Summer

I just cannot wait to see what the rest of the summer months have to offer.

Let see, since football camp at the end of the school year, I have:

1) Worked on the house
2)Rode my bike around Metro Denver
3) Traveled to Japan (more on this later)
4) Planned for our second daughter
5) Traveled to the mountains
6) Played with my daugter Megan
7) Read some books
8) Worked on some AP Chemistry problems (which is a new prep for me in the fall)
9) Stressed about making my classroom more student centered
10) Played around with my iPod
11) Worked in my yards
12) Attended some very important birthday parties (Megan turned two)
13) Sold part of my childhood toys on eBay
14) Read some blogs/made some comments
15) Met with some teachers at school to determine laptop computer use policies
16) Rewrote my classroom policies
17)Watched "The Tour"
18) I am sure that I am missing some stuff but this is what my brain would allow right now.

I am not sure but this sounds like a lot and I know that other teachers are doing the same kind of things. There are people out there who think that summer is just a nice time off for teachers. I am sure that there are those teachers out there who do little thinking on their practice in the classroom. I am not having one of those summers. This is not a post that says how good I am or how much I am doing to be better but one to just remind myself that there is constant work that needs to be done. The work is not only in the classroom setting but for me also.

Japan was amazing and the next few posts that I make will be about that.

Has anyone been watching the Tour de France? Did you see the Alpe d' Huez stage? This has been an amazing Tour and the more I watch the more I think about education. If you do not know, a lot of the riders favored in the Tour were removed before the start. What this did was it left the other riders with a very "open" ride where there was no one favored rider but everyone had an equal chance. I thought about this a lot and what if our schools were places where all of the students had an equal chance. One where the playing field was level. What would that look like?