From my first year teaching, my district was committed to doing the very best for our students in a range of academic areas, and life skills. The problem was, we really needed to do a lot of rewriting and adapting the curriculum to cover all those areas at the same time.
I spent much of my personal time rewriting and adapting areas of literacy and trying to fit it into science, or social studies, and remembering to balance all of that with life skills.
I was getting bombarded with extra hours of adapting and modifying and creating visuals—not kidding here; I had to create everything. Don’t get me wrong, I love that work. But it’s exhausting and discouraging to have to reinvent the wheel over and over. Between this and other teaching responsibilities, I felt I was being pulled in 100 different directions.
There simply had to be something more. I wanted something that would make my job as a special educator—easier is not the right word—balanced. That’s it. I wanted more balance.
My teaching did not feel balanced. Which, of course, meant my life was off-balance. Every night, I brought the computer home and spent hours working on curriculum at the same time that I was starting a family and advancing my education. It was not sustainable. I could not do it all. Not to mention my curriculum was chopped together. There had to be a better way…
But then we heard about Readtopia. This was the light-bulb moment.