It's all over except the shouting now. As I write this, I'm about 30 minutes away from needing to get appropriately clad for graduation this evening. As one group leaves, my thoughts turn to the next group.
What can I do to better prepare for them? How can I improve upon the mistakes of the past year? What is my action plan?
First, I think I need to take a little time for relaxation and refreshment. I have two weeks until I travel to Salt Lake City for the AP reading. In that time, I plan to do a little decluttering and organization at home, read for pleasure and reacquaint myself with my yarn and needles. Knitting has been sorely neglected this year and I feel it in my stress levels. I have also found this year that I am a bit more refreshed if I'm surrounded by a decluttered environment. My bedroom is in desperate need of cleaning and decluttering and that is a chore I plan for this very weekend coming up. My eldest daughter and I have started going to the Y a few nights a week to exercise. While I walk about 1-1/2 miles on the treadmill, she manages about 6 on the elliptical - oh to be 18 and in great physical condition!
I made movement this week toward planning some positive professional development at the reading beyond that which I gain from scoring exams. I reached out to other AP teachers through the forums and asked if anyone was interested in an informal gathering to discuss ideas for flipping the classroom and delving deeper in class. The response has been gratifying with about a dozen positive responses already. As soon as the schedule comes out for our evenings, I will plan a specific time and place for us to meet. I'm looking forward to the experience and hope that I can come away with some new, fresh ideas.
Another goal I have this summer is to write a textbook for the regular Government classes -- yes, you read this correctly. I plan to write a textbook. I cleaned up my Mac hard drive this past weekend, backed up all my documents and photos to an external hard drive and then upgraded my operating system to Mountain Lion. This allowed me to download iBooks Author. I've spent a little time this week playing with it, finding video tutorials on youtube, etc. I've made a start with the organization of it. I believe my colleague, Amy, is going to help me write, leaving me the task of finding video clips, pictures, creating interactive widgets, and pulling the project together. We plan to publish to an internal network which will download it only to our students' iPads. This will help us update the information from our last (2005) textbook adoption and put it in a format that is readable on the students' iPads. I'm both apprehensive and excited by the possibilities in this one. I wish there was an easier way to build the works cited. Even though I'm only using creative commons searches, I know I still have to keep up with the citations, and iBooks Author doesn't do it automatically...pity that. I hope to have at least a good first working copy available by the time school starts, which we can tweak as necessary along the way.
I am trying to decide whether I want to participate in a professional book group this summer with my colleagues. Two of our administrators are hosting book groups on one of two different books: Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess or Do Your Know Enough About Me To Teach Me? by Stephen G. Peters. I'm most intrigued by the "pirate" book and have downloaded a sample on my Kindle. I think I need to give it a little more thought before I jump into yet one more endeavor this summer. I really should consider some of that relaxation part as well!
To finish up and get out of here for the school year, I need to spend some time tomorrow doing my filing - it's amazing how much of it there is considering I went almost completely paperless this year. I feel a purge coming on! I also need to transfer my personal video library and reference books back into the closet for summer I think, and do some general straightening up. My desk has stayed pretty organized this year, so that part is done - hooray! We can't "check out" until Friday morning, and I hope to have everything complete tomorrow so that on Friday morning, I can go and check out and then just clock my time once it's done. Summer is almost close enough to taste it - yippee!
Time to go and change clothes, I guess. Till next time...
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