School is out. The list is complete. We begin the projects, great and small.
Kitchen Counters
g
Sunday Ride
With the big end-of-the-year concert coming up this week, the Boy had an extended Carolina Youth Symphony practice this afternoon, going 2.5 hours instead of the usual 1.5 hours. K and I usually take a walk with the dog during that time, but today, I decided I should take a bike ride on the Swamp Rabbit Trail, our local rails-to-trails treasure that we use too seldom. I began by riding to the northern starting point in Traveler's Rest, then turned around and rode back to downtown Greenville before heading back to Furman University, where CYS practice is held. It was a total of 37 kilometers.
The height of my riding was when I still lived in Poland, and a 37 kilometer ride would have been a short ride from my village to Nowy Targ, the nearest (Polish) town. One of my favorite routes was a 50 kilometer ride around a lake just over the border in Slovakia. It usually took me a little under two hours.
Today's ride went 1:50, with a weak average speed of 20 km/h. I felt like I was flying. I felt my speed (I don't us a cycling computer -- I just track rides on my watch) was surely higher than an anemic 20 km/h. Then I remembered I'm 20 years older and a lot less practiced than when I would make an international circuit around a Slovak lake. Perhaps that's not a bad result, all things considered.
And there's more to be considered. Increased problems with cholesterol has been on my mind for the last year, and a few much-higher-than-average blood pressure readings had me heading to the doctor for some reassurance, which is why I'm heading to a local clinic for some tests tomorrow. Still, my watch reassures me: I've gotten no notifications about symptoms of elevated blood pressure, and other metrics suggest my cardio-health is above average.
My resting heart rate has been under 60 for the last month, for goodness sake.
My VO2 Max is above average for the last six months, also suggesting that I have good cardio fitness.
The fact that I'm even giving this so much thought reflects the change in my thinking: in my fifties now, I have to think about my health in a way I never did before. It's nothing big, I suppose: everyone who wants to live a long and healthy life starts thinking about these things at some point, making changes and sacrifices along the way that would have been inconceivable a decade ago.
Playing and Trimming
The Same Weeds
The same weeds that plague us plague everyone...
Another Conclusion
Tomorrow is the last day of school for our small charter school. It will be the final day of my twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth year as a teacher. (I can't recall recall; I don't really care to count them.) It is the end of my least stressful school year in recent memory. It is the first time in eighteen years that I've not worried about how my students will do on the state year-end test that is ostensibly to measure student mastery but is in fact an awkward and inaccurate measure of teacher effectiveness. It is the end of my first year of teaching primarily sixth graders. And it is the end of my first year teaching a new subject. Each of these firsts impact me differently.
For all the years I taught English, pacing was of utmost importance. The state gave me a list of topics that my students would be tested on at the end of the year; the district gave me a pacing guide that was to dictated the order and duration I taught each topic; I had my own classroom experience that often conflicted with the district pacing guide; and I had 180 days with the students. Add to this (or rather, subtract from that last element) all the testing days we had for worthless benchmark tests, even more useless common formative assessments (CFAs -- educators love acronyms), equally futile common summative assessments (CSAs, as one might guess), PSATs (actually useful for the students), and a handful of other required assessments, and it's easy to see why any unit that needed more than my planned time became an instant stressor. That time had to come from somewhere: more time on topic x means less time on topic y, which could easily affect the results of the ever-important end of year test. This year, though, if I felt we needed more time for a given topic, I simply added more time. No stress; no worries; no issues. Having that freedom was more liberating than I'd imagined.
The previous eighteen years of my teaching career were in an eighth-grade classroom. I knew eighth graders as well as I knew anything. I knew their likely behavior, their maturity, their level of abstract thinking, their enthusiasm (or rather, their lack thereof as often as not). Moving into a position in which two thirds of my students were sixth graders was initially stressful, but I soon realized that sixth graders are the best middle school group to teach. They are so very funky, silly, energetic, and excited that every day seems a dance more than a drudge.
Finally, teaching an entirely new course with only a very skeletal curriculum was a daunting prospect when I first accepted the position. What could I not teach?
In all, a great year that leaves me excited about next year instead of dreading it.
Memorial Day Conestee
Fourteenth Party
In the evening, it was family games all round.
Our Mailbox
Forever crooked thanks to guests backing out of our neighbor's driveway...
Final Middle School Awards
Athens Cat
