Why must professional development sometimes feel like a sacrifice? I really enjoy professional development and I select ones that I’m particularly interested in. However, either you must miss teaching days and go through the hassle/stress of arranging your classes for a substitute. Or, you must take weekends and/or holidays to complete your professional development and you are left feeling somewhat robbed of needed “time off”. Either way, it’s a sacrifice.
It’s Friday night and I just drove 4.5 hours with a colleague to get from the Netherlands to Luxembourg for a conference on “Assessment for Learning”. I am enjoying the trip with my colleague and I am eager for the information to be gleaned from this conference. However, I have missed two basketball games of my teenagers and I will be working all weekend. We drive home on Sunday evening following the conference, just to get up early on Monday and face our regular week without having had any recovery time from this week. It will be a bit rough! However, hopefully it will be worth it! I’ll report tomorrow.