Summer Learning

Being one day away from finishing my third week on the road at various workshops it is interesting to see many of this weeks tweets focus toward personal learning and passion for the profession.  For those in the non-teaching world, the summers of teachers are supposed to lounging around the pool, sipping cold drinks, reading books, and just being lazy.  Just one perusal of twitter will prove that many teachers break the stereotypical mold, many of them tweeting about education issues while on vacation.

In quite the stereotyped fashion, teachers often spend summers revamping their classes or preparing for entirely new classes, and continuing their professional growth.  Last week thousands of teachers attended ISTE 2010 in Denver.  In various cities across the country (and world) hundreds, if not thousands, of teachers have attended seminars sponsored by ISTE, NCSS, NEH, Gilder Lehrman, the AP College Board and many other discipline organizations.  This is how we spend our summers! 

For many who attend these workshops, we do so because we are lifelong learners and they are the way we rejuvenate ourselves and prepare for the upcoming year.  As John Cotton Dana stated, “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”  What we learn during the summer allows up to continue the passion we have for educating students in the classroom.  The rejuvenation received during the summer is often passed on to our students, making them lifelong learners in the process.  To be the best teachers we can be we should be intuitive and remember that the knowledge we have must constantly be improved, challenged, and increased.  

That is exactly what I have done since I began my second career of teaching ten years ago.  Each workshop provides me with new content knowledge, teaching methods, and professional contacts.  This summer I have gained a considerable amount of content knowledge and pedagogy by attending my local Teaching American History Program, the Gilder Lehrman workshop, The Sixties in Historical Perspective at Georgetown, and the AP Psychology workshop at Oglethorpe University.  I must say a sincere thank you to all the people involved in making sure these workshops happened.