Here is the latest report on my February #sciwrite challenge (see posts from Kickoff, End Week 1, and End Week 2).  As usual, my week did not go as planned – but in the big picture, it went pretty well!

On Tuesday, I visited a friend and colleague’s middle school classroom in Philly to do an exercise on iPads with tree growth data.  And then, of course, I had to write a blog post about it (My First Run with Nearpod)!  It was an incredibly eye-opening, rewarding, and exhausting day.  I had lost my voice by the end of the day, which has rarely happened the days I teach at my campus.  Wow, my respect for what middle school teachers face has increased 10-fold, and I hope I can help them delivering even more Earth science content.  Who knows – I might even see some of these students in my classroom in the future!

My plan was to spend the rest of the week finishing up a paper on the tree growth data, but then I got the news that makes every faculty member do a secret happy dance (or, not-so-secret!) – I have a paper accepted!  Of course, there are revisions to do, and my goal is that by the end of February, I have the revisions completed and the paper resubmitted.  It’s going to be a tough goal, as I leave in the morning for the ScienceOnline conference, so we’ll see how well I do.

So this week was a detour, but a happy detour!