summertime

School year 7 down... and it was a good one.

Things got a bit crazy and emotional at the end, but overall I'd say it was a good year. My principal, who has been ridiculously supportive of me these past three years, got a promotion and is going to be working at the school district offices from now on. Everyone - students, staff- is sad to see him go, but we're really excited for him too. I don't think I've ever seen a person get cheers from the entire student body, but he did on the last day of school. The band played, the chorus sang, the drumline played and the students lined up so he could have a path to walk out of the courtyard. It was a really cool thing. 

Some of us are a little nervous because we don't know who our new principal will be yet, but I think with how awesome our school is, it won't really matter too much, and all the awesome will keep on going. I found out that next year I'll have the same classes, 3 physical science, 3 astronomy, and I'm hoping that I get really good at the physical science stuff over the summer. I know it was my weaker subject to teach, so my goal is to improve on it for next year. I also want to do better with teaching astronomy, because I really ran out of time at the end of the year. I knew I'd be a little behind with my trip to California, but somehow I lost a few weeks and not just one. I did get pretty good feedback on my end of the year student surveys, and I'm still trying to find time to compile all the data and comments from my students. I did start looking, and there were some pretty interesting trends in the data... but I'm going to need to really spend some time with it before I make any decisions on big changes. I'm really glad my students were honest with me, and overall the answers were very positive. I plan to make a blog post about that soon because it helps with holding myself accountable if I make a public list of how I want to improve. I guess I'm not really sure how many people read this, but at least if I think people are reading, I'm more likely to get things done. :) I usually dedicate a bit of time over the summer cleaning up my lesson plans and getting ready to go for next year, but I'm going to have very little time to do that this year.

As I mentioned a few posts back, I found out in February about a summer teacher internship at Kennedy Space Center with the Ground Systems Development and Operations team and I applied immediately. I interviewed at the start of April, and found out that I got the position in the middle of April. I start tomorrow, and I almost can't believe it's happening because it's been nearly 4 months since the process started. But it is happening tomorrow and I have to be at the KSC badging office at 8am. I'll be working Monday-Friday until August! I'm only going to be able to work for a week before I'm off to Honeywell Educator Space Camp for 5 days and I'm really excited to be going back to Space Camp for the first time since I was there on Team Gagarin in 2000 even though this is going to be my 3rd year in a row with a summer trip to Huntsville! In August, I'll be heading out to JPL with 2 of the students who have been doing Astronomy research with me through NITARP, and we're really excited about that! Clearly, with all the space nerd fun, I won't be able to dedicate a ton of time to my lessons and plans for the year, but I'm sure I'll find at least a little bit of time. I always feel like I could do better, which I think is a good lesson for everyone, me and my students included.

I guess I should head to bed since I've got to be up bright and early to start my internship tomorrow...thanks for following along with my blog, stay tuned for posts from Space Camp next week!