Summer Classroom Setup

 I live and work where students still don't come back to the classroom until after Labor Day. We are among the last holdouts in the country. I am well aware that many other teachers are already weeks into their school year while I am still working to set up my room. Of course, those who are already in the thick of it will be done sometime in May while I will toil in my room until the middle of June.

I have appointments (and my birthday) next week, so I have been spending the mornings of the past two weeks in my room doing a little bit at a time. I hope to be done with set up before in-service the final week of August.

I spent a large chunk of my summer at civics professional development. My classroom reflects those experiences. Last year I made a set of Presidents to hang up, but never found the correct location to hang them. This year I remembered that the beams across the classroom are metal and I can use magnets to hang things on them. Last week I cut up business card magnets (one of my favorite classroom helpers) and stuck them on the back of the Presidents, and spent about 20 minutes today climbing up and down a ladder to affix them to the beams. The photos don't do the result justice. This addition to my classroom décor was very satisfying and made me incredibly happy as I sat and ate my lunch, admiring them today.

One of my professional development experiences this summer began with a fancy dinner in a hotel ballroom. On the table were questions like: "Can you name three supreme court justices?" "Can you name an American Idol?" There were probably five of each - current United States officials vs. current United States pop culture. As a result of that professional development experience, I also made a display of our current Supreme Court Justices and the Congresspeople of Washington State.

The "Who represents you?" display photographed the best and I am happy with all three... but the Presidents are still my favorite.

I still have a long way to go to get my classroom ready. I got three new sets of textbooks delivered within the past week - one free from the We the People Summer Institute, one to replace the U.S. History books from the early 2000s that were great, but falling apart, and one to replace the Washington State History books from the 1970s. Boxes and old textbooks are taking up a lot of real estate on my classroom floor right now - waiting for next week when middle school students are invited to come help in classrooms to earn service hours. They will be taking many runs to the dumpsters...

This photo was even after at least two other faculty members had pilfered boxes and packing peanuts from my rubbish pile.

I am really looking forward to the start of this year, but I also have a lot of work to do between now and then. However, I'm still taking the next five days off.

Summer of PD

It feels like most of my summer has been spent in professional development. I attended two government/civics workshops and spent a week writing curriculum with a co-worker and friend. When I came home from my latest trip, one of my husband's first questions was, "When are you ditching me again?" I guess I should plan less travel for work next summer!

My first trip was actually five weeks into my summer, to War Week at the George Washington Teacher Institute. But I had only been home for a week before I took off to a small island, accessed by a teeny tiny car ferry that held maybe 20 cars, to write unit plans. The learning management system our school will be using for grading this year requires that units are entered into the platform and tied to specific standards, both state and IB, before anything can be graded. Since I took over for a teacher who had not yet started using the new platform, I had zero units ready for this. I was skeptical at the beginning of the week that I was going to get all of my units entered in just one week, especially when my co-worker said it didn't matter if we got any work done on Monday after we arrived at our destination.

Did I mention that our destination was a beautiful house owned by a school family? Near the end of the year, one of the parents who is in the building volunteering nearly every day asked my co-worker and I about our summer plans. We told her we were planning to stay in an Airbnb on the beach to put our units into the new learning management system. This parent LIT UP at the opportunity to offer us the use of her family's second home on a small island. We decided free was way better than not free, and took her up on that offer. The house did not disappoint!

We arrived in the pouring rain and had to call the school family to gain entry to the house. It was a beautiful space, and the rain continued on Tuesday, making it easy to stay at our computers and get lots of work done. We did walk to the island store on Tuesday after the rain stopped, which turned out to be a three-mile walk, round trip. My knee wasn't too happy about that, so for our afternoon break on Wednesday we sat on the private beach across the street from the house and drank wine. We even finished early, completing skeleton unit plans for every unit we intend to teach this year by Wednesday evening. Since we weren't paying for a rental, we felt at peace with our decision to head home on Thursday, giving us an extra day to do laundry and rest before heading out to a weeklong PD across the state.

After three days at home, four teachers from my school, including the co-worker I had just spent most of a week with and myself, went to the We the People Institute in Spokane. This program can BE one of my eighth-grade units, and even includes a process based summative assessment. One of the other teachers from my school who attended the institute is a science teacher, and we have plans for morphing this into a transdisciplinary unit for the eighth graders. One of the other teachers from my school in attendance will be a first-year teacher this year. She took the spot of someone who cancelled at the last minute, and turned out to be a very fun travel partner. She is going to be a great addition to our team this year!

The institute was excellent. The whole thing was for one specific resource for civics, We the People: the Citizen and the Constitution. It could have felt like a high-pressure sales pitch but wasn't. The institute was given a federal grant to bring teachers together to teach them about the resource and how it is designed to be used, culminating in mock hearings. In addition to the classes, each teacher had their own room in a historic hotel, was fed catered meals (or given cash for the meals not provided), and is getting a FREE class set of textbooks! We even went wine tasting and had a winery tour as part of a session on federalism.

I am excited to bring everything I have learned and worked on this summer back into my classroom next month. My classroom is a long way away from being ready for students, since we don't start until after Labor Day. But I can't wait for school to start!