In late May, the countdown wound down, students finished their last assignments, signed each others yearbooks, and I packed up the classroom. There was a definite conclusion to the year. Final grades were assigned. Hallways were empty leaving open lockers that were missing the books, papers, backpacks and personal items that had filled their steel lined spaces. But the glimmer of a plan, the next beginning, was already in play.
By early June I had slid into a summer routine that involved hours and days of reading for the sake of pure enjoyment, drinking coffee on the patio as the sun rose from the eastern sky, and ending my days poolside while my young sons enjoyed the water and dinner was either chilling in the fridge or being grilled nearby. In between was usually whatever I wanted it to be. Sometimes taking day trips to the city nearby, sometimes working on a home improvement or deep cleaning project, and sometimes visiting with friends and family with a sense of leisure that never seems to happen during the school year.
Simultaneously, during this wonderful summer, I started planning the changes I would be making during the next school year. My colleagues and I had already discussed and chosen new materials for students to use while learning the math curriculum. So I spent some time doing some preliminary planning, and making myself familiar with the materials and on-line tools that would soon be available to myself and the students. I had planned on meeting with my new teaching partner to plan using the new math materials, but they did not arrive until the very end of the summer break. I read research articles that I had received during several training sessions I had attended during the last school year, as well as getting caught up reading articles in the Math and Teaching Leadership Journals I subscribe to but don't always get a chance to do more than skim the most interesting of articles. I attended a couple of days of training to better understand a progress monitoring program that the school began using last year. In Literature planning, we had decided to work with a different novel each quarter, and so I spent time rereading the novels we had chosen as well as a few others titles my middle-school-aged son had recommended.
So now the end of summer has arrived, and with it the fresh beginning for a new group of students, and for me as well. The boxes are being unpacked, lessons are being planned and the meetings and training sessions that come at the beginning of each new school year have begun. New teaching colleagues have been introduced and are in the thick of meetings with mentors. Expectations have been set for my teaching community, and celebrating the successes of the last school year gives us motivation and momentum to meet the increasing challenges this year provides. And it's just the beginning!
