One-Week Paid Summer Study for Teachers

[Editor's note: jd2718 is a math teacher and the Chapter Leader at a small high school in the Bronx, and writes a blog, also called jd2718.]

Sometime during my first three years teaching, my uncle, a retired chapter leader, scolded me: “Jonathan, there’s always a reason to work in the summer. Just never a good reason. Take a vacation.” I said yes, and worked anyway; and finally one year my program was canceled, I took that vacation, and, man, summer vacation is a great thing. I’ll never give it up voluntarily again.

Now, I talk to teaching fellows and tell them the story. And I tell them, unless they are absolutely desperate for money, not to work summers. And if circumstances force them to give up their summer, it should be one summer; it must not be habit. The restorative power of those weeks is tremendous. I could no longer think of returning to school without it.

But what to do? Big vacations can cost big money. Hanging out in New York is OK, but there are other options.

The National Endowment for the Humanities runs summer workshops for teachers. Four to six weeks. Too long! (at least for most of us). But more recently, they started sponsoring one-week “Landmarks of American History.” They pay $750 and reimburse transportation. The week is 5 days. You hang out with other teachers. And learn something. And visit somewhere. It’s a good, cheap (you might come out ahead) vacation. (Application deadline is March 19.)

And, if you teach something other than social studies or English, they still might take you. I (a math teacher) did two of these two years ago. I highly recommend the week in Lowell, Massachusetts, at the cotton mills there (with a side trip to Old Sturbridge Village, and another to Concord and the battle site and the Emerson museum and the Alcott house and Walden Pond…).

Landmarks in American History: Teachers study on location for a week in the summer. $750 stipend. Take a look at the (partial) list of programs and places:

• Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry and Place, Amherst
• “Stony the Road We Trod”: Alabama’s Role in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, Birmingham, Selma, Tuskegee
• Remembering the Alamo: Landmark of American History and Culture
• The American Skyscraper: Transforming Chicago and the Nation
• The Most Southern Place on Earth: Music, Culture, and History in the Mississippi Delta, Cleveland Mississippi with trips to Memphis…
• Pearl Harbor: History, Memory, Memorial
• Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Her Eatonville Roots
• America’s Industrial Revolution at the Henry Ford, River Rouge
• A Revolution in Government: Philadelphia, American Independence, and the Constitution, 1765-1791
• “Aiming for Pensacola”: Riding the Underground Railroad in the Deep South
• Women’s Suffrage on the Western Frontier, Wyoming
• Inventing America: Lowell and the Industrial Revolution

Link: National Endowment for the Humanities, Landmarks of American History

Visit their page to learn dates of each particular program and to get more details about how to apply.

[Cross-posted, slightly edited, at my blog.]

Tagged: summer study, summer vacation

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