Like Summer, Short & Sweet

This late summer entry nods to the waning days of summer.  It’s a safe bet: teachers everywhere are scrambling to wedge in appointments, dinner parties, and the stuff other people do on the weekends or their lunch hours.  The school year is a fast-moving train, and some are better at balancing non-school life than others.  I’ve always been one of the “others,” so I’ve had a tendency to view summer as largely comp time for the extra 15-20 hours each stack of collected essays represents.  I love Lee more every time I hear him tell someone that teachers work a full year in 9 months (but really it’s closer to 10 months, another misconception).

You will either already know or be happy to know that summer for most teachers also represents a time for professional development, to return to student status and sharpen (or refurbish) the tools in one’s teacher toolkit.  I just spent three weeks at one of the best PD experiences of my career: the Minnesota Writing Project’s Summer Institute at the University of Minnesota.  Quickly (because my title promises to keep this post short & sweet) its mission is to recognize teachers as writers and give them time to write and to recognize teachers’ expertise and knowledge, and give them time to share it with each other.  I wrote A TON, and benefited A TON from the feedback I got from the talented, smart members of my writing group.  I also read and discussed books by educators Linda Rief and Kelly Gallagher, and a profound collection of essays edited by Sun Yung Shin A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (but applicable beyond MN for sure).

I’m off in a few hours for Columbia Teacher’s College August Writing Institute in NYC.  We’re talking immersion, folks!  As fortunate as I am to be having two incredible PD opportunities that would make any English teacher drool, l’ll be the first to admit that spending one month of free-wheeling summer days in classrooms has been made a lot easier knowing I’m on sabbatical this fall.

Back to books for a minute.  I’ve been listening to Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give on Audible.  I began just listening on walks and driving to the U, but lately I listen while sitting on my porch steps because I can’t stop.  It’s a compelling, important story for our times.  I first heard about it from my friend Jen who heard about it from our other friend KC.  Check out KC’s excellent review of it on Literary Quicksand.

There are still at least three weeks before teachers begin reporting for workshop week, an abundance of time when measured against the school calendar, right?!