We started off the week with a celebration. Our oldest graduated from college. We celebrated with all four grandparents, our youngest, and with a family that we have been great friends with for over 30 years. Their daughter graduated as well. Madison, WI is a fabulous college town. I will miss the visits there. During our three year stint in Zurich, our daughter will be finishing up her undergraduate education at UW/Madison. It is very likely that outside of taking her back to school this fall, the next time we will visit as a family will be a couple of months before we are moving back to the US from Switzerland for her graduation!
The moving struggles continue. It has taken forever, but just last night we were finally given the information for the company we need to contact to move our household goods. We have been waiting on this for over a month. The apartment in Zurich is available the first week in July, but at this rate, our pots/pans, and other household items will not get there until August or September! I finished painting the last room in our house that needed a touch up last night. Now just have to concentrate on getting the house cleaned and straightened up so we can start showing the house to prospective buyers soon. My family wound up filling two large construction dumpsters of stuff we needed to get rid of. I will easily fill a third one right before we move. That is a LOT of junk!
School in the US is quickly winding down. I am putting together the last of the summer work plans. It seems really strange, to not have some big plan in the works. The only real project I am doing this summer is replacing teacher workstations. Some days I feel as if I am working under false pretenses. I do not want to try and implement anything new, because I do not want to burden my replacement with something they do not feel is either needed, or they simply do not want to do. This week I have kept busy at work, trying to figure out why our transportation software suddenly stopped syncing with our student management system every night. It turns out that it actually stopped working about three weeks ago, but since no one knew is starting school right now our transportation person did not catch it immediately. Winneconne is a pretty small district (1600 students) so I wind up doing things that a CIO would never do in a large district. This morning I spent a couple of hours processing a video that is played at graduation. The video consists of baby pictures, and a current picture of every graduate. It is just a little thing, but it is something I will miss when I leave the district.
One thing I won’t miss is testing season. I will never understand the infatuation we have with testing our students. We started in March with the mandated state tests for almost every grade level. However, when that is over, we continue with other standardized tests. I looked at this last year, and in our middle school our students will take at least one standardized test per week for 12 weeks. That is crazy to me. Granted not every student is affected to that extreme, but the testing puts a lot of stress on the teachers as well as the students. There has to be a better way. That is one of the things I am really interested to find out when I do finally get to Zurich.