Catching up with the MTBoS!

I am being a little bit crazy and frantically trying to catch up on the past four years or so of MTBoS goings on (going ons? goings ons?)

I'm in the middle of reading Make It Stick, but then I got distracted by reading approximately eleventy billion blog posts as I updated my Feedly.  I then spent a lot of time learning about Vertical Non Permanent Surfaces and Visibly Random Grouping after their mention on Kate's post about "A Magical Incantation."  And then I started thinking about how to rearrange my classroom so that I have 10 distinct areas for students to work vertically.  I'm also writing this post in the middle of doing all of that.  Plus a million more things.

I'm jumping from place to place and idea to idea in a pretty non linear way, which at first was stressing me out, and then I realized this is just how I do things.

When I was planning my wedding I looked at Pinterest for what seemed like weeks, pinning ideas and thinking about what I wanted to do.  I looked at everything.  Like, literally every wedding pin that has every existed.  Ok fine, not literally but pretty close.   Finally, one day, I was able to just pull the trigger on almost every decision.  I had spent enough time with all of the information that I was able to reach this magical point of saying "yes, I've seen every possible option, and now I'm ready to choose."

The difference this time, is that when you're working on the MTBoS, you want to choose everything.  When people blog about activities that they've done and theories that they have and their best practices, and everyone is reflective and generally self aware and into the big picture as well as the microcosm of their classroom, and people are just generally cool people who know how to push back on an idea and give great feedback, it seems like millions of practices and ideas have already been distilled into one dynamic pile of awesomeness and I want to partake in ALL OF IT.

Interleaved practice? Yes please.
Three act math?  Yes please.
Vertical Non Permanent Surfaces? Yes please.
SBG? Yes please.
Interactive notebooks? Yes please
EVERYTHING? YES PLEASE.

I'm trying to create some lists of things to do and ideas to explore so that I can organize a bit more.  I'm relying heavily on Evernote, which I only started using last week, and it is SUCH an improvement on my previous attempts at using LiveBinder or even just Pinning stuff and never looking again or making my own comments on what I've looked at.  

I'm working on a list of books to read (which I'll post at some point), things to do so that I'm back in the MTBoS (like actually tweeting... I'm nervous for some reason?), and I'm trying to fix some lessons that didn't go well and find/create some foldables for the probability unit in AP Stats which I missed due to maternity leave.

So many things to do.  So much excitement.