NaBloPoMo

I'm trying my luck with NaBloPoMo again this year. That stands for "National Blog Posting Month" for those who might be wondering what that odd combination of letters stand for. The challenge is to write one blog post every day in November. I started but failed miserably at the challenge last year. The year before that I successfully completed it. What will this year bring? I don't yet know.

For me I guess it's the easy version of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which I love the concept of as well, but just simply don't have time to attempt this year. In many ways that makes me sad. In past years, NaNoWriMo has been a wonderful writing motivator for my students. I've been blown away by the shear amount of words that some of my past classes have written. But due to multiple factors, this year my students don't even know about it and when I stop to think about that, I get sad. With our class schedule (e.g. limited minutes) and the intense test pressure we teachers are under (that I already overlook a bit with just doing workshops in the first place), there's no feasible way of successfully doing it. Next year, if I'm still around, I'll likely try to do an after school version, but this year, even that wasn't possible -- I've just been too busy with a bunch of other school demands.

Oh, what I would I do to have a 90 minute (or more!) class period again! Old school that was the norm. Here (new school) it's only 60 minutes, which is just never enough time to do all the things I'd love to do...