I took the summer off.
Really, I did minimal work related to school. I worked on my Google Level 1 certification and I read Routines for Reasoning by Kelemanik, Lucenta, and Creighton (GREAT read, btw).
I am somewhere between 4 to 6 years from retiring, but I don't want to stop learning and I don't want to stop helping my students become better life long learners. However, at the end of the school year, I was truly burnt out. I realized that all the wonderfulness of Twitter Math Camp, all the blogs written by my inspiring MTBoS colleagues, all the meetings with my fellow teachers ....none of this was going to restore me. I needed a true "sabbatical", and so I gave myself the wonderful present of mental REST.
Instead of writing curriculum, I cleaned out closets. Instead of coming up with new lesson plans, I emptied out my home office. Instead of diving more deeply into Geogebra and all the new Desmos awesomeness, I read novels and took naps. Instead of travelling to TMC, I spent a long weekend travelling with my 4 remaining siblings to visit our 96 year old uncle!
Jo Boaler posted this today and I couldn't agree with her more:
While I feel like I may have failed some of my students last year, I am rested and ready to jump back in, throwing caution to the wind. My students and I are going to do some more and better thinking this year. (Go read Elizabeth's (@cheesemonkeySF) blog post NOW)
Maybe we won't be the best at routines for reasoning, or with Geogebra or Desmos, or with openers and closers, but we will be thinking and living.
