On always needing to help...

The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing. -Anton Checkhov

How is it that this need to get inside students' heads and analyze their intellectual development in order to help them never seems to die down? I just want to understand, because I just want to help. Maybe that need is something integral to the human condition. How else would a species become so successful and so dominant? We do well because we do good; we help each other as a contribution to the common welfare. 

This month, I really just want my second graders to move past counting on their fingers (that one's complicated; a caveat: I do it too, but want them to increase their range of strategies) and my fourth graders to really grasp syllabication.

On a nuts and bolts level: great news. I no longer do weekly progress monitoring. It just might not be a great use of my time. I do it periodically as needed, but not on a strict schedule anymore. This leaves significantly more time for actual teaching and it's just more fun. After the Month in Heck that was our winter universal screening I'm more than happy to give up some testing. Fairly sure the students are OK with it too!