Sleepless Sunday Nights

I'll admit to having three issues:

1) I love Google Reader
2) I hate Google Reader during the school year
3) I do very little in the evening, school year or summer.

Issues 2 and 3 mesh really well. I used to spend my evenings before bed cleaning out my google reader feeds on my phone. Long story short: phone continually updated, crushing the battery, largely because of the enormous number of feeds I follow, and hence was wiped off the phone. The summer nights are great times to get that Google Reader professional reading done... even if you don't want to.

Tonight I started with dy/dan, a blog that I really enjoy. The construct, while focused towards math, applies to all of learning: how can we make sure that the problem we present to kids is interesting from the get-go without giving kids all the tools to solve it, therefore fostering their inherent problem solving ability. The idea transfers well from math to literacy, because all too often kids are too impatient to find information (in an article, book, newspaper, etc). Ah, but a solvable problem that they are inherently interested in holds promise. Alas I digress...

In my cleaning tonight I stumbled upon a post with the following quote from a blog (irrational cube) he happened to be reading:

Even though it’s the middle of summer, my job as a teacher seems to be unavoidable in my day to day life. I’m not just talking about the unavoidable questions of “so what do you do for a living,” but the places my mind drifts to when I have nothing else to think about. During silences in conversations, or when I close my eyes at the end of the day thoughts of my soon to be classroom are constantly filling my mind.

Those thoughts are similar to my own. I'm married to a teacher, and I am still a very unpolished version on a teacher. I have, and will likely continue to have, warts. I strive to improve, thinking of ways that I can improve my reading and writing instruction so that kids can improve. August is almost here. The realization that we are back at it is right around the corner. The moments where you are thinking of your classroom (or soon to be classroom) are important- they help set the stage for what is to come.