summer vacation – Page 2 – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

pile-of-money

Anybody ever heard of the Lilly Endowment’s Teacher Creativity Fellowships? I found out about them on Facebook the other day– it’s a $10,000 grant given out to 100 teachers across the state of Indiana for the rather nebulous purpose of “creative projects that are personally renewing and intellectually revitalizing to individual Indiana teachers and education professionals.”

In other words, ten grand for writing a grant proposal about a creative way to fucking relax during the six weeks of the summer. And they even say that if your budget for your relaxing thing doesn’t add up to ten grand you can designate the rest as a stipend. Here’s some examples of some of the crazy nonsense that people got handed ten grand for this year. These are all direct quotes from the website:

travel to Costa Rica to dive on a coral reef; study environmental conservation; learn to speak Spanish
“Hooked on Becoming a Nova Scotia Hooker”—attend workshops in Nova Scotia to learn wool dyeing and rug hooking; visit textile-arts museums in Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine
travel the country, taking lessons from master guitarists in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Maine and Hawaii; write songs and post a blog; record new songs written during the journey
create artwork from debris found while scuba diving and beachcombing; participate in workshops in Oregon and California that promote using trash to make artwork
attend workshops in Montana and Oregon to learn landscape quilting; visit and photograph four national parks; prepare quilts of national park scenes
visit historic sites in France, Greece and Italy; capture images of sites using high-dynamic range photography and video techniques

I swear I’m not cherry-picking the ridiculous ones, guys; the recipients are listed by alphabetical order by the city they’re from and I didn’t get through F. That last one boils down to go to Europe and take pictures of shit, gimme ten grand. And it got funded. That’s insane.

I am pretty damn sure that I can come up with a way to spend someone’s ten thousand dollars this summer. They apparently have way too much money if they’re giving it away for nonsense like this. Which means that some of this shit is gonna be mine.

Let’s talk about how the summer went.

In a word? Weird.

As I write this (which isn’t at 8:00 on Wednesday morning, which is when this is going to pop; I’m probably passing out locker numbers to my homeroom girls right now) I still don’t have ISTEP scores for the 2012-13 school year. We can argue– and I have, no link necessary– about how important these tests should be, and how much they actually accurately measure student learning, but the simple fact is that they’re really really important right now even if they should be. In a very real way, I’ve spent all summer unable to close the book on 2012-13 because I never got my ISTEP scores. I have kids who have already transferred or moved who I’m never going to get to be able to tell that they passed for the first time, or that they brought their scores up by more than they ever have before.

That’s kind of a big deal for me. Now, granted, I’ve got a lot of these kids back, so I can have the conversation with them this year, but it’s not the same. Psychologically, I haven’t let go of last year yet. I haven’t been able to process how well they/I did– for better or for worse– and figure out a way to adjust and/or do things better for this year, because I don’t yet know how well the changes I made last year worked out. And that’s a damn weird position to be in. (I’m hoping that by the time this actually publishes I’ll actually have scores in-hand, but I’m not holding my breath.)

Outside of school… well, it was still a weird summer. It started off too wet, transitioned into too hot– expected in northern Indiana in July– but then took a weird detour straight into Octobersville, which is where we’ve lived for the last month or so. Business at OtherJob hasn’t been what I’ve wanted it to be, because the weather never cooperated with us. And it’s made the job less fun in a way that I don’t like at all, because having something fun to get paid for is the whole point of OtherJob. I don’t like it when that doesn’t happen.

I built a deck. That was awesome. I cooked a bunch of stuff; also awesome. Ripped up some carpeting in my hallway and started working on the year’s biggest project, the new bathroom, which I’m hoping will be awesome once it’s done.

I failed at ukulele. That was unfortunate.

And then there was this place. I haven’t been a regular blogger for several years, and I managed to write damn near every day through the summer (when the hell did I start this place up again? Early June?) regardless of what else was going on. I think I only missed two or three days all summer, and while the posts haven’t exactly all been brilliant at least I’ve been writing. I’m hoping to hell I can keep up at least a four- or five-days-a-week pace once school starts; we’ll see. Weirdly, I think my schedule– my prep period is last hour– might help with that; it’ll give me time to get stuff done before school lets out, which will mean I won’t be at school as long, which will mean I’ll theoretically have time at home to write. I don’t want this place to wither, but I can’t pretend there’s not a real risk of it. The plan will be to always try and write for the next day so I can keep posts popping in the morning. We’ll see.

The biggest failure of the summer has been where it always is: writing fiction, which I’ve barely done at all. Which I never do, despite my constant desire to the contrary. But you’ve seen that rant before, multiple times, so I’ll spare you.

And that was that. Here we go again.