End of Week 4

Goals:
To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook. 

Prepare yourself for a lot of data-heavy blog posts in the next few days as I complete my background data analysis on the Year 9's who arrived at Tamaki from our Manaiakalani feeder schools!

• Visits to the gym this week: still 0. I left a meeting at 5.30 on Thursday keen to go to the gym, but by the time I reached it at 6.30 after a frustrating hour in traffic I just wanted to go home. So I kept on driving.
• McDonald's eaten: 1 Happy Meal combo and McFlurry (mostly because I wanted the Roald Dahl book they were giving away in place of a toy).
• Casual sports games played this week: 4 games of touch throughout the week.
• Books read: Firewall by Andy McNab after talking to Staff Cairns about his favourite books. I can see why armed service-people enjoy this book! It was a little too heavy on operational details for me, but the story was interesting. 

• Teaching highlights: 
• Printing and cutting up this Excellence answer to review (and help learn) the third section of the Human Evolution exam, which students had to shuffle into the correct order using colour first, then semantic clues such as topic sentences and clues like "firstly," "the second piece of evidence" or links between sentences, and then finally order the paragraphs into an essay using the bullet points in the question to structure it.
• Next, students read through the full answer and wrote down words that they didn't know the meaning of onto big whiteboards. As I moved around I noticed these included both biological and just general English words. Some frequent ones written were: 
• Concurrently (con- means with or thoroughly, current relates to time or now.. with each other in time)
• Vaguely (sort of, kind of, slightly)
• Simultaneously (at the same time)
• Cohabitation (co- means together, habitat is a living space... living together)
• mtDNA 
• y-Chromosome
• Carbon dating
• I moved around the room explaining the words, and then went and created this doc that we'll come back to today.
• Year 13's took the initiative to write down notes about the evidence to support each of the two theories of human dispersal, half of Year 12 asked more questions while the other half tried to avoid any further learning.
• In response to that, I think it would be useful to get the Year 12 students to un-shuffle the answer a second time and record a quick summary of information from it. I'm hoping the second run at the activity will build more confidence.

• CoL things: I presented my data at the first CoL meeting of the year and received positive feedback and interest. That was nice. I'm going to ask Kathryn if I can present at the next staff meeting too.

• HSA things: Went to a meeting on Thursday morning with other Academy Directors and finally found out what other HSA are doing, and left feeling much more calm. We have our first guest coming to speak with students on Tuesday, and the fono with whānau next week :)

• Teacher well-being support: nothing this week because of the rain on Friday :( although Vaughn was ready to take people for a walk up Maungarei while I was busy flying to Nelson for my mother-in-law's 60th birthday!

• Gratitude emails sent: more this week, 4 I think. And 4 RISE cards too.