Ok, friends and colleagues! We are down to SINGLE DIGITS in our countdown to the end of another crazy school year!! Six or seven days after today. Woo!!!
As always, I love to share my summer reading list. I usually feel like I have more brain power to spend on more challenging books in the summer. Sometimes, the school year is so crazy, I can’t read anything really intellectual. But summer is when I don’t wear out my brain all day so I have brain power left to read the “good stuff”.
I hope you find ways to learn something new and challenge your brain while you have more brain power available to you without those pesky kids around all day!
You certainly don’t have to read the same books as I will but I hope you’re starting to compile your summer reading list too. And if we DO read the same book, I’d love to talk about it in the fall!
So here goes! Tracy’s summer reading 2018. Cue the summer jams!
Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston. Yes, Zora has a new book out despite being dead for 60 years. But what a subject -- this book is the product of her extended interviews with the last survivor of the middle passage. Yes, in the 20th century, there was an 80-year old man who had been brought over from his native west Africa at the age of 19. He remembered Africa and the journey clearly and told Hurston all about it. Rumor has it that the dialect may be a challenge, but for Zora and the topic I’m willing to work through it. It has languished unpublished in legal confusion until now and I’m pretty psyched about what this WPA-era anthropologist can tell about the horrors of slavery.
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack Davis. The 2018 Pulitzer prize winner for history is all about THAT gulf -- the one we will all be visiting this summer with our sunscreen. I may have to get meta and read about the Gulf while sitting along the Gulf with my toes in the Gulf. It’s supposed to be a huge-scale environmental history cover everything from continental formations to vacations and Hollywood. I can’t wait!
Origin Story by David Christianson. I also love Big History -- the idea that science and history go together to explain the history of everything from the Big Bang through globalization. Now comes a new one-volume book to explain it all. It brings out my inner adolescent who wants to know “what all these classes have to do with each other”. Origin Story should help me put it all together.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Another Big History book to help me get my brain World-History-ready for next year! This is Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel. He’s really interesting in his emphasis of the link between geography and history. This is not a new book, but I never got around to it.
Never Work Harder than Your Students by Robyn Jackson. I have been poking through this one for a couple of months, but it deserves a sit-down, focused-read. It’s brilliant about how to make teaching great (again?) and how to have your kids work harder than you do. She takes some unexpected paths to get there, but that’s what I like about it. Hint -- it’s a lot about relationships, but not just “getting along”. I have been finding this book powerfully spot on and could be a fabulous way to get your kids to work harder while you reduce your own exhaustion level.
Building Executive Function: The Missing Link to Student Achievement by Nancy Sulla. I am fascinated by what I have been learning about executive functioning. Do your kids struggle to START their work? Do they not remember ANYTHING about last week or even yesterday? Do they lose everything? Do they struggle to get/stay focused? Do they struggle to solve a problem (math or real-life)? They’re not just lazy, slackers, or “low”. They might struggle with Executive Functioning. What is it and how can we help them build these skills?
Ok -- your turn! What’s on YOUR summer reading list? How can you enjoy your summer and learn new stuff? As always, I love to hear from you! EMail me at newmantr@pcsb.org and share your summer reading list!
-Tracy
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