Vacation Starts, Let's Get To Work

My first day of vacation was greeted by the highest close of oil futures in history, just shy of $140 per barrel. The stock market dropped and unemployment increased by.5%, the largest one month increase in some time. I went and filled up the truck with gas and it cost $70.00. On top of that I still had to go to my classroom to bring some things back home so I could work on them over the summer. After all of this, maybe I shouldn't have vacation. That is quite a bit all at once.

A lot of people think that once the end of school comes and summer vacation starts that teachers live a life of leisure. I guess that some do. Many, many others teach summer school, prepare for next school year by planning, rewriting curriculum, going to classes to catch up on latest research, prepare things for their classroom, etc. Summer is not necessarily a vacation for teachers.

I started my summer (All right, I know that the Summer Solstice doesn't officially arrive until June 20th.) by heading to school and cleaning out my classroom; dusting, rearranging, cleaning out, and minimizing. I will spend quite a bit of time organizing things, preparing learning centers, and generally planing the upcoming school year. Oops, I forgot about my reading books. You see, some of the students can get a little rough with the story books so I have to bring them home a play "Story Book Hospital" and repair many of them. This next school year our campus will be downsizing the Kindergarten from 4 classrooms to 3.

The best thing about summer is the lack of deadlines. That means if I don't feel like taping up books this morning I can do them later. Of course, If I want to do it all tonight I could, highly unlikely but I could if I wanted.

Later this summer I will be taking 57 hours of training for this next school year. Fortunately, 30 hours will qualify for a $200 stipend. That leaves 27 hours. If I can take another 3 hours I will qualify for another stipend of $500. That' $11.67 per hour. It could be better but at least I have a job for next year. Unfortunately, there are many that can't say that.

© 2008 Barry T Horst


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My Summer Vacation, Sort Of

When I became a teacher people told me I became a teacher for three reasons; June, July, and August. I would laugh and reply that it wasn't true because school generally began in the middle of August and teachers had to report before then.

Well, the State of Texas in it's infinite wisdom decided last year that school should not start before the last week of August but schools still had to meet the required 180 days. I guess you can tell what that means for most schools now. Since they can't start until the end of August , most schools have to go into the month of June unless they have cut out some holidays through the year. Waco ISD's last day for students is June 3rd and for teachers it is June 4th.

When the new school year begins teachers will have to report on August 18 and students will report on August 25. Now I know that most of you will say that still gives me most of June and August off and all of July. Not true. You see our district offers summer training opportunities for all staff. While this training is not mandatory it is strongly encouraged. Several campuses will begin a new campus climate program called TRIBES. Also, the district has adopted a new Math program and my campus will phase in a new reading program. All of this requires training. So for my summer enjoyment today I scheduled 51 hours of training during the month of July.

So for all of those who think a teacher becomes a teacher because of June, July, and August; you can tell them I became a teacher because of 3 weeks in June, 2 weeks in August, and not much of July.

© 2008 Barry T Horst


This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Please visit the Giveaway of the Day near the bottom of the left sidebar for free software downloads daily.