La Maestra Bilingue

Here goes the beginning of (hopefully) a beautiful friendship!  In the last few weeks I have reached the decision that I am going to leave my classroom.  I love teaching.  I love my students.  I love my administration.  I love my school.  So, why am I leaving?  First, I feel like a new chapter is opening in my life.  After much prayer and contemplation, I feel that this is what I’m supposed to do.  Second, I can financially afford to.  With all the worries about possible Reductions in Force and possible teacher layoffs, I can’t help but think of my colleagues who depend on their meager teacher’s salary to make ends meet.  Thankfully, the other business my husband and I started is booming and he supports me completely.

That brings up the question of what am I going to do?  My quick answer is for awhile NOTHING!  I am going to sleep in, read, relax, watch some movies, and do basically nothing for at least a few weeks.  After that gets old, I’m going to help my husband more with our business, work on getting our horse business off and running, and volunteer at my school.  However, a new light bulb has started shining…..

During our team meeting today, the second grade teachers were working on lesson plans for next week.  Nothing special, happens every week.  The monolingual teachers were running back and forth to their classrooms to get other materials that they thought of as we were planning.  Us bilingual teachers didn’t really have anything to get.  This has been my frustration (as I’m sure it is for many others) since I began teaching bilingual education.  There are many wonderful resources for the classroom available for English speakers, but bilingual teachers have to pull from a small reservoir of materials or translate.  I love technology, I love teaching, why don’t I start creating some high-quality resources for bilingual teachers?!

I have been toying around with this idea for quite some time.  But life seems to keep me too busy to do much about it.  In the last few weeks, I have been making strides to put this dream in motion.  In fact, I have two apps for the iPod/iPad in production right now. Without giving too much away, they will be helpful tools for both bilingual and monolingual teachers.  I have lots of ideas of things that I want to create.  Resources that I would like for my own classroom, but never have the time to make.  Hopefully, now that I have decided to take this step of faith, I will have the time to pull some of these resources together for my fellow bilingual teachers.

Thank you for being here on this first entry….I hope that soon I will have many things to share.

¡Hasta Pronto!