It's no lie that most teachers get the summer "off". But it's delusional to think that all teachers do in the summer is sip on iced tea and go to the pool. Although I cannot speak for every teacher, this effective teacher tries to take some time for myself and continue to work on school-related things.
Now I realize I may be preaching to the choir, but I feel slighted when people say "Must be nice to have the summer off." I worked hard for this thank you very much. Just in the past two weeks in addition to finishing up my last graduate class of this year (much of which involved curriculum mapping/planning), I've spent at least 4 8-hour days working on bettering my craft for the upcoming school year.
I'm working on aligning my curriculum to the new Colorado Academic Standards and to the new national standards from ACTFL. I've done this through moving towards a standards-based grading system, which is something that has always interested me (although now that I'm writing this I realize I need to actually do research about its effectiveness). I have planned out when assessments need to be and begun writing them. But I need to step up my game on my third year class. I guess I'm stuck as to how to best facilitate language acquisition with them. I hope to get this resolved next week.
Next week I will be in St. Louis for the National TPRS conference. It will be 5 wonderful days of learning, networking and reflection. I hope to learn a lot and to be able to better facilitate language acquisition.
But now, I'm going to read Pyramid Response to Intervention by Buffum, Mattos and Weber. This was a book assigned on my summer reading list by my administration. I'm interested to see what this book has to say, how research-based it is (I look at just about everything with a critical eye), and how I can better serve all of my students.
So to all of the nay-sayers who think teachers have summers off (among other things), I hope you realize that not all of us are parked by the pool sipping iced teas for the entire summer.
I was reading blogs about the use of TPRS and I came across this post. I couldn't resist commenting on this post even though you wrote this in July.
ReplyDeleteI teach H.S. Spanish and, like you, I was also busy this summer with grad classes, curriculum related work, and searching for new ideas for instruction and technology use in class. What people outside of the educational field don't understand is that we're paid only for the number of days in our contract (mine is 189 days). Specifically, that means no paid summer vacation and no paid holidays.
Thanks for sharing your experiences on this blog. Wishing you a great school year.
Sra. Thanks for visiting! People don't realize how much we work without being paid and how much of our own resources (mainly money and time) go into our work, but I feel like my students definitely have benefited with my training and hard work with TPRS.
ReplyDeleteHope your year is getting off to a good start!