I have an admission. If you’ve emailed me in the last year or so, you may have caught on. The thing is…I am behind. On like everything.

With work, church, and mariachi, I tend to remain pretty busy. But when I’m home, often I will sit here looking at blogs, playing catchup in Google Reader or my email, checking my blog stats, checking out Facebook, chatting with friends, and doing all sorts of time-wasting things. These things are all right in and of themselves, but when combined, they lead to me neglecting things such as basic housekeeping, laundry, filing my bills, cooking, and even sleeping.

Then I find a burst of energy, sit down, start sorting through my emails, and get distracted by something else. This dang ADD thing really frustrates me at times.

So you tell us this why?
The thing is, I am behind on the Student Teaching Weekly Summary thing for this week. It will come out tomorrow. With more people getting involved, I’m excited about this project. I think what I’m going to do by the end of next month is actually start up an official Student Teaching Blog Carnival kind of thing. This will help to raise the awareness of the project, as well as perpetuate it into the next school year and hopefully get more student teachers aware of it. Maybe even some university teacher prep programs. It will also simplify the process a bit for me by reducing the work I have to do somewhat.

But what about the whole falling behind thing?
Oh yeah, my ADD kicked in. Sorry about that. Since the beginning of December, I have been working on consolidating my emails to one singular gmail account. Emails sent to joel@soyouwanttoteach.com will actually be routed through soyouwanttoteach.com@gmail.com, which in turn sends them over to my personal account. This will help me to be far more efficient with my email habits! It also sends all comments over there, so now I will be able to reply to every comment that comes across. At least the ones that I feel need a response.

But you’re still behind
Yes, I know I’m still behind. But I have made some major progress this weekend. I consolidated a few online accounts. My personal Twitter account is now set to update Facebook. In fact, I set up a SYWTT Twitter account last summer sometime, but really didn’t get into it much. Now I have a few real life friends who use it all the time, so I’m joining them over there. If you’d like to follow either one of them, go for it.

Enter the iPhone
My iPhone 3G actually helps me out a whole bunch with this process too. I’m going to write more about this sometime in the next couple of weeks, but specifically to this, I can check my email, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook all while I’m sitting around during my conference period or during our assigned AR Reading time. I actually read blogs while the kids are reading books! Amazing stuff.

Joel Wagner

Joel Wagner (@sywtt) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting. He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. So You Want To Teach? is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.