Instead of heading to the beach, many local educators spend June, July and August teaching children, brushing up on their skills — or heading back to school themselves.
By Robyn Meadows
Published Aug 12, 2005 13:39
The principal of McCaskey East went to Harvard and ran a leadership program for educators from around the world.
And dozens of county teachers trekked down the road to Millersville University, where they worked on earning their masters degrees.
It seems as if many educators spend little time for themselves during the summer.
“Everyone says to me, ‘It must be so great to be a teacher, you have summers off,’” said Leslie Spurrier, an English teacher at CV Middle School. “I know very few teachers who have their summers off.”
They take college courses, get summer jobs, tutor children, volunteer in service projects and coach.
Spurrier has taken courses to earn her master’s degree for several years now. But this summer, she traveled to the southern African nation of Zambia.
Safari? Nope.
She and her husband Matt led a handful of high school students from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on a missions trip through the state-based Priority 1 Missions.
The group stayed with Matt’s parents, John and Esther Spurrier, who are missionaries for Brethren in Christ World Missions and live year-round in the village of Macha.
Leslie and Matt Spurrier spent more than two weeks in Macha, which is in the bush, playing games and reading with children and performing service works such as painting a local maternity ward.
“It’s very different from Women & Babies,” Mrs. Spurrier said, referring to Lancaster General’s facility in East Hempfield Township here.
She and her husband also brought the students to an outer village to eat lunch with a family that lives in a mud-brick house with a thatched roof.
The meal included nsima, a hardened cornmeal mush and some form of cooked cabbage. To drink, the group sampled a fermented cornmeal and yam mixture.
In all, the experience gave the group a sense of perspective about their own lives, she said.
Her students will hear about her adventures when school starts, she said.
Meanwhile, Irvin Scott, principal of McCaskey East, spent 10 days in July directing some participants from all over the world at the “Art of Leadership” program at the Harvard Principal Center.
The program is hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Some of the skills they learned were using data to build student achievement and learning how to become more of a head teacher, instead of an administrator concerned only with the nuts and bolts.
They also trained for working with people according to various emotional intelligences.
There were plenty of thrills during the adventure portion of the program.
Participants split into smaller groups of 10 for trust-building activities in the woods.
One of those involved blind-folding members, who then had to follow the teammate’s voices to reach a goal.
Scott, who was a participant last year, returned this summer with a renewed sense of purpose.
“... Sometimes, you need to step back and reflect and rejuvenate on an emotional, personal, spiritual level and for those around you,” Scott said.
For the teachers who didn’t travel this summer, Millersville University provided much of what they needed.
This week, dozens of teachers are attending Millersville’s Writing Institute: VOICE!, where they are honing their writing skills, so they can share them with students.
“As a teacher, I am always looking for ideas,” Michael Heverling, a fourth-grade teacher at Nitrauer in Manheim Township, said during the writing workshop Tuesday.
Tamesa Sensenig, a third-grade teacher at King Elementary in Lancaster, would love some down time.
“This puts more ideas in your pocket,” she said. “But it would be nice to take a vacation because when the school year starts, it’s going to be intense.”
Summers have always been busy for Suzanne Kopp, a third-grade teacher from Sporting Hill in Manheim Central.
She participated in the Writing Institute to “refresh” her mind.
“I’ve taught the same class for 28 years, but I’ve never taught them the same way,” she said.
At the institute, educators are learning how to define and write with voice.
One definition of voice is when a reader can hear the author’s voice speak through the piece. It’s writing how you talk.
Lisa Roth Walter, a sixth-grade teacher at Hambright Elementary in Penn Manor, led the group of teachers through an exercise on voice Tuesday.
She charged the teachers with the task of reading articles written by education experts and school children.
“They are to find those little bits and pieces that have meaning,” Roth Walter said.
Along the way, the teachers discovered meaning for themselves.
So, even though most teachers didn’t spend weeks at the Jersey shore — and even if they did, they said they would hunt for classroom items in shops — they found their own sort of refreshment teaching others and becoming students themselves.
