Summer days: make you forget math

While I am waiting for time to pass before returning to the manuscript, I’ve started another manuscript. Who knows whether it will ever get finished, but I have to do something with the creative muscles while the other manuscript sets. Working title for this next project: “Rainbow in the Dark.” I like to give my manuscripts funny names while I’m working on them.

The school year approaches, and I greet it with hope, enthusiasm, and trepidation. I cannot pretend not to have gotten used to summer hours and general lack of commitments with my time. However, the structure of coming back to work is appealing, and of course I’m looking forward to making this the best school year I can. I hope to implement some changes with my grading practices that will make my gradebook more meaningful as a reflection of learning, and we’re getting a brand-new curriculum that I’m excited about using. It’s expansive, so we’ll be learning as we go this year, right along with the students.

Summer vacation, by the way, is a relic of the past that we really should be getting rid of across the board. Researchers have known for ears that such an excessive break from the classroom has a demonstrably negative effect on student knowledge retention, particularly among those most vulnerable students we serve in public schools: low-income family students. These students perform worse on tests covering the same material from May upon their return to school in August. This phenomenon even has a name among education researchers: summer brain drain. As much as I love the break, it’s got to go. It probably won’t happen, though. Inertia is a powerful force in the world of education policy.
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-J. E. Ayers