Sunday Salon: July 23, 2017

My life in books:
Reading over the past couple of weeks has been good even though I was on holiday and now am grading for a course I'm teaching.

• Holding up the Universe by Jennifer Nevin--Excellent YA fiction
• The Perfect Horse by Elizabeth Letts--a super detailed non-fiction
• Scythe by Neal Shusterman--dystopian and really good!
• History is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera--LGBTQ YA that is thoughtful

Challenge updates:

• Read Your Own Damn Books--My goal was to read 25 books from my TBR shelves this year. So far I've read 31, adding one in the past two weeks. I've been reading a bunch of books borrowed from the library so this challenge hasn't gone very far recently.
• Travel the World in Books--The idea is to read books set in as many countries as possible. In the past two weeks I added two new countries: Austria and the Czech Republic.
• Literary Escapes--Similar to the previous challenge, this one tracks the US states. In the past two weeks I added one new state: Indiana.
• Read all of the ALA YA Award Winners--complete

My life outside books:

Working:
My online course ended and I think it went pretty well. The students were engaged and remained focused for the 3 weeks, which isn't bad for summer time. I also spent this past week in Los Angeles at a Summit Learning conference. Two of the schools I work with are going to do a personalized learning program this coming year and I am their coach/helper. I think it will be especially good for the continuation high school. Personalized learning is not the same as independent learning or online learning. That's one of my biggest take-aways this week. The goal is to get students to be more responsible for their learning and to emphasize cognitive skills as they learn content.

Family:

I had a birthday this past week, but there were no celebrations since I was at the work conference and I didn't tell my colleagues. However, good old Facebook alerted a couple of them and when we went out to dinner they got me a delicious warm chocolate chip cookie with a candle so that was super nice! Actually, our superintendent came down to LA to take us all out to dinner one night and it happened to be my birthday so in my head I pretended that the dinner was for me :-) My family also sent me flowers, which was a nice surprise.

Watching:

I finished season 3 of Madam Secretary and soon the last season of the Great British Baking Show will end. I'm still watching Big Bang Theory when I notice it's on. What I really need/want is a new show to binge watch. Any suggestions?