Just to keep the blog pegging along. Heh.
Am still bogged down in marking papers. Why does this take me so long? It seems to take longer every year. Is it purely that I’m getting older? I honestly don’t know.
What’s taking me so long is providing my math methods students with feedback on rough drafts of a couple of lesson plans. Once they do revisions based on my feedback, they’ll teach the lessons, and then reflect in writing on the whole experience. It’s the major learning experience I put them through, and overall a very demanding assignment.
Doing the feedback for them is also pretty demanding. I have to visualize my own student, taking into account what I know of her/him, and her/his students, using information they provide me as well as what I know about students of that age in general, and take into account the mathematics of the topic of the lessons and what I know about the big ideas of that topic, and what we know about how people/children learn the math of that topic, and what I know about that from my own teaching experience, and good classroom management–and, keeping all that in mind, decipher my student’s description of the learning activities and how they will be implemented, and consider how well those learning activities are likely to work to accomplish the learning objectives for my student’s students, and whether or not the plans include all the required elements I’ve built into the assignment, and what I can say to my student to further my own learning objectives for her/him. Pretty much all at the same time. And when something isn’t there, or likely isn’t going to work, I have to figure out something that might work better, while still being within the spirit of the student’s own plans, because it’s not fair to just tell someone that something isn’t good enough unless you also help them fix it.
Altogether, it taxes my brain. So I can only stay at it just so long. And all that thinking seems to take me longer and longer every year.
Whine.
OK, I’m done. Back at it. The good part is that it’s an interesting challenge for me to think all that through, and sometimes I even figure out things I had never quite realized before.
Oh, yeah–all that mental heavy lifting is why I haven’t posted anything serious recently–and likely won’t for awhile. These days I’m not even reading demanding stuff on other people’s blogs, let along writing my own.
Addofio 
Keep the blog “pegging along”, huh? I wonder whether my children are familiar with that expression. Sometimes I think you and I are of a different generation than other bloggers. 🙂
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I know what you mean. There’s a whole lingo, as well as a sort of scattershot syyle of writing, that I see on some other blogs that when I see it leaves me feeling like an old fossil. I think some of it comes from texting, which fosters communication (and possibly therefore thinking) in snippets instead of complete thoughts.
But take heart–I’m pretty sure I’m older than you, probably by the better part of a generation.
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