Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. ~Albert Einstein

These last few weeks my mentor co-workers and I have been working what feels like around the clock helping and supporting our growing number of new teachers.  We have 1st year teachers that are walking into a classroom that was left a disaster by the former teacher, 3rd years teachers that are doing some incredibly thoughtful year long planning and everything else in between.  They are inundated by acronyms, last minute staff meetings, curriculum, standards, schedules, assessment data and furniture.  All of them are feeling grateful they have a job.  All of them are feeling overwhelmed.  It is honestly a little hard to find a teacher this time of year that isn't feeling a little overwhelmed.

The to-do lists continue to get longer and longer and it seems teaching gets more and more complex every single year (even though last year we were sure it couldn't get any harder) and I worry that sometimes as we try and wade through everything we sometimes forget that there are children at the center of it all.

I found the above quote last spring when the insanity of state testing was at it's peak.  At the time I started, finished but didn't publish what was nothing more than a rant about what testing has done to our classrooms.  Instead, I tucked the quote away on a virtual sticky note for another time.

And then yesterday, in the middle of another insane day of not having enough of me to go around, I saw this quote on a actual sticky note in one of my teacher's classrooms.  It was surrounded by stacks of leftover print, buckets of math manipulatives all mixed together, and dried out markers she had pulled out of yet another cupboard.  It just sat there as I sorted through things the best I could while helping her think about how she might want to arrange her room.  I don't think it was hers but I just left it there, for another time.

So I sit here now, after digging through my virtual sticky notes on my desktop, thinking that this would be the perfect way and the perfect time to wish you all a wonderful 2012-2013 school year.