*cough* Ahem. *coughcough*

Man, it’s a bit dusty over here.

My poor neglected blog appears to have collected a couple of cobwebs and dustmites, and I have a list in my phone’s notepad of a half dozen blog topics sitting as lonely ideas waiting to join Internet permanency.

So far this summer, I’ve completed two more masters classes in which I crafted a full presentation on why Schoology is awesome and learned about and administered the Ekwall-Shanker Reading Inventory to two students, attended the ISTE 2017 conference in San Antonio, spent a couple days enjoying the Guadalupe River in Gruene, Texas with my husband, and played roughly 1.3 million hours of the Sims 4.

Ok, not 1.3 million, but the game did give me a notification this week that I’ve played 100 total hours. The game called this an accomplishment, but it felt a little like it was shaming me. “You have work to do! You have a blog to write! Lessons to plan for next year! Books to read! Another class to get ready for! And here you are playing the Sims. Shame!” it seemed to say.

But, no! No, Sims 4. You are wrong! I am not ashamed of my 100 hours of Sims playing time since I installed it on this computer in May. I’m not ashamed that my Sims family is now working on the fourth generation. I deserve that playing time. All teachers deserve to spend time in the summer doing what they want to do, what they enjoy, what makes them happy. We sacrifice so much of our personal lives during the school year, some more or less than others, for the sake of our students. After school hours grading, lunches spent shoveling in a salad while reworking the flopped parts of the day’s lesson for the afternoon classes, even late nights trying to sleep but worrying about that one students having so many problems at home. Like the meme I keep seeing on Facebook says, teachers don’t get summers off, we just collect our overtime. And let’s be honest here, most of us still do quite a lot of actual work during the summer to get ready for the next year.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted on Facebook “I have a carefully crafted reward system that involves to-do lists and The Sims. #gradstudentproblems.” I found this system to be incredibly effective. Both of my classes thankfully provided a calendar of due dates and assignments for the duration of the month, making it easy for me to create lists of what I needed to get done for both classes each day. If I completed my list for the day, I could play the Sims. If I didn’t, no Sims. I mean, hey, we all use positive reinforcement on our students, why not use it on ourselves?

So, in a way, those 100 hours of Sims playing time just shows how many things I actually did get done in June.

Even if writing a blog post wasn’t one of them.

(Posts about ISTE, my classes, and other topics of actual substance coming soon!)