Student, Again

Three days into the AP Summer Institute, I have to confess that I’m 92% loving it, if I can actually give it an A- like that and make it sound legit. Really, it’s turned out to offer quite a lot for me. Over the past two days, I’ve gotten some great ideas for activities, been able to reconcile (mentally) how I want to do some things, and gotten so much more confident in my understanding of the exam and scoring the written portions.

Sure, there are moments when my eyes glaze over and I surreptitiously glance at the book I’m reading on my iPad while keeping one hand on my binder, but all in all it’s been a good experience for me so far. I’ve acquired a half-dozen textbooks, review books, and document readers (all mailed home). I’ve also gotten the prized possession: all essay questions (DBQs and FRQs) since the early 1970s. These make me incredibly happy. I’ve also created three units, although they’re much smaller chronologically than what we do in our program. Consequently, they’re not terribly useful for my purposes, but just the act of creating them has made me focus a little on the issues at hand and helped me feel confident about where I’m going.

I’ve gotten some good reinforcement that my instincts on grading are on the right track, which is also helpful. Having my mentor this year really helped with that, but there’s always that bit of nervousness as you step off on your own.

And tonight, I wrote an essay for the #5 question on this year’s FRQ. We were each tasked with one of the four essay questions at random and told to spend 5 minutes planning, 30 minutes writing, exactly as our students would. This puts us in the students’ shoes, although some of us may still have unfair advantages, like being able to type it, being fast typists, and being better at BSing than most high school juniors. Also, if you happen to get the question from the time period of your own dissertation, that may be a little bit of a gimme, too.

Even though it’s a Cold War question, I did panic a bit. It asks you to focus on Cold War foreign policies of 2 out of 3 presidents listed. I chose the 2 I knew I could do best with, but as I sat down to brainstorm I panicked a lot. All I could think of was “Korean War!” – which is a great start, but that’s about it. Happily, spending 5 minutes on the matter gave me time to come up with 4 or 5 items for each president, plus I was able to freewrite a paragraph where I could work out my ideas about comparing and contrasting the two as directed. By the time that timer went off, I was ready to go.

Tomorrow, I go before the AP grading fires. Will let you know how I do.

Sidewalks Have a Purpose

I love staying in places where you can easily walk to restaurants or shopping or the drugstore. Washington, DC, for instance, was great for that – I spent 2 weeks at a hostel and walked everywhere I needed to go, or rode the metro. Boston, NYC – other great places. But mostly, I travel with my car, so I’m definitely missing my self-transportation option this week. I decided that in the long run, it was best for my sanity to fly to Atlanta (instead of doing the 12-hour drive and adding more miles to my car). And yes, the hotel has a shuttle (it just needs to remember that it promised to pick guests up from the AP Summer Institute at certain times).

But why not walk? It turns out that this hotel’s idea of a gym is more like an April Fool’s joke. The photo looked great, but it’s something like 2.5 pieces of equipment set in a glass-enclosed passageway to the (over-chlorinated) pool and hot tub. So for today, I decided walking would be the best way to work out: upon return from the session, I grabbed my phone and plastic cards and hiked over to Target. Google Maps tells me it’s a mile away, located on the opposite side of the mall I visited yesterday. And sure, it’s about 90-something degrees out there and humid, but there are sidewalks that are going sadly unused.

I like adventures. It took about 25 minutes to get there and 28 to get back, only because i decided I’d cut through the mall for (A) air conditioning and (B) to shorten the distance (which I might not have actually done, come to think of it). And now I have fruit, sparkling water, and – most importantly – cases for my contact lenses. I managed to bring extra contacts, but not any cases to store my contacts in at night. #fail!

In the end, I’m happy to report that I’ve surpassed 10,000 steps for the day, gotten some Vitamin D and some strength training, and plan to join some other folks for dinner in 30 minutes. So far, not bad for Day 1.

Which means I should probably mention the AP Summer Institute, right? Right. It’s okay so far. Almost everyone else in the class will be teaching AP US History for the first time this fall – which I suspected, and which is a little disappointing. They all have more teaching experience than me (save one person), but I’d hoped to hear some ideas and strategies for this course in particular. But that’s the funny thing about AP Summer Institutes: I’m taking the “new teacher” version, which is designed for anyone who has taught the course for zero to three years.

The main goal so far – aside from getting everyone else’s syllabi past the College Board’s syste, a formality – is that we each have to prepare a unit. We got a list of unclaimed units, and the idea is to create a term list, 2 possible essay questions, 10 multiple choices, a DBQ, 2 primary sources, and anything else we want. No one wanted 1492-1607, so I took that.  Ironically, while everyone else is running scared from this content area that the test will start to do more with in 2 years, I feel good with it – probably because I teach Atlantic World History.

Which means that my unit is done. Tomorrow I’ll move on to the Era of Good Feeling, since I need to prep that section for my course anyway. But I confess: I finished the day a little frustrated and out of sorts (but not too badly so). I hope all these unit materials will be useful, but I really need to focus in on some things for me, which I may end up doing the rest of the week anyway.

For now, though, I relax and ignore any thought of how in the world I’ll transport all these textbooks back to MO with me…

Where the Peaches Grow

If June was the month of finishing the school year and teaching summer school, July is the month I travel. That all started today with a flight to Atlanta for an AP Summer Institute, which I’ll start tomorrow. So for now, I’m contentedly ensconced in my hotel room.

I’ve always enjoyed traveling, and I have a thing for hotel rooms. While I’m here for work purposes this week, trips like this aren’t – well, maybe they’re just not like business trips might be. I don’t feel like it’ll be a stressful week, but rather an opportunity to learn and plan and even get some downtime for myself. I have a TV to myself, a room to myself, and plenty of books to keep me company (not to mention almost every episode of Dr. Who that I own).

Yes, I promise I’ll actually do the school-related stuff. The rest is just for off-hours. Or for when I should probably be sleeping.

The hotel is lovely and has a free shuttle to the school where I’ll be all week. It was also pretty close off the MARTA line: so close that I figured I could walk the 0.7 miles between station and hotel, but my Google Mapping efforts showed me that I’d be navigating an overpass that may or may not have had a sidewalk. So last week, I called the hotel and they told me it wasn’t walkable, but I could call for the shuttle.

Of course, if you tell me it’s not walkable, I have to give it a go. I walked out of the MARTA station, made my way to the main road, and discovered a sidewalk. I figured I’d see how far it got me – and voila! The overpass is being reconstructed to include a fabulous walking/bike path, so I made it to the hotel on my own two feet. Of course, I still had to wait an hour to check in – I was technically only half an hour early, but they were having some delays with housekeeping or something. This is why books are an imperative when traveling!

Of course, once I got into the room, there’s this inevitable “What now?” sense that I always have. I didn’t feel like hopping into a book or doing anything else, and was disappointed that the room didn’t have one of those standard binders with “here’s everything you need to know about our hotel!” – I (dorkily) love those things. In lieu of that, I decided to head back out to walk to the mall (next to that MARTA station). I did a lap of the upper level, lap of the lower level, grabbed a sandwich and sodas and chips and cookies to bring back to the room (supplies!), and that was that.

I think I’m ready to settle in for the week. If you don’t see me for awhile, it’s probably got something to do with the 18 books on my ereader.