Why my trip to New Zealand will make me a better teacher this week….

I just returned today from an amazing three week tour of New Zealand with my wife. My plan is to post photos and captions somewhere in cyberspace, though I haven’t figured out exactly where, and given the start of the new semester this coming week, it may take some time before I am able to do so.

Given that it was the end of the semester before we left, there was no need to even think of bringing work along. Instead, I was able to spend my time focused on the most breathtaking 3,500 kilometers of driving I’ve ever done, giving mountain biking a try (with the scars to show for it), and staring down trails like this:

It amazes me how taking time to completely take my mind off of work and teaching somehow tends to result in doing some of my best brainstorming about work and teaching. Making time for genuine renewal is a real productivity booster. I read The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working by Tony Schwartz a couple years ago towards the end of the school year, an excellent book which explores this idea in depth. I found myself agreeing with all of the concepts then, even though I had done the complete opposite throughout the year. It is counter-intuitive to take a break in the midst of stress – you think about how many little tasks you can get done in the ten minutes you might spend taking a walk, or the thirty minutes you might spend running a few miles, and it becomes too easy to rationalize not  taking a break even though there is plenty of evidence to show that it does good things for you.  It’s the same principle behind the Google twenty percent rule through which employees are given 20% of their work week to work on whatever projects they want to work on.

I made the decision to keep most of my tech toys at home on this trip. I checked email occasionally and looked at tweets, but was otherwise fully immersed in the various adventures we had scheduled for ourselves. It was the right decision, including from a teaching standpoint for this reason: I find myself starting the semester with a big list of ideas for activities and potential projects to engage and involve students through my classroom. I am excited to share my vacation with students on a basic level, but am more excited to show how bug splatters lead to finding definite integrals, or how hiking on a glacier made me think about self similarity. I will share those ideas as I put some structure to them and share them with students over the next week or so.

In the meantime, here is just a taste of another #anyqs that is brewing at the moment:

Finally, a video look at this curious landmark from the North Island:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR74vJo-okI&w=420&h=315]