My Plans for the Summer

Now, I know summer officially begins in another week or so but as soon as school is out, I consider it summer.

Summer is my busy time. Since I retired from teaching in public school, I now teach on the university level in the summer. This is my time for teaching teachers. I love teaching so much that I felt that by sharing my knowledge and expertise with other teachers, it is a way to pass it on. Of course, the best time to teach teachers is during the summer when they aren’t focused on their own classrooms as well as real life.

So, I need to get busy with planning my lessons!

One course that I’m teaching is a practicum where I will supervise 5 teachers and about 20 special education students. I will observe the teachers and evaluate lesson plans. I really enjoyed doing this last year and one of the comments on my evaluation was that the teacher/student learned more in this course than any other course. I believe the reason is that he was able to bring together all that he had learned and actually apply it. It was a real life situation.

The other course is a Procedures course which will be a hybrid course of online and face to face. There weren’t enough students to meet daily face to face so the university wants me to teach it as a tutorial where we only meet five times. But I need to make it as rigorous as if we meet face to face every day. This will be a challenge. I’m hoping to record some presentations on slideshare and post them on the wiki as part of their weekly assignments. As you can tell, I’m still working on them.

I’m also planning on doing more hiking and camping than we did last year. I really missed it but we did a lot of road traveling. This year we plan to stay closer to home and remember why we love living where we do.

We recently got our ham radio license so I am going to learn more about ham radios and how to use them. I’m wondering if they have a place in the classroom and how a lesson can be working in with it. This will take some looking into and I will let you know how it goes.

I plan to do a lot more yard work and gardening. I’ve put off a few years some things that need to be done. This is a good time for me to do it. We planted tomato plants earlier than we did last year so hopefully we will be able to enjoy them longer. I hope to freeze some to use in the winter too. We also have a ton of figs coming in and I hope to freeze some of them too.

Of course when all my teacher friends are working, I really miss them. Now that summer is here, my friends can come out and play! I’m excited about scheduling some lunches so we can catch up on what’s been happening.

In a couple of weeks there is the Upstate Technology Conference and I will get to visit with some of my online friends in person. I look forward to the 2 day event and learning lots of new stuff. I’m not presenting this year so I can attend more sessions. I might present next year though.

So, what do you have planned for the summer? I have big plans but we will see how it all pans out!

Posted on the Successful Teaching Blog by loonyhiker (successfulteaching at gmail dot com).

Original image: 'party in the sky'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26720971@N02/3970279665 by: Dene' Miles