I have a few new things to lay on the kids this year when we read The Outsiders. I found a groovy audio file that demonstrates the use of the word dig as a slang term. It comes from an old vinyl record called How to Speak Hip, and although it came out in 1959 (about 8 years before The Outsiders is set), it is still a very groovy way to show the kids how versatile and expressive the word dig is to Pony and the rest. The Meaning of the Word “Dig” So now I’m going to combine this with the poem “Motto” by Langston Hughes (that I already use as one of the intro pieces for The Outsiders), and then I’ll be busting a new let’s-see-how-they-write-at-the-beginning-of-the-year assignment on them. Go here for that. I also added a few new outside links to the Outsiders page. One is to the primetime TV lineup for 1967, another goes to the top music of the time, and another gives some good pop culture and technology references.
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Wotta “week.” Considering how tired I am, I can’t believe it was only a three-day week – for some reason we had a 4-day weekend for Veterans’ day. And I done clean forgot that I was supposed to give the “District Benchmark Test #1″ (that’s a whole ‘nother post) by Friday. So we spent Wednesday darkening ovals to generate data for the district, AND there was a “multi-media” assembly that, amid the rock and rap, touted the beauty of trust and honesty (also: don’t do those things which I obviously can’t mention, because ads for them started appearing here). AND, yesterday was “parent visitation day.” Whole lotta scare quotes today too. Usually I get a pretty good turnout for these parent visitation days (it sounds like a Catholic holiday). Our previous principal (our present principal is an FNG, both to the job of principal AND to our school) instituted these as a sort of PR for parents. Many parents of ms’ers are more than a little leery of sending their little angels to the big bad junior high. (You should have seen the reaction a few years ago when the district proposed making our school 6-8. OMG. You’d have thought [...]
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