My 17 Summers
What do teachers do all summer? What have I done with my 17 summers?
A lesson to teach: Nothing to teach! It’s summertime!
Instead of a lesson, here is a little list of how teachers spend their summers:
Caring for their families. One of the biggest perk as a parent-teacher is getting to be a stay-at-home mom for two months. My extreme condolences to working parents who are trying to piece together summer child care. Check out Katherine Goldstein’s writing about the on-going fight for affordable child care in the USA here:
However, teachers who don’t have kids are not exempted from family care. Many teachers end up taking on child care responsibilities for their nieces, nephews, baby cousins, and friend’s kids. I also know a few teachers who spend the entire summer in another state or country caring for elderly parents. Raising kids and caring for family members takes a village, and teachers get to be a bigger part of that village during the summer.
Working. Teachers often pick up summer gigs. Sometimes that is teaching summer school, but often it’s not. Picking up contract work or retail jobs is common. When I worked with a bunch of 20somthing teachers in Colorado, many transitioned to working as rafting guides in the summer.
Napping
Focusing on Passion Projects. Summertime is the time to train for a marathon, write a book, build a house, train a puppy, plant a garden, or start a band.
Traveling!
Professional development and curriculum planning for the next year. While there are often professional days within the year, it’s hard to deeply think about new ideas and strategies during that one hour after school when you are trying to secretly grade papers during your district-mandated meeting. However, multi-day summer intensive trainings really gives teachers the time and space to think about how to engage student thinking. Even better, some teachers connect travel and professional development by applying to opportunities like this or this or this. Keep an eye on teachingtraveling.com for news on all the latest grants, scholarships, funded trips, and other travel opportunities.
Reading
Setting up their classrooms. Most teachers spend a few summer days setting up their classrooms, but some teachers go crazy with the painting and the decorating and the organizing and will spend entire weeks in their classroom. This has never been me. I’m the opposite what an interior decorator (an interior destroyer?) and have made peace with the fact that my classroom and home will never be aesthetically pleasing.
Life maintenance: September is crazy busy, so I always spend the last two weeks of August doing meal prep for the entire month, making freezer meals, buying fall birthday presents and Halloween costumes, and deep cleaning all the things that I won’t touch again until winter break. Likewise, the first week of summer break is always spend playing catch up on things I neglected in June. Summer is also the time for orthodontist appointments, bloodwork, and car maintenance appointments.
Did I miss anything? What else do you teachers out there do during the summer?
If you enjoyed that, Jennie Robertson wrote something similar here:
Places explored and things done during my 17 summers
Summer of 2007: Lesson planning. My first year of teaching showed me that I was woefully unprepared to teach, so I spent my first summer writing EVERY SINGLE LESSON PLAN for the first three months of school. 10/10 do not recommend.
Summer of 2008: Planned a big wedding and went on a big honeymoon.
Summer of 2009: Professional development. I took classes from the AMAZING Cyndi Giorgis at University of Nevada. She taught about using children’s literature in the classroom, which transformed my teaching.
Summer of 2010: Taught summer school. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. The school days were shorter and a group of us teachers had figured out how to sneak into Las Vegas hotel pools, so we’d be out of the classroom and into bikinis well before happy hour.
Summer of 2011: Taught in China. I’d quit my job at the end of the school year, so this summer was a jumble of moving, helping an elderly uncle move, and traveling.
Summer of 2012: Eating and professional development. I was pregnant and broke this summer, so my goal was to attend all the professional development opportunities that included free food. The week long AP conference included free breakfast and lunch (I’ve never taught AP before for since this conference), but nothing beat the week-long training at a Google site. The training was totally useless, but Google feed us lunch AND took us out to dinner every night AND we also had free access to their well stocked micro-kitchens.
Summer of 2013: Moving again - this time with a baby.
Summer of 2014: I had another baby at the end of May, so summer was my sole maternity leave. While this was (slightly) better than the six weeks I had for the kid pictured above, one summer is not nearly enough maternity leave.
Summer of 2015: I started freelance writing this summer. I also trained for a pretty fast marathon…not fast enough to qualify for Boston though :(
Summer of 2016: Travel, but mostly in-state trips. My friend and I also created and ran an inter-faith day camp for kids at the refugee center connected to her church.
Summer of 2017: Same as last year, but while training for another marathon
Summer of 2018: Disneyland! I also wrote and queried a book proposal.
Summer of 2019: Reading. I was on the NCSS Trade Book Review Committee and read/reviewed over 100 books.
Summer of 2020: Doomscrolling. I also spent a lot of time on zoom preparing a totally useless document to help teachers transition to online teaching.
Summer of 2021: Paddle boarding and hiking
Summer of 2022: A zillion local trips (Mt. Rainier, camping at Deception Pass, a week at Priest Lake, a tiny-house stay, a San Juan island trip, a concert at the Gorge, the Hood-to-Coast relay) and a week visiting family in Oklahoma.
Summer of 2023: Europe! I also ran a Ragnar Ultra (200 miles, 6 people, 1 van) and a marathon in Germany.
Summer of 2024: This will be the summer of writing.
A book to read: A DANGEROUS COLLABORATION by Deanna Raybourn
This book is pure fun. It’s a historical fiction, but there is not one sentence that I would use in the classroom. In other words, the perfect read to kick off summer.
A DANGEROUS COLLABORATION is a historical mystery. It’s 4th in the Veronica Speedwell series, which I had no idea about when I picked up the book. The plotting is clever enough that I didn’t feel like I missed anything, but I still want to go back and read the previous books.
The book is set in 1880s on a (possibly haunted?) island off the coast of Cornwall. Our heroine, a well-traveled butterfly hunter with a penchant for solving mysteries, ends up on this remote island with this guy she’s trying not to fall in love with and his brother. The trio are quickly tasked with tracking down a bride who disappeared the day after her wedding.
Veronica explores all the priest holds, secret tunnels, beaches, and poison gardens on the island as she susses out the circumstances around the disappearance. The book is super atmospheric, funny, sometimes a smidge scary, and an overall delightful read.
P.S. This isn’t a steamy book, but the love tension is top notch.
You have filled your summers well! I bet you look forward to them.
I have so enjoyed your writings. I hope you continue.