My Summer is Over

Tomorrow is the first day of school with students. My summer vacation is officially over - I will return back to the real world of teaching after a two month hiatus. I am certain that tomorrow morning before school begins, I will be an emotional and nervous mess on the inside. But 27 years of teaching has taught me that once the school bell rings for first period and I take attendance for the first time, my internal teacher "switch" will flip on, and I will be fine and back in teacher mode.

However, although I had this summer off, I had many opportunities both to train others and to learn at numerous CI/ADI Conferences: CI Iowa, Acquisition Academy in Denver, Fluency Matters Conference, and CI Summit. Yes, it was actually a very full summer, but when I take a step back and reflect on it all - wow, I learned SO much! For three of the conferences, I was serving as either a language teacher or as a coach/trainer; when one is serving in those capacities, one cannot help but relearn and gain a much deeper sense of CI/ADI, since one is teaching others about it. Throughout this summer, I was surrounded by so many CI/ADI folks over whom I still fanboy and hold up with such reverence; I know well enough that I must pay attention whenever I see them present and interact with them, because I am always going to glean some new piece of CI/ADI wisdom from them. I am now taking so much of what I learned this summer and am now turning them in my first few weeks of lesson plans.

Shout outs to:

• Eric Richards - For this opening week, I am Latinizing your PQA lessons on playing sports that I observed you do both in Iowa this summer and last year at CI Summit, because they are that good!
• Skip Crosby - I always have the pleasure of observing you teach a Spanish language lab to middle school students at CI Summit. I am planning on teaching about the Dominican Republic sport vitilla like you did but in Latin! It is a natural springboard from Eric's PQAs about sports (plus the Olympics are starting its second week now, so it is timely) - who says that Latin must be stuck to teaching only cultural topics from ancient Rome?!!).
• Eric Herman - I am still faithfully reading your Research Bites book (I know that it is called Research Talks, but I like the phonetics of Research Bites lol). I am now on Week 8 and reading one quote a day - much like Goldilocks, that is exactly the right size for me!

Thank you to all who played a role in my summer - my CI cup has now been refilled!