Ahhh...summer.Without a doubt, the eight-ish week break is a perk of being a teacher. I use the term "eight-ish" because I don't know a single teacher who takes all eight weeks of summer off without doing some sort of professional development or self-guided learning, be it reading teaching-related books or websites, shopping for the classroom, meeting with other educators and debriefing on the year/planning for the next. A teacher's work is truly never done, even when he or she is on "summer break".
For me, summer means a slower pace of life. I don't have to worry about waking up at 5am in order to get myself and my 4-year-old prepared for the day and out the door by 7:10am for our commute to preschool (him) and the first period bell at 8am (me). Summer mornings mean sipping my coffee as I peruse my Facebook and Twitter feeds while the little one watches a YouTube video on the iPad (Or two. Or three. Oops). We make it to preschool somewhere around the 8-9:00 range. After that, my day really begins. It's a nice change and something I revel in. Of course, I'm still busy. Rather than cramming all of my chores into the 3-4:30pm range of time like I do during the school year, I now space them out during the weekdays. Summertime is also known as "teacher doctor appointment season", since we typically save all of our dentist/doctor/optometrist appointments for now. I thoroughly enjoy Trader Joe's and Target on a weekday morning at 10am. If I feel like lingering at my favorite coffee spot or treating myself to lunch, I can. I exercise a lot more in the summer. I catch up with friends (mostly teachers themselves) for mid-day poolside chats or wine tasting excursions, just because we can. Don't get me wrong, there's a pretty decent amount of Netflix and Hulu watching going on, but it's more in my nature to take advantage of these precious summer moments to do other things.
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Pencils are the necessary tool of most schoolwork...and are the bane of most teachers' existence. In eight years of teaching I've tried pretty much every single Pinterest-suggested trick there is to solve the various problems associated with pencils:
Then one day, I stopped all the madness and just started giving kids pencils. I can't remember why or how I arrived at this epiphany, but I do remember the shift in my thinking. You see, the issue here wasn't pencils -- the issue was mindset. |