mslafon-blog

[mslafon-blog]

STEM 1st Day, 1st year

 The second to last day of school of my for real for real FIRST year of teaching, my beginning ESL students were begging me to play “Bad Bunny” on Pandora while having a relatively rambunctious, but structured game of “Cerdo” (pig) with basketball goal I’d temporarily propped up along my storage cabinets. As we negotiated to play the clean Bruno Mars station as one of my students tossed me the ball while respectfully demanding in anticipatory fashion, “Ms., shoot it!”  As I caught the ball, I heard my phone ring. “Ms. Lafon...” I answer. It was my appraiser wanting to have someone cover my class to meet with him. At that moment, everything stopped. My year had gone excellent, so I was feeling a mixture of confused, excited and scared. Maybe the game of “Cerdo,” was off the chain? Among that thought, many others ran through my mind, all of which were complete over reactions. Little did I know, my teaching career was about to take a turn for the what I call, “IDK Vortex.”  Of all of the scenarios I’d played out in my mind walking from one side of the school to the other to slowly walk into his office, I never thought I would be asked to teach STEM History the next year. That is where the, “I don’t know,” started. I was excited, but I didn’t know. Not about the position, but just about EVERYTHING. I knew that the Olle STEM Academy did things a little differently and I was a little different, so I thought, why not?! Then just when I thought I finally coded all the crazy educational acronyms and basically learned a knew language, I heard PBL and the 4C’s. This is about the time I asked myself, “what was I thinking?!” About that time, I dug a bit deeper into these new world of STEM and started growing even in the deep realm of the, “IDK Vortex.” I wanted to know more and wanted to try this and get good at it and do all of the “STEMie” type things, but I knew it would take four things. Yeah, about those 4 C’s....