Vacation!

So, I know I have been horrible about posting, but I promise once the school year starts I will get better about it. There will be much more to say when I'm in the classroom with 30 4th graders all day. (Yes, I've again switched grades. Same school, but now I'm w the 4th grade class at M School. I LOVED 4th grade, so I'm excited)

As of now, I am on VACATION! Yay!! Summer session is over, I never have to look at either of my final papers again, and I have two weeks off to enjoy time in DC with John and go home to California to see the fam. Hooray!

In filling out the course evaluations for my very short, but action packed, summer session at Penn, I reflected a bit on the summer, and I feel like I really learned a lot. Although I am sick of talking about the "funds of knowledge" in my neighborhood, I really am sold on the idea of teaching through the "Teaching for Understanding" framework advocated in our Social Studies methods class. I really enjoyed designing my three week curriculum on immigration, and I feel like I learned a lot in the process - I'm also hoping that its something I can use in the spring when I'm in the classroom full time!

I stopped at the Penn bookstore's education section to pick up some summer reading for the next two weeks, and in case you're interested, here's what I got:

1. Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen... we read a chapter of this in Social Studies Methods and I thought it was pretty cool - it has definitely been changing the way I want to teach history.
2. Letters to a Young Teacher, by Jonathan Kozol... after reading "Shame of the Nation" and "Savage Inequalities," I had to have Kozol's new book. It looks like he wrote it just for me!
3. City Kids, City Schools...a new compilation of essays on urban education by lots of awesome people - Lisa Delpit, Michael Eric Dyson, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Pedro Noguera, etc.
4. Holler If You Hear Me, by Gregory Michie... one chapter of this was assigned in my course packet for my School and Society class, and I loved it, so, I picked up the rest of the book.

and two non-education books:
5. Run, by Ann Patchett... "Bel Canto," one of her other books, is one of my favorite books of all time, so I of course had to buy her new book.
6. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy... Pulitzer Prize winner, and I read a great review of this one in the NYTimes. Plus, I figure I should read something other than education books on vacation. :)