What happens when a Math, Art and Barbering Teacher find time to exchange ideas?

As this school year draws to a close, I finally have some time to sit down and do some blogging. June has been a whirlwind for me and today was the last teacher day at my school. I finished collecting the laptops for the year, signed out some for the summer, locked up my storage room, forgot my phone, unlocked my storage room to get my phone, locked it up again, hopped in my car and am now ready to start the summer.

This summer will be the first one for me where I have specific goals that I need to focus on completing before September. I always have ideas about what I want to accomplish but this year is different. For school, this summer is about planning for standards based grading, 20% time and project-based learning. For family, it's about spending inordinate amounts of time with my Little Princess and her Mommy at Sesame Place, the Philadelphia Zoo, Cape Cod, Williamsburg and any place else we feel the need to visit. For me, it's all about work on the house, CrossFit and Paleo.

Back to the question that leads of this post.

What happens when a Math, Art and Barbering Teacher find time to exchange ideas?

Only good things!!

Last week, I was lucky enough to spend some time talking with the Art and Barbering teachers at my school. We told each other what was successful about the year and what we hoped to accomplish next year. What was great was that we did it on our own. The two parts of our conversation that stood out the most:

• We all want to create something amazing at our school and know that we have the students to do it. Our Art teacher wants to do murals throughout the building and we talked about what to do and where. She decided that she will work the idea into her classes of older students and talk to our principal about installing them in the halls and classrooms.
• We asked ourselves why we don't do this more often. As we talked about our "instructional groups" that we were placed in by the administration, we realized that none of us really found anything beneficial from the meetings. We decided to somehow keep this dialogue we created open and growing throughout the summer and into next year.

I can safely say that I haven't been this excited and motivated for a new school year in quite some time. I'm going to post thoughts during the summer and try to get caught up on Twitter and some reading I want to do. But for now, all of that will have to wait until the beginning of July. I have a lot to do this summer and I'm going to need my rest. See you soon!