Every summer, I am thankful for that break from students and teaching.  I know, I'm not supposed to say that, or even to admit that it is a vacation, but it's true.  It's also true that teaching is more than a full-time job during the school year, and that makes up for the time "off" in the summer.

Of course, anyone who pays attention will notice that I am constantly thinking (to a fault) about the new school year during the summer weeks.  I visualize Open House, the first day of class, and all of our forthcoming over-the-top units and projects, and I picture it, every year, as being the perfect year - the year that everything comes together for this teacher.  The year I have it completely figured out.

Truth be known I am very thankful for an extended time away.  After nine months in the classroom and facing all the aches and pains that come along with the job and its peripheries, I don't know of a teacher who doesn't in some degree look forward to some weeks off.

The misnomer, then, must be this idea that I am getting paid for a vacation in which I am not working.  Not only do I put in many hours planning and preparing for the next year - and this year organizing things in the physical classroom - but as mentioned above, I also spend countless hours of unpaid overtime during the regular school year.  It all averages out to a point that I may actually be spending hours working for nothing.

And I'm not ready for summer to end yet.  With school supply lists already in stores, it's very much like seeing Christmas decorations in October.  Let's not rush things, people!

Mental Floss has an article about our friend Brian Robeson, the main character in Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen.  In the article, Paulsen reveals many truths about his own life and the ways his experiences influence his writing.

In find it interesting that Gary Paulsen prefers to live away from densely populated areas.  One of his reasons is that when he is under the influence of people and crowds, he tends to feed his drinking habit. Recognizing this, he prefers to feed his desires to live off the land instead - even making his own boots and clothes.

Paulsen has been in some scrapes during the course of his life, and he has been able to incorporate those experiences into his novels for young people, revealing truths about the world along the way.  His real experiences include forced plane landings, living in a cave, and being attacked by a moose (but not eating raw turtle eggs). When he was young, he endured his parents' bad relationship and subsequent divorce, and even that made its way into one of our favorite books about survival - Hatchet.

Look carefully at the picture below.  What you are looking at is an image from Antietam following the bloodiest single-day battle in United States history.  That image is superimposed with an image from the same angle, taken just this year.  The little white church building has been rebuilt since the original one was destroyed in 1921.

These images are posted on The Guardian website.  It's an interesting article, and the pictures there include "sliders", with which you may toggle back and forth from original Civil War photos to photos from 2015.  I spent several minutes looking at every aspect of each picture to see how much things change and how much things stay the same after 150 years.  Check it out for yourself.

We are the Joplin Eagles, and as such we are birds of prey - raptors.  I thought I would have some fun with that while trying to express this idea that we must reacquire passion in our classrooms.  The requirements will always be there, and the standards will always change, but the magic happens when our passion comes alive.  Herein lies the key to unlocking the process of survival and success in education.

Raptors.  R.A.P.T.O.R.S.  That is, Revealing A Passion To OuR Students!  How do we become RAPTORS?  How do we reveal our passion for our chosen careers in education?  Keep reading:

There are several talons upon which our passion regally stands.  T.A.L.O.N.S., that is.  Tenets About Lighting Our iNnovative Sparks (or something like that).  These are the things I believe are necessary for the nurturing of a teacher's passion and to help it explode in the classroom:

In July of 1976, I was 10 years old.  When Popo revealed his latest creation, I quickly put together the plan to create a long-lived family tradition - to fire it every year on the fourth of July. Already, the nation was in a patriotic mood, turning 200 years old, but my patriotism was always a step beyond normal:  my bedroom was adorned with revolutionary wallpaper, and I had a collection of historical American flags (I wish I still had those!).

We commenced to firing that eight-inch barrel, using black powder as the propellent.  I can remember standing on Popo's back yard, helping him light the fuse to fire a one-inch steel ball at a target across the lawn.  Most of the time we didn't include the ball, but just wadded paper towel or toilet paper and stuffed it into the barrel.

Here's a graphic from the mind of educational consultant Dan Haesler.

Just because students are working - or even collaborating - doesn't necessarily mean they are all engaged.  We have a long way to go to achieve complete engagement in the classroom, but I'm not sure that's what we want either.  Not only might a fully-engaged student body be chaotic, but there is something to be said for compliance. Educators need to know the difference and the appropriate times for each.

In this world where employees are given assignments - perhaps unsavory assignments at that - and where employees are thrust into collaborative groups or assembly lines, those employees must be able to complete the assignments, often with specific parameters. There are times when conformity and compliance are the desired result - both in the work week, and in the school week.

