I live in my teaching bullet journal during the school year. The notebook houses everything from curriculum revision to my day-to-day task lists to a host of meeting notes. Brainstorms on lesson sequencing, calendars pacing assignments to fit students’ needs, and periodic analytic reflections to assess whether what I intend to teach is what I’m actually communicating.

This week: the deceptively simple meeting log.

Reflecting on how to start this guest blog post, I kept coming back to this one song lyric: “It’s the little things we do together ...” from Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Company. Sondheim’s show is devoted to the inner workings of married couples, their relationships with one another, and what they share together. Pens, for JP and I, are one of the many things we share.

A few weeks ago, Endless Pens sent out a pre-order for a new Opus 88. They partnered with Twenty Sides, who illustrated the cutest dog on the pen’s cap, “Naptime.” Naptime resembles JP’s editor, our sweet dog, Rumi.

Of course I needed the Rumi pen.

I built out my own index this week. And I revisited past indexes to revise according to what worked and what hasn’t in prior years. This week I share my current approach to making an index that works for me. A “what I’m doing” tour, not a “what you should do.”

I continue taking inventory of my pen collection this week. A process I started back in July. I like to think through my collection from time to time.

This week, I journey through a second of my four 13-pen trays. The tray I lovingly call “The pen tray of large assortments.”