Summer concludes

Well its been a really nice summer! After spending three weeks in France, I purposely didn't do much the rest of the summer so that I could rest up for the new school year.

I wasn't completely on vacation though. I did attend two meetings for the Maine Council for the Social Studies. I am now Vice-President and we are have been planning our annual conference for October 30. We also have a new website: http://www.mainecouncilsocialstudies.org/ and and are very excited to promote Social Studies education. As part of my role, I will be attending the National conference in New Orleans in November and represent Maine in the House of Delegates. The National World War Two Museum is right near where the Conference is being held and I've already registered for a pre-conference workshop there. I am very excited about this! It should be an amazing NCSS conference!

I also attended a workshop put on by the Maine Historical Society. They have a grant to fund lessons around using primary source documents and local history. I learned some great ideas and even came up with a project to connect a local soldier killed during World War One. Benjamin Bradford was from Wayne, Me and is buried is the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France. I would like my students to tell his story and perhaps erect a small memorial to him on campus.

I have also spent some time this summer participating in the #sschat on Twitter. This has been great in giving me some ideas for my classes. For the first time, I am teaching AP Psychology. I spent a good deal of time reading for this and developing lessons. I am very excited about this new class! I am no longer teaching through Virtual High School. It had become tedious and uninspiring, so I'm happy to have left it. I am excited to put my time and energy into my face to face classes instead. I will be doing to more Webinars this year through the Maine Department of Education on writing in Social Studies. We are moving toward a proficiency-based diploma and modifying our teaching as a result. I will be blogging about this throughout the year. This year I will only blog twice a month, about every other week. This will help me to focus on bigger issues and I think I will be more reflective as a result. It's wonderful to have time in the summer to recharge and do fun things, but I am very excited to get back in the classroom and be intellectually challenged once again!

School year, here I come!