Priorities

I decided that, since I've finished reading my 5 holiday "must reads", (finished the Kite Runner last night and am still thinking about it) today was the day to outline next term's class plan.

So before I settled down, I did a bit of piano practice for next term's musical production. Then I fired up the laptop, found and made a copy of last year's class files for their next year's teacher and then looked at today's blogposts. That was hours ago and now, I've read loads, including a long article about how people don't read long articles any more, and thought a bit about it. Also, because of this post, I've tried to find out why an expensive Visualiser would be better for showing pupils' work for peer review etc than simply linking a video camera to my data projector (not sure on that one). I made a comment on another blog because a link made a very strong memory pop up. I've read some Tweets and found out the times for a film we're going to see tomorrow...And now it's lunch time and there's not even a blank document on my laptop with "Class Plan" at the top of it :-(

I think my difficulty is not with not reading in depth or being distracted by e-communication - it's with reading too much and being too interested in things to get down to the mundane matters that "must" be done. The articles I found were interesting enough for me to want to read them, not skim them. Now by finding a link to put here to the Kite Runner, I've discovered that Kahled Hosseini has a website which will give me information about Afghanistan and illiteracy there. So that's next on my list of things to read. (The irony there has only just struck me.)

Far from making things more superficial, I find that many things I read on the web cause me to think more deeply and allow me to make connections I would not otherwise have made.

But prioritising - now that's something I've never been very good at, and I don't think the internet has helped me with that. So, I'm making an start and instead of taking a long time to draft and redraft this blog post, I've just published it more or less as I've thought of it. It's been a more entertaining morning than it might have been though.