The three Rs: During summer break, teachers can recharge, refocus and renew

We checked in with a few teachers this summer to see what they do during their time away from the classroom. Here’s what they had to say:

“I recharge my batteries. I swim, I sit at the beach, I play with my kids. But I do a lot of school work, too. And there are changes in Florida, obviously, so that’s going to take some work. Also, I feel like I’ve always been behind the curve with technology at school, and our school is lacking when it comes to technology to begin with, so the past few summers, I’ve been trying to catch up. Some of it is basic but I’m getting there.”

– Brian Drake, Fort Lauderdale “When I taught, I liked to tutor over the summer. Getting some one-on-one

time with students helped me focus on the real minutia of teaching algebra. Working in front of a classroom, you have to be much more general, but when you’re working with a single student, you can try some new things and see what works and what doesn’t. I can’t say I made any major changes in my approach to teaching, but I did get a bit more visual. When you’re sitting right next to someone who is struggling, you can get a little creative with pictures or videos as examples, and I bookmarked a lot of the visual cues I used during the summer and used them in the fall.”

– Nancy Cullen, Dayton, Ohio

“I think the best thing a teacher can do over the summer is to connect with

other teachers from other schools to pick up some new strategies. My oldest sister is a principal in a fairly impoverished Chicago suburb and my youngest brother teaches at a very affluent Baptist school in Georgia, so we all come at things with very different perspectives. I teach at a private school in San Francisco so it’s cool to connect with colleagues and be introduced to others with similar goals. We can teach the same subject in entirely different ways and it’s cool to learn how others are doing it and then to incorporate that into my own classroom.”

– H.G., San Francisco

“I’ve connected with other teachers throughout the school year and over the summer — well, really throughout the entire school year — we post a lot of

ideas and stories to a group we created on Facebook. It’s just nice to see that some issues in education, like testing, are universal but it’s also enlightening and inspirational to see how hard some teachers have to work to achieve the same results that other teachers achieve during the first few weeks of class. – Kim N., Chicago

“I work a lot on my curriculum and planner for the upcoming year. I used to have a pretty loose outline of the year and

then work on my lesson plans maybe two or three weeks in advance. Now, I like to map out most of the year in advance, especially post-Covid. There are more students with IEPs and with teachers or aides who accompany them during the day, so I try to be mindful of that.

If I hand them a lesson plan a week in advance or, I’m sorry to admit, the same day, we’re not going to be able to do our best to accommodate those students, so having a detailed lesson plan early in the year really helps. And if I’m being honest, I usually get about two or three months ahead, which is still a huge help come the fall. As far as other things, I

teach literature so I read a lot over the summer since I don’t get the chance to dive into books as much during the school year.”

– M. Voss, Miami