Still here

Hey, it's been awhile. Checking in here because a couple people said they missed me and I appreciated that very much. I do have a few new things that I've wanted to share, but before that here's a quick recap of what's been up lately:

What's new:

• My time management (aka probably the reason I don't blog anymore)
  A few years ago I was spending all my time doing work and it wasn't working out well for me. I'd bring work home at night, I'd work on things during the weekend, I'd spend all summer making posters, buying things for my classroom, blogging about work, etc. It just got to be too much for me so I don't do it anymore. I'd write more about this but I fear that it might come off too negative sounding.
  
• This guy
  
  His name is Snoopy and I adopted him about two years ago. This is him last summer hanging out with me while I set up my classroom. He's super cool and helps greatly to occupy my time outside of school so that I can't spend all my time doing work. So he's not school related, but that picture is so that counts.
  
• The amount of time I spend advising/coaching
  So while I said up there that I haven't been spending time outside of school working I should probably amend that to working on math teaching things. I haven't really talked all that much at all about the group that I advise/coach (SkillsUSA) but in the past few years the amount of time I spend on it has increased exponentially. Much of this time is spent working with students fundraising and preparing them for state championships though so it's much different than sitting home doing teacher work. It takes up a ton of time and drives me absolutely nuts at certain times during the year but is incredibly rewarding.
  
• Grad school (aka another reason I haven't been here)
  During 2016 I started work on my masters in school administration (principal and supervisor certifications). Over the past five years I've been doing increasingly more work on developing curriculum and have found that I really enjoy planning things like that and doing work on that scale. Ultimately I'd like to move on to be a mathematics supervisor.
  
• Some things with how I use standards based grading and interactive notebooks
  I'm planning to share some of what I think are the more interesting things that I'm doing.

What's not:

• Where I teach
  Still at the same vocational school and it's still a great place to work!
  
• My classroom
  Prior to this room, my classroom got moved on me every two years. This year will be the fourth that I've spent in this room so that's cool. At the end of last school year someone that I work with forced me to declutter and get rid of a bunch stuff which made setting up and cleaning up my room last year a breeze. Again on the topic of time management, previously I used to spend a bunch of time in August setting things up but now I've gotten it down to about one and a half days. And this year I (along with the help of a few awesome kids) packed the whole thing up in one day too.
  
• What I'm teaching
  This may also be a reason I haven't been around here. Lately there isn't a whole bunch of new stuff that I'm doing. Right now this is the longest that I've been at a school and I'm fairly consistently teaching the same courses. I have a bank of things that I really like using and while I do add in new stuff here or there it's nothing major.  Most of the newer stuff that I do use is things I get from other people's blogs.

Also noteworthy: I am working on fixing links to stuff. Unfortunately the site that I used to share files a couple years ago has stopped working and the process of fixing everything is just too overwhelming. I fixed some of the most requested files so if there is something you were looking for (and it's not too late) please go give it another try. If there is something else that you see and would like please leave me a comment on the post and I'll try my best.