What I Did Over My Summer Vacation
I began my ten-week summer vacation in ;ate May 2015 with a trip to Houston on the Wednesday following Memorial Day. The purpose of the trip was to help my sister Anna move some of her belongings from her temporary housing in Houston back home to southern Louisiana. She is an engineer with Chevron, and she was finishing a two-year stint in Houston.
On that Wednesday night, my first night, my sister was driving us (herself, my nephew Aidan, and me) to dinner when she asked me, “What are you going to do this summer?”
I responded, “I am going to write my third book.”
Allow me to help you envision the look my sister gave me immediately following my answer: Imagine that I had just given birth to two children in two years and that I had just told her, “I’m pregnant.”
That’s the look. A combination of Are You Kidding and You Must Be Crazy.
Upon first hearing of my plan, my sister’s girlfriend, Gina, asked, “Do you not like summer?”
I get it. But here’s what I know: My ten-week summer vacation is the time for me to write a book, and if I want to write a book and not wait until the next year, I must do so when summer rolls around.
And for all of the effort and discipline it takes, I am really enjoying writing books.
If I could, I would move those ten weeks to December in order to give myself more of a reprieve from one book to the next. However, knowing that my book-writing opportunity is fixed, I realized long before May that I needed to figure out how I was going to manage writing a third book.
I already knew what topic the third book would cover: school choice. But I also knew that I must figure out how to not burn myself out.
My first book, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education (Information Age, 2014), was by far my longest: 24 chapters. Too, within weeks of signing the contract to write my first book, I was also slated to have an unanticipated major surgery that would require my leaving school two weeks early. At the time, I did not know how my medical issues would affect writing the book, and I had to get my affairs in order at school because I was ending my school year prematurely. I am a member of a wonderful faculty, and I am especially indebted to my recently-retired English colleague, Susan Summers Muchmore, who graciously assumed responsibility for both grading my students’ research projects and entering my final grades. And I am also grateful to my long-term substitute, Bob Branson, who completely assumed responsibility for providing the lessons taught to my students in those two weeks.
As I was healing from my surgery, I was able to write. And midway through the summer, I was writing a chapter every two days (writing 7 to 11 hours a day) in order to complete all 24 chapters before the next school year began.
That was my first book.
My second book, Common Core Dilemma– Who Owns Our Schools? (Teachers College Press, 2015), was considerably shorter than my first, which it needed to be in order for me two write it that next summer. I still wrote for about 7 to 11 hours a day on most days, but I had fewer 11-hour days, and I took more time for each chapter: 4 days, with one day off built in.
But in order to write a third book, my school choice book, I had to build in even more rest time to keep from burning out, and I knew it. And at the outset of my writing, I What I Did Over My Summer Vacation | deutsch29:
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