Intro

Budgeting

Baby Steps

Debt Snowball

The Emergency Fund

Retirement Investment

College Savings

Pay Off Mortgage

Be A Giver

Build Wealth

Live Like No One Else