Work this year was craze. Appropriately, one of the last things my boss said to me this week before we went on vacation was that basically the only issue we really needed to have a serious discussion on was the fact that I apparently have not figured out this whole “work/life balance” thing, inferring that i would die horribly and soon if i didn’t figure it out.

In my 2.6 years at the organization, 2011 had a lot of breakthroughs. It was campaign mode and I got a lot of things done that I wanted to.

Major highlight came last month in a discussion with teachers. One of them, someone who ranks near the top in terms of my admiration out of the hundreds of teachers we work with, was at the meeting, being awesome as usual. Unprompted, he brought up how much he was impressed by a pedagogical tool/framework that I developed, without knowing that it was me who made it. I didn’t mention anything, but he went on to say that as department head, he uses it as coaching tool for other teachers.

To hear a 17 year vet say that he respects and employs something I developed on my own (I just felt a need for this particular thing and did it on my own time) got me extra juiced. My job is dope as hell, but those moments make it so much iller.