Keep In Touch

The New York Times reported yesterday on how people are catching up with their former teachers on Facebook.   Facebook has allowed me to stay in touch with hundreds of former students (all of them adults now), and I’m grateful for the fact that I can still know them, even if I’ll never see many of them in person again.  While it’s great to keep up with personal news, it’s also interesting to see where they wind up.  Gauging your former students’ success on Facebook  isn’t exactly scientific, but it might provide an informal look at how your school (and the community at large) prepares its students for life.

The article also made me realize that I am not in touch with any of my former teachers.  After reading, I found my old AP Government teacher on Facebook and sent a friend request.  His page didn’t allow me to send a message, so hopefully he’ll see the name and remember me–but I was his student 17 years ago.

What Do Teachers Do All Summer?

Since the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project has ended, I have a month of summer left.  The conventional wisdom is that as a teacher, I have nothing to do until I return to work in August.  Of course, that isn’t true, so for the benefit of cynics, here’s my game plan for the next four weeks:

1. Prepare to implement my KMWP research into my curriculum map for the year.  Everything we did was packaged for an audience of teachers; now I just have to rework it so that I can deliver it to students.

2. Revamp my vocabulary instruction.  I’ve been teaching SAT vocabulary for a few years now, mainly because my seniors are freaked out about the big test.  Generally, they do see the words on the test are grateful for the vocabulary.  What surprised me recently, however, was a former student’s comment that the SAT vocabulary helped her during her freshman year of college as well. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but it does make me wonder how I can gear second-semester vocabulary towards preparing seniors for that first year of college.  I hope to have word lists and quizzes (up to a full year’s worth?) ready to go by August.

3. Continue in my professional reading.  My upcoming education-related reads are not organized under any particular umbrella, and they vary widely in ideology.  I just started Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind (and I’ll probably comment on that soon), and after that, I’m thinking Jacques Barzun’s Begin Here, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and (for something more practical) Kelly Gallagher’s Deeper Reading.  Then I have to figure out how to take the best ideas I encounter and work them into my classroom.

4. Student leadership stuff.  I don’t know much about this yet; I just know I’ve been asked to help out with it.

5. Keep writing!  I’ve always modeled my reading life for my students, and I look forward to figuring out how to model a writing life for them.  Now I just have to cultivate a writing life…

6.  Keep blogging.  So far, that seems to be going okay.

All of this work contributes to my effectiveness as a teacher, and it will keep me very busy.  And although I will still have a paycheck at the end of the month, that will be for work performed during the school year, not for the work I’m doing now.

GRANOLA!

For those of you who are interested, here is the granola recipe my wife used last week.  Stacey says, “I use coconut oil, and I usually omit the vanilla and cinnamon. Because I’m that lazy.”