Like every buzzword that comes swooshing through the educational pneumatic tube, even engagement must be taken with a grain of salt.  While I love it conceptually, and while there is value in the spirit of entrepreneurism and fully-free engagement, it just should not be the end-all method for raising and educating our children.

- but reducing it to a two-word slogan doesn't get people to believe it or act upon it.  If it did, I would stop writing this post, now, and just leave the title.

I don't know that we often think about relationships outside of romantic ones.  The truth is we have relationships with everyone whose path we cross.  Obviously some relationships are better than others.

For a teacher, the challenge is in establishing relationships with his students as soon as possible...and then maintaining them throughout the year.

Such relationships may be deeper and harder to achieve than we would like.  Districts, schools, administrators, and teachers would love to have something called a magic bullet.  I'm not sure where the term came from:  the Lone Ranger has a silver bullet forged from the silver badge of his ranger brother, and a silver bullet can seriously end a werewolf, but I know not of the power of a magic bullet.

A successful, positive relationship is the key to discipline in the classroom.  By the way, it helps in a parent-child situation, too.  Because this is true, and because proper discipline is greatly desired, a relationship is a majorly important thing.  It should be a course in every college elementary degree program!  I'm here to warn you, though, deep relationships are not magic (or any other type) bullets.

In many classes, these days, you will encounter something called a clip chart.  These are easy to use and easy to understand.  Spread like an infection through Pinterest and teacher blogs around the world, the clip chart is a cutesy, artsy piece of decoration that hangs from a bulletin board in the classroom.  When a kid shines, she can move her clothes pin (which is not called a clip, by the way) up on the chart.  Less desirable is the result when a child misbehaves and the pin is moved down.  Conceivably, a kid could move down and back up all the livelong day, and never receive any consequences for his negative actions.  In other words, he can "work the system".

I've not used a clip chart to monitor conduct in my classes.  I've used a combination of Positive Discipline, the positive behavior supports our school subscribes to, and Class Dojo.  Why not a clip chart?  It's simple really:

1. Many teachers found it on Pinterest, which I believe puts teacher creativity in shackles.
2. It's cute, and as such it would be disingenuous for me to use it.  Beauty is only skin deep.
3. It allows a child to "work the system" as described earlier.
4. It does not provide the teacher with short- or long-term data to use in evaluating the system or any behaviors under scrutiny.
5. "Everyone else" is doing it, and anyone who knows me knows I don't like to follow the crowd.

Class Dojo is also not a magic bullet.  Teachers around the globe use the program to monitor student conduct, but I cannot believe that it was designed to fix the problems.  The key in that last statement is the difference between monitor and fix.

What I believe Class Dojo does is provide the teacher with ongoing tracking information pertaining to particular behaviors.  A teacher can easily track both negative and positive behaviors with this tool, and as such may use the information to establish deeper, more meaningful, individual relationships with his students.

You see, some teachers believe that avoiding negative points in the program and inflating the positive points is the secret to using Class Dojo.  They believe that a naughty kid can be fixed by rewarding every little positive moment they catch him doing.  I call that shallow, and I think those teachers are dreaming of magic bullets.

Instead, let's use Class Dojo as a way to legitimize behavioral conversations.  Absolutely, reward the positives more than you punish the negatives, but at the same time, you must have one-on-one discussions with your "troubled" student.  I like the idea of focusing on the positive, and I do, but at the same time, I have to remember that as a teacher I must establish a deeper relationship with my student. My fourth graders know when I'm being fake. So while I make those attempts to be positive, my students also understand that they have to legitimately earn those points. It is our job - together - to change the behavior in order to earn them. The points mean more to them when they know I didn't just give them the points to manipulate them.

The museum at the memorial is one of the best two museums I have ever encountered, and now, after extensive upgrades, it is a full telling of the history.  My ultimate test of a museum is the amount of real artifacts versus replicas, and this museum passes that test.

With the upgrades, visitors now see the license plate from the truck that contained the bomb.  One may now see the sign and the door from a hotel where Timothy McVeigh stayed along his path to OKC.  You may hold your breath when you see and understand the implications of the shirt McVeigh wore upon his arrest, along with his Michigan driver's license, the citations issued for his traffic stop, the ear plugs that were in the passenger seat of the stolen car he drove, and the car itself.  And that's not to mention the actual bomb fragments, the gavel used by the judge in McVeigh's sentencing trial, and many other real objects - all in addition to survivor and rescuer stories and artifacts.

The renovations at the museum include some amazing technology, as well, incorporated into the displays, video presentations, and a number of really well-presented, interactive touch screens.