Welcome to Smarter Teachers!

 Welcome to Smarter Teachers!

The purpose of this blog is to ease your teaching stress and workload. It is possible to be effective, memorable, and rigorous without slaving away over grading student work and spending countless unpaid hours doing follow up, paperwork, and lesson planning. 

My name is Laura Kay Ellis. 

I've been teaching secondary English for over 20 years, and I'm constantly changing things up to keep my job interesting. 

Teaching can become stagnant or overwhelming if you let it. 

There are also a societal pressures to forgo pay and your own health and well being for the sake of the students. There is this toxic unspoken rule that the best teachers LIVE at school, are constantly available, and put their students before anyone else. 

I've done the whole teacher martyr thing... frankly, I'm over it! 

The best teachers have balance and a healthy work/home boundaries. 

The pandemic of 2020 woke me up. Suddenly, we were all thrown into distance learning, given a whole new set of rules, and a whole new set of responsibilities. 

How am I going to be an effective teacher through a Zoom meeting? 

How am I going to connect to 180 little boxes on a screen? 

Are my students going to be ok? Am I going to be ok? Panic is setting throughout my district and across the world. We are FORCED to adapt and adapt quickly. 

There are two ways a person can deal with change: 

Freak out and fight it.

Treat it as a challenge and jump in. 

Either way, you are still going to have to change. It's inevitable! 

A simple change of mindset can change your whole life! 

Let's jump in and change our teaching to work for us! 

What is working for you with your current teaching situation and what is not? Let me know in the comments.