Back to School!
Since our staff works year round, there was no back to school anxiety for me this year. No teacher dream. If you don't know what that means, ask a teacher! It's a strange phenomenon that happens very shortly before a new school year. Most teachers I knew had them. Mine usually involved a nightmarish school building with twisted stairwells, doors that opened into thin air, and distortions of every kind.
This year I think it would have been better to have the nightmare than the reality! School started with multiple challenges to say the least. We found lots of things that had been working just fine when teachers left for their break were now displaced, misplaced, disconnected, misconnected, or just missing in action! Everyone managed to go with the flow and some even managed to plunge right into exciting and engaging activities.
The highlight of my back to school so far has been working with the Newsletter/Yearbook class at Lowell Elementary. We have just begun to learn how to use the open source photo editting program called GIMP. Since digital cameras take such high resolution pictures now, they need to be resized for multimedia and desktop publishing. We will be using GIMP to do that as well as learning how to use layers to create photo montages. I look forward to working with these students over the course of the school year.
