My summer 2021

Hello! It's been a while. I hope this post finds you well. I had a very productive and fun summer this year, and I hope you did, as well.

Summer School

For starters, I worked my very first summer school. I assisted middle school students in three social studies -related courses: Geography Bee, Let's Plan a Trip, and Latin America. I love social studies. As evidence of that statement, I offer to you my college major, which was political science. I also graduated with minors in sociology and philosophy. I participated in Model United Nations for five out of my six years in college. And now, as a Ph.D. student, I'm studying China's rise to power on the international stage, as well as aspects of the Cold War and Soviet history and economics. Love social studies. Did I make myself clear on that point? If not, let me try again - I LOVE SOCIAL STUDIES!!!

But in all seriousness, and getting back on point here, helping with summer school was a very rewarding experience for me, and I hope to work summer school in my district next year.

What made it so awesome for me was that I got to learn with the students. Sure, some of the countries and topics discussed in these courses I was already familiar with. But there were also so many new things I learned. Let's Plan a Trip, in particular, was a really cool class. Students in this course were tasked with researching countries they would be interested in visiting. Each week, they gave a presentation to the class on their findings. If I remember correctly, summer school was five weeks long, so students in this course gave a total of five presentations, one new country or region each week. These presentations included details like hotels to stay at, attractions to see and experience, local cuisine and culture, interesting trivia and history, costs and budgets, and flight details.

Another wonderful aspect of my summer school experience was simply getting to meet and begin building connections with quite a few new students. Many of these students are incoming 7th graders at the middle/high school I work at (in the district I work for, middle school starts at 7th grade, and the school I work at is a combined middle and high school).

STEM Camp

Immediately after summer school ended, I got a chance to stick around for one more week to work a STEM -themed camp that my district organized. This, too, was very enjoyable, and again, I loved learning right alongside the students. I was in two sessions - one was on rockets, and the other was about coding. Check out the paper airplane I flew in the rockets class. At the end of the week, we flew - you guessed it - rockets. That was a lot of fun, and we were very lucky to have a beautiful, calm, sunny day for it.   

My trip to Key West, Florida

I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Key West for the first time back in August. Over the course of the coming days and weeks, I look forward to sharing with you my trip to Key West through recollections, photos, stories, histories of the island and some of its more well-known residents, reviews, and travel tips. There will be a number of separate blog posts coming out of these adventures, but they'll all be unified through my Key West travel series tag.

How was your summer? Did you get to go on any fun trips? Learn a new skill? Work? I'd love to hear all about your summer, so please feel free to comment below!