A Day in the Life of a Math Educator

Long ago, when I first started putting together the #matheme page, I thought a fun theme would be for each of us to record a day in our lives. I wonder how everyone accomplishes the million tasks required of a teacher, who has routines that might work for me and the many unique approaches we all take to grading, lesson planning, email and that other thing- working with students. Sam suggested we do this in October but the start of school year insanity lasted a lot longer for many of us than usual so we are opting for November instead. The idea is that everyone picks a day during the week of November 12, and records everything they do that day. I'm planning to start with the alarm going off in the morning and end with falling asleep that night. You can provide as much or as little detail as you like, but the goal is to get some insight into what it's like to be you. If you have a blog, write your day up in a post and let us know so we can link back to you (the plan is to have a fancy form, but leaving a link in the comments works great too). If you don't have a blog I would love to have you write a guest post!

My original intention was for us to share our experiences within the online math teacher community. But after reading Lisa's post over the weekend I really want our 'day in the life' theme to be bigger than just us sharing with each other what we do each day. Then I saw this article, and Fouss' post. Peg Cagle made a big deal about teachers as professionals this year at PCMI (for good reason) and I think that public misconceptions of what educators do are only getting worse. I would love to see this turn into something big, a "Dear world, this is what teaching really entails." I'm not yet sure how to turn this public, so I'm hoping you have some ideas. In the meantime, I'm going to ask my department to participate (none of them blog) and hope that after the elections are over some type of media will be interested in what we have to say.

If you'd like to include a logo with your blog post or as you publicize this project, feel free to nab whichever one of these fits your color scheme.  Sam also made some fancier banners. We absolutely welcome non-math teachers; if you'd like one of these banners tailored to you just let me know. Or you could make your own!  We will be tweeting about it using the hashtag #DITLife.  I look forward to hearing about your day.