Summer Vacation - Friendly PD

Amanda and I have now been back in Canada for just over two weeks, and time feels like it flying by. Before we left Kuwait for the summer I was envisioning myself relaxing for a few days and then getting down to some prep work for next year. In hindsight that was probably pretty bold thinking when I have a wedding to plan for and friends and family to see. I'm still churning out the ideas, but the physical work has slowed down. Amanda, though, is still busy making great resources on her site.

One thing that has come out of our visiting with friends, besides the great time we have reconnecting, is the exchanging of ideas. A lot of my friends are teachers or are married to teachers, so they have an invested interest in the discipline. It can be a pretty special thing to sit down over drinks and discuss hot education topics. Collaboration and sharing are the only way that we can grow as teachers and individuals. To be able to sit down and throw ideas about changing or improving education is an invaluable form of professional development. What I'm doing in my classroom, or planning too, might seem completely foreign to my friend who has just entered the profession, but he listens and tries to understand the aim I am trying to meet. Similarly, he has a lot of fresh ideas that he wants to develop and use that I think are great, but might not necessarily have been ones I would ever have thought of.

Even our non-teaching friends often get in on the chatter, which is probably because they are forced to...oops. However, they have a variety of professional and educational backgrounds, so they bring some out-of-the-box thinking to the dialogue. It is fantastic, and it is something that helps to reinvigorate the teaching mind.

School's Out, Now The Work(?) Begins

Yes he does.

Amanda and I are a day and a half from boarding a plane to fly back to Canada for the summer.  We are both very excited to see our friends and family who we haven't seen since we came to Kuwait last September (with the exception of my awesome sister who met us in Portugal for a spring getaway).  It looks like we will be back in Kuwait around August 22, which only gives us around 2 months at home. I know that the non-teachers out there are up in arms about the fact that we get summers 'off,' but trust me I have plenty on my plate.

I will be doing a lot of education planning this summer, as most teachers will be.  I have all sorts of ideas I need to perfect in order to start them in the fall.  I've set myself up for a lot of work, which wouldn't be so difficult to complete if I wasn't also getting married in a little over a month.  Amanda and I still have a fair bit of work to do on that front, and then we pack up and head to Peru for 2.5 weeks of honeymoon joy.  Wait...why was I complaining again?  I can't remember.  The summer is almost here! 

Closing out...

Tomorrow is my last real day of teaching for the rest of this school year. We start our exams on Wednesday. I only have two exams this time around, one on Wednesday morning and one on Thursday morning. Our exams run until Tuesday next week, but school isn't officially done until June 12. We basically have a week where we can't assess anything and where students aren't likly to come anyhow.

Kuwait is an interesting place for a new teacher. The students tend to travel a lot and it isn't uncommon to have a reduced class size weeks before the end of the year. It isn't always a bad thing, but it is frustrating when you do want to see them learn. C'est la vie, I guess.

This post isn't really about much other than how excited I am to fly back to Canada for the summer. The days are starting to crawl now...