Monday, February 28, 2011

Portfolio Playlists

Portfolio is due Friday. For those of you unfamiliar with this monster task, portfolio is a collection of reflections on the writer's year as an educator. In my district, we're asked to reflect on a number of experiences like how we were resourceful to a particular student, two instructional tools used in our curriculum we thought were particularly effective, and other topics that are supposed to be telling of our abilities as new teachers. Come into my English class at 7:30 AM and watch me get twelfth graders to read Hamlet if you want to see what I can really do.
The beast that is portfolio poses a number of problems for me. First of all, I'm old school when it comes to writing. It's very challenging for me to to compose anything on the computer without writing it on paper first. So portfolio means double duty, I write all my responses on an old lady legal pad and then I type them up. The second problem portfolio presents is distraction. I am an easily distracted individual. Fortunately, my distraction doesn't lie in sparkly objects, they are much more task oriented. You can call it putzing around, I'll call it task oriented...putzing.  For example, I'll walk by a kitchen cabinet and feel compelled to reorganize it.
Lucky for me, I solved my distraction dilemma with portfolio playlists.
A portfolio playlist is a collection of music that is about an hour and twenty minutes long. For the duration of the playlist, I make myself respond to these prompts. When the playlist finishes, I'll give the left half of my brain a break and do something fun like bake a broccoli-cheddar quiche for lunchbunch or post on the p&p blog about portfolio playlists. For those of you wondering about the quiche, it looks and smells wonderful. For those of you wondering what I'm listening to on my portfolio playlist, take a peek:




Back to work, begrudgingly to slay the beast that is portfolio,
-L

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