So Long Summer, It's Been Fun!

As I sit here on a Sunday morning, I still can't quite wrap my head around the fact that I have only two days to prepare for school to start.  It's not that my room isn't ready or I don't know what I'm going to do on Tuesday.  Those things are pretty much taken care of (or will be tomorrow!).  It's my brain that I can't seem to get ready.  It's not that I sat around all summer.  I took two classes toward my Master's Degree and traveled in June, July, and August.  I tried to tame my yard and have almost finished sorting my basement.  I read some books and spent a lot of time volunteering at the food pantry.  It was just that I always had the option to relax if I wanted to.  And with school starting, that option goes away for 9 months.  Not that I won't have any free time.  I will.  But I will always be feeling that I should be preparing a lesson/giving some feedback/writing an assessment/revising something I did last year to make it better...
I think sometimes this is what gets lost when we don't stop to examine the teaching life.  It's a job that you don't ever leave when you walk out the school door.  And summer (for me at least) really helps me remember what it's like to be a normal person.  And I need that so that I can dive in to the teacher world again every fall.
With this said, I am excited for the year to get going.  We had a Back to School night last week and I loved seeing the new 6th graders coming in, looking around, picturing themselves as middle school students.  My brain will be full this week, learning 168 new names and faces.  My goal will be to write at least once a week about what we're doing in class or anything else that I think might be interesting.  Feel free to comment or send me an email if you ever have questions about what's going on in 6th grade Social Studies!