Summer Excitement

Things I am excited about for this summer:

1. Getting enough sleep.

2. Continuing with the Kayla Itsines (here) exercise program. I started in January, and during the school year, I could only get myself to do one full round in the mornings, but I still feel stronger, and there is an insulated 6-pack in there somewhere. I just know it. Come out, come out, wherever you are.

3. Get serious about the Amanda Bisk (here) stretching routine. She made some new-to-me comments about why stretching your muscles is important - boosts circulation, balances your nervous system, ... during the school year, I was not able to carve out daily time to do this, and now I can.

4. Going to APCS training with Maria Litvin (well, we are not going together, but I have heard she will be there ....). Our APCS class "made" for the following year. I'm going to have a mix of newbies and kids who took CS1 with me. For that reason, I am going to flip the class. Lots of work, but hopefully way more useful.

5. Going to Rochester, NY for continuing ed on DE. Whew! This time around, I won't be the slow person in the room, and I may even further my skills and things I can bring back to the students. I've never been to Rochester, and I hear it's beautiful.

6. Doing solo studying of drawing. I started art lessons in May, and have to take the summer off due to fun travel, but I LOVED it. All the classes were/are differentiated, and I'm interested in pen/ink drawing, like this and this. We were taught out of the "Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain" techniques, and it was/is so fun.

7. Continuing to improve my Spanish. I started to take classes in January, because my attempts at solo study always got pushed aside for other more pressing tasks. With the classes, I had homework and I didn't want to be THAT student in class that was unprepared. We talked every week for 2 hours in class while we were learning. There were also Happy Hours where we had to only speak Spanish. I am also learning via Rocket Languages (which I love). I had used this program to learn a bit of French this past year, and found it effective. I then signed up for the 14 lessons of Spanish, and now that I'm near the end, I wish I had gotten the reduced price for buying all 3 at once.

8. Taking this online Python course. A former student made me aware of the 9 week free course, and now we will be virtual classmates..