Welcome to Teaching in my Tennies!

Hello!

Welcome to Teaching in my Tennies!

This blog has been floating around in my brain for the past six months or so and I am very happy to finally have it up and running. This blog, like many wonderful things in my life, came about at the suggestion of really wonderful people.

Last summer I accomplished something big. I swam, biked, and ran my way to being a 70.3 ironman finisher. At the finish line and in the days following the race, I felt on top of the world. I couldn’t stop smiling, talking incessantly about my race, and telling anyone who would listen the details of my tire popping, how miserable I felt on the run, and how I had swam under people to make it through the choppy water. I couldn’t stop talking because I didn’t want to forget.

After listening to my endless ironman chatter over phone, text and email, two really fantastic women suggested something to me: why not write about it?

Write about it? For who? Nobody wants to read that. Where would I post that? Nobody wants to read that…

Well, I went ahead and wrote about it and while a hugely rewarding part of the experience was that I received a lot of heartwarmingly positive responses (thank you, by the way, if you were a part of that), something else happened that made me start to think about this blog. Something that I would call magical. When I wrote that race report, it became mine. It became permanent. It became something that nobody could ever take away and that I would always have. And truth be told, I’ve read it a couple, well hundred, times since the race.

Fast forward to now. It is snowy, cold January in Chicago and the idea of writing a blog keeps creeping into my mind. Partly because we’re going on day two away from school and teachers start to go a little batty around this time, but also because those same two fantastic women keep telling me that I could do this, there is plenty to write about, and it will be an incredible experience...and so, here I am.

I have a lot of hopes for this little blog. I hope to write about my experience as a teacher in an urban, slightly dysfunctional but somehow charming, school district. I hope to share thoughts on current education policies that I’m learning about through an amazing policy fellowship I have recently started. I hope to give a window into doing crazy things like triathlons and marathons as a fairly normal person. I hope to talk about the many events and experiences that give meaning to my life. But more than anything, I hope to grow and learn and change through this blog. I hope to give a positive spin on subjects that don’t always get a lot of positive light, and I hope that just like my race-report, it will become something permanent that I will love.

Oh, and the name? Well, I’m a teacher and I run, so I basically teach in my tennies all the time. Just kidding, not all the time, I have some fashion sense!

Stay tuned...