Summer Training

Ah, those wonderful, warm summer days, where you play outside, or sit at the side of the pool and listen to the kids splash in the water. Or, if you're me, you spend the last two days at countywide training for math and social studies. This year is a new math adoption, plus the great state of Georgia has completely re-written the social studies curriculum, so we all have to go to three days of training. Of course, with thousands of elementary teachers, there's no way to do the training all at once, so there were a number of sessions. I appear to have chosen the one with NO ONE else from my school. So that's the first problem. The second problem was yesterday. I arrived at 8 in the morning ready to dive into the new math and social studies programs and learn what new materials we were receiving. Did that happen? Of course not! I spent all day sitting on a hard theater seat learning that worksheets don't really help kids learn and retain information. Really? I think I learned that in a freshmen college course about 15 or so years ago. We didn't even look at our new curriculum until 2:00 in the afternoon! Plus, the presenter was not exactly thrilling and scintillating. Needless to say, I was not happy when I got home after eight hours. I had a much longer post/vent ready to write, but I wasn't able to get on the computer last night. It's probably a good thing. Today was much better. We were able to see what technology we'll have both for us and for the kids. Then, we spent the rest of the day looking at the new social studies curriculum. To let you know just how much it has changed, my units in social studies last year were: The Flag and Citizenship, Economics, Eastern Woodlands and Plains Indians, Jamestown and Plymouth Colonists, The Continents, Australia, and Japan. My units this next year are Georgia's geography, Georgia's natives (Creek and Cherokee), Georgia's Settlers, Civil Rights (we'll focus on Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson), Human Rights (Government), and Personal Finance. So, you can see why I really wanted to see what the county was going to provide us. We have one more day, thank goodness, and I am getting paid $300 to come, so I guess I can't complain too much. Of course, I probably won't see that $300 until the end of July at the earliest, but hey, it'll help pay for school clothes, I guess. :)