Ok, so it's been so long since I've posted or even logged in that I didn't remember my username. (Boo! Hiss! Shame!)

I am feeling appropriately abashed, I promise.

So, this summer's plan: read, read, read, get some sun, work on curriculum.

What does this curriculum work entail? Well, so far as I can tell, it requires sitting in meetings. We've met once in June, had an all day long meeting, and so far on the first day we have had two long meetings that haven't really seemed to get anything important done. But from what I understand, that's what meetings are all about. The second meeting on the first day involved us being shown a whole new software program that hasn't even been made yet, and we won't get access to it for several months. Ahh, I just love bureaucracies, don't you?

Anyway, the curriculum work itself is pretty massive. I am working with the World history curriculum (not an easy word to type, by the way), and we're working on combining the state and county curricula. I think that ultimately the idea is that the first year teacher should be able to look at one document (preferably handed to them on a disk) rather than two or three, and it will be less confusing for them. The course is hard enough to teach as it is!

So what makes this job so massive? Well, to start with, the county curriculum (a "world class document") was written by some scholars and teachers a few years ago. It has something like 267 objectives that we are supposed to teach in one year. Objectives like "Explain the causes of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and analyze why the revolutionary government progressed from moderate to radical." The idea is that once the lesson is completed, the students should be able to do the above mentioned tasks. Note that that objective is actually asking the students to do two different things. So while we have 267 objectives, some of those objectives may have multiple tasks within them. So our job is supposedly to weed out some of the extraneous stuff. But what's extraneous??? That is the question. As I mentioned earlier, it is a massive task. It's funny, we all thought it would be a piece of cake. When we met back in June, we said "Oh, we'll be done in 2 days!!!" Yeah, well, we've been allotted nearly three weeks. I'm hoping it's enough time.

As for the reading bit. My plan is to read through all the books in my house that are unread. HA HA HA HA!!! That's a lot of books. I spend waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much money at my two favorite places:
Amazon and Borders

So I have about a bajillion, maybe a tad fewer, books to read this summer. So far (given that we are nearly halfway through July), I have read:

Q is for Quarry - Sue Grafton
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd (quite good, I recommend it)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling (natch)
Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (I really enjoyed it, but it took me about 50 pages to get into the book, but once I was in, I was hooked. I have found that to be the case with both the Ann Patchett novels I've read)
Girls' Poker Night - Jill Davis (standard Bridget Jones-esque. I found that it got frustrating towards the end because I think it took too long for the main character to come to her senses.)

I'm also in the process of reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang, which I really, really recommend, especially if you are interested in 20th century Chinese history. It's about three women and their lives in China starting around the turn of the last century (1900's). The author of the book starts by telling her grandmother's story, then her mother's, and then finally, her own. Very good. It totally has sucked me in.