Yay! (Or something to that effect) for the end of another school year. Yesterday marked the end of my sixth year of teaching. It felt more cohesive and settled than prior years, but again I walked away from the building wondering if I would be back again in the fall. This is the plight of a substitute. The ultimate goal is to be placed full time. This year was closer than years prior-half time with quite a bit of sub work in the mornings. It was the perfect set up to help me reach my goal of both establishing myself professionally at Cranberry, but it also let me have the morning time/flexibility to train for the marathon in May. 
Academically, I feel I came away from the year having gained a ton of knowledge about myself as a teacher, how to work with my strengths and build up my capabilities, and information about how education (specifically the area of reading/writing) is changing. I truly think guided reading, with the focus on small group intense collaboration of four or five students with a teacher, is a positive shift in the practice of reading instruction. I want to write more on this after I have done some decompressing from the school year.
Not to get my hopes up too high, but I was given verbal assurance that when the grant I am paid with is passed in the state budget, I will receive word that my position will be kept for 2013/2014. With that I can breathe just a tad easier. Seriously, this is so much more than the end of the previous years of teaching where I scour school district websites everyday hoping to have more than just day to day subbing work come September. I will be keeping my fingers and toes crossed in the hopes for my career to only move forward from this point. My coworker (same position as mine) and I did not have classrooms to clean up or major paperwork/progress reports to file for the end of the year, but we did mark our desks, in the hopes that we will be back come the fall!
In the meantime, summer! I look forward to being on here, hopefully more often. I have the time to work on disciplining myself into getting some things, writing included, more habitual than they have been. I am a planner, so that is probably next on my summer to do list (seriously, I plan to plan). For today, Peter and I got through our first unstructured weekday okay. Barbara is home so we had a late morning brunch. I ran (really poorly for some odd reason-mentally just trying to be race ready for tomorrow's half marathon) and then walked Big who was told by the vet that he could afford to shed a bit of weight. I am not completely without work; tonight I will be making sure our regular customers get their fried fish while trying to get them to order more appetizers and a sangria (seriously, people, your meal is $10-splurge on some potato skins!). Hooray for summer! 
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