Amber Attwood

This school year, one thing we have kept going each week was a puzzle. Usually around 500 pieces, more or less. I had a student who was very good at them (like...very very good), and it helped him keep calm when feeling anxious. As a team of 3 educators in the class, we would use our free time to work on the puzzle as well. There wasn't many opportunities for all 3 of us to work on it together, but this morning, exactly that happened. We all sat at the table and began to fit pieces together. I was given the job of looking for the side piece that was missing...I'm good at spotting those. Middle sections of puzzles are not my strong suit. My coworker finds pieces that fit using colours, so she worked on attaching more pieces to my edge pieces. My other coworker is good at finding specific areas of the puzzle (like the eyes or nose on a dog), putting a few pieces together, and then fitting in the larger chunks later. (then there's my student...who finds pieces everywhere...

I titled this post with a purpose... This school year (2017-2018) isn't my 1st year teaching. It's actually my 4th. But in those first 3 years, I had a mixture of both supply teaching and long-term positions. This year was my first full school year. One school. One job. September-June. And it felt like my first year. The first few months, I felt like I was swimming with my head just slightly above the water. I was new to the areas I was teaching in, and had so much to figure out & learn just to catch up to speed with everyone else. I spent many hours after school learning, reading, planning...and then went home and read documents, books, followed educators in my fields on twitter... And I felt like the most unqualified person to be teaching my students. Angela Watson refers to it, "The Imposter Syndrome", in her blog. She asks, have you ever had any of these thoughts..."I have no idea what I'm doing...I'm clearly not experienced enough...I...

Have you read the image above? Now, stay with me for a few as I explain why this led me to want to blog and share my story & learning. I remember seeing an image similar to this online once. I read it and thought, oh man, I DO THIS! And then started reading the comments that all said the same thing...we all did this, turned our music down to "see better". For a while, I thought I was the only one. ..or at least it wasn't a common thing people did. But apparently it is. And suddenly I didn't feel so, "alone". This then led me to have a discussion with a friend, who apparently also does this too. Who knew!  I can't be the only one. This same idea applied to when I started being more active as an educator on Twitter, reading blog posts, listening to educational podcasts, etc. Suddenly I didn't feel like the "only one" . Suddenly, there were so many other educators (outside of my circle of co-workers and educator friends) out th...