Summer Goals

As I explained in my last post, I am completely in love, absolutely obsessed with summer! One of my favorite things about summer is the extra time to get ISH done. (Yes, “ish” is a part of my regular vocabulary.) For those of you that haven’t been in school for quite awhile, you may have forgotten why school breaks are so necessary. School is intense for both students and teachers. It’s like a full-time job crammed into 8-9 months. And it’s different than any other full-time job. For students, they take anywhere from 6-12 different classes over 9 months’ time and get graded on every single one. They have little control over the teachers they work with and often have to take subjects that are completely unrelated to anything they ever want to do for a career. For teachers, you have all our regular professional duties like preparing lesson plans (figuring out what you are going to teach and when), typing up assignment sheets and syllabi (so students will know what they are doing), physically teaching your classes (trying to cram new knowledge into sometime reluctant minds), meeting with students to give further instruction, resolve problems, deal with immaturity, and then grading and recording all student work. It’s pretty fatiguing and you always take work home with you. But on top of all these responsibilites, you also deal with certain emotional burdens. You try to help students who struggle academically. You try to overcome student apathy, laziness or downright disrespect. You try to balance compassion and grace with firm expectiations and fixed boundaries, and sometimes that means you are the one teaching a student a hard lesson about responsibility. You often become a part of students’ personal issues such as parent problems, depression, anxiety, break-ups, sickness, etc. You try NOT to become involved in these issues (and thankfully you get to be far more separated from them when teaching college instead of high school – praise Jesus!), but you can never avoid them completely. So teachers get breaks because they are absolutely necessary for our mental and emotional health. The almost endless cycle of grading essays needs a stopping point and that point is NOW. I do not have to grade another essay until September 27th, 2011.

So what will I do until then? EVERYTHING. A number of years ago, my friend Kristin and I started creating summer goals. These goals ranged from the funny (watch all three Back to the Future movies in one sitting or learn to play chess), to the practical (paint room or work out three days a week) to the deeply significant (read or memorize Scripture). You get the idea. Since we started doing this (gosh, it must have been five or six years ago now) many of our friends have begun doing the same thing. So here are my goals for Summer 2011. I have no papers to grade, nothing I am being forced to read, and a lot of extra time on my hands. I have never been one for laziness, so here is what will be filling my time for the next three months:

FIRST AND FOREMOST… FINISH WEDDING THANK YOUS BY THE END OF MAY.

Reading:

• Catch up on reading recent additions of Real Simple that are sitting in a box next to my couch
• Read remaining issues of Domino (R.I.P.) that have been sitting around my house for a couple years now
• Read Radical Womanhood by Carolyn  McCulley
• Start Systematic Theology by Grudem (goal to be done by the end of summer 2012)
• Finish Future Grace by John Piper
• Get a basic grasp on qualitative research methods and read three books for my mommy blog paper

Okay enough reading…I do too much reading during the year… Let’s get to the fun stuff, like…

• Clean out house (every cupboard, closet, corner and cranny – what’s a cranny?) and prepare to move
• Find a house to buy in Phoenix!
• Watch Calamity Jane and Waiting for Superman
• Upload old pics onto facebook
• Blog five days a week
• Get basic sewing supplies and fix/update a few articles of clothing in our closet
• Update i-tunes library (get rid of stupid songs I never listen to and buy new music)
• Print and frame a picture for Micah’s desk at work
• Make deviled eggs for Micah 
• Add weights and abs back into my workouts (at least 2x per week)
• Make homemade Moon Pies
• Organize my recipe binder
• Begin a Scripture memorization plan
• Start growing a small herb garden (so I can be a true homemaker)