Welcome to the SchoenBLOG. Thanks for reading my first real post, and a special thanks to my best friend, Dani (@missraskin), for coming up with the great name. I've been thinking about starting a blog or writing in some form for a while, and when she called me up with the title, I knew it was fate.

My goal with this blog is simple: develop my voice by sharing and reflecting. I want to share my best practices, successes, challenges, and classroom experiences, and I want to reflect on my work, thoughts, and ideas. I imagine it will be pretty informal and unpolished--more stream of consciousness than anything else, but I like that authenticity. I'll probably share links, resources, and Twitter posts or chats from time-to-time, too. Hopefully this interests you (maybe a little?) and I can develop an audience. Either way, I want to write about the things I'm passionate about with honestly and reflection.

To start off The SchoenBLOG, today's post is about Take Aways...

So much of what teachers do takes time--planning, grading, meetings, phone calls, professional development--you name it. Sometimes we're lucky enough to control that time and benefit from it--I participate in Twitter chats because I want to and have the drive to do so. Other times, we have less control.

Someone smarter than me made that, but I've been trying to live by it lately. It's hard. Good teachers care. We're passionate. And I know I am constantly trying to control more than I can to try to make more matter, and it doesn't work.

So here's what I decided: take one thing away from every day.

If I can have one positive growth, reflection, or learning moment, even on bad days, that's a win. And sometimes, it feels hard to get a win. For the rest of this week I'm going to try to join the #AprilBlogaDay movement by writing about my Take Aways this week.

Hope you took something away here. At the very least, it felt good to start writing it...