Just a few choice seventh grade lines, sort of Art Linkletter stylie. From Wednesday’s vocabulary pretest: 1. The sub was slow to realize when something was ____; he thought everything was fine. a) forlorn b) amiss c) apathetic d) earnest e) crestfallen Now I’ve used this one before, and I can’t remember anyone not knowing I meant substitute teacher. But this year… “On number one, you mean sandwich, right?” “Sandwich? What?” “Sub. You mean like sub sandwich?” “Ummm. No. Substitute. Guest teacher.” (Pounding head on podium.) Now I hear other murmurings: “I thought it was submarine…You know, like they didn’t know it was leaking or something.” From Friday’s Mental Floss: Sid and Nancy were comparing information about their siblings. At one point Sid said, “My older brother was born on the Fourth of July. I remember the day because I was watching the fireworks.” Nancy immediately knew it was a lie. How did she know? The Mental Floss really frustrates some of them. In a good way. There are some who almost never get any right (there’s no penalty for guessing; it’s all extra credit), but most of them get this one. Most of them. “Micah” was waving his arms
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This one is about teacher behavior rather than student behavior. A colleague of mine this year decided to go for a change, and moved (voluntarily) from teaching 7th and 8th grade math at our site to teaching… SIXTH GRADE! ZOMG! Recess! The continual lining up! Covering all subjects! Feeling the love! Only 22 kids! But this is not about that. This is about a joke he thought all his new colleagues would find funny. I know I laughed quite heartily. But they took him seriously, when he spoke to them about… Super Teacher. I just came across the pics, as I was searching for something else, and well, I just had to share. Every year, at his new school, the sixth grade classes take a trip to Yosemite for several days. There is evidently an outdoor school there that caters to trips like this, and kids from all over California come for the program. My friend “Joey” was one of two teachers from his school who went. I guess the program handled most of keeping the kids busy, so the teachers (there were a bunch from the California central valley too) had some time on their hands. Joey and his
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Yesterday I received an e-mail that took me awhile to cipher. Dear Mr. Coward, Recently I have been thinking about making a hovercraft and wanted to be able to propel it in directions unlike the ones I’ve seen on the Internet. Those ones can’t propel in certain directions, but yours I saw was able to. However, the instructions were not as self-explanatory as you may have thought it was. I wanted to build what was on the site and modify it to make my own hovercraft. Please reply to me with this email address and help me understand certain parts of your instructions. Thank you. After more than 11 years on the net, my various websites contain well over 30,000 pages. I’ve had many, many e-mails over the years, asking all sorts of questions. But this one was a first. Hovercraft? Directions? When did I teach hovercraft building? Or is this some new sort of Spam e-mail looking for gullible hovercraft fans? What page was she looking at? Was this meant for another Mr. Coward? An hour or so of mulling (as well as some furious clicking) brought me to the answer. Through the wondrous power of Google, this budding hovercraft
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It’s been a weird week. We had Monday off for MLK. I was on call for jury duty on Tuesday, so I had a sub (sorry, they’re called guest teachers @ Laguna). To make it easy, I had the guest teacher administer the “District Benchmark Exam Part II,” the results of which I’m not sure what to do with. Mostly our English department has been ignoring them, saying the tests don’t really test what they claim to. Also, everyone covers the various standards at various times throughout the year – I don’t do a research paper until the spring, so we haven’t talked much about citing sources – so the idea of testing standards a-g in the beginning of the year, and standards h-m during the middle part, and so forth, just doesn’t work very well. Plus, why do I need to waste three class periods from my precious allotment giving yet another test? Anyway, I had the guest teacher give them the test, and I’ll figure out what to do with the results later. Then we were in the computer lab on Wednesday, to work on the Tom Sawyer Moodle. This is the main reason I’ve been lagging on
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This past week just disappeared on me. I’ve been spending my time monitoring the Tom Sawyer Moodle Experiment, and thinking of ways to expand and build on it (it’s working beauty so far). I also need to figure out the accountability angle; all my grade grubbers are wondering how they’re going to get their extra credit, and some are already trying to pad their stats by furious posting of questions and answers. They hope that I’m grading on quantity. The next post will talk more about all that, but I want to post some stuff before I forget. This was a week full of funny lines from the li’l darlings. These are the kind of things I forget to remember (as my seventh graders say) over the years, so now with this blog thing, I can “remember to remember.” Yes, that was an actual line from one of them. This week’s gems: *After I “rebuke” someone in the cafeteria for not picking up his trash– “No matter how much you yell, Mr. Coward, you’re my favorite teacher, even if it’s at me. The yelling I mean. You know.” *After I use the following sentence in a warm up, The employees
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(Friday Flashback – Last Year) “Mrs. G” has been teaching in our district for over 40 years. She’s been at our school since it opened in 1980. She’s taught English, art, social studies, music, and much more. She is literally an immovable object, and doesn’t need to rise from her chair to strike fear (well, not exactly fear any more, but…) into 8th graders’ hearts. She doesn’t care what people (parents, admins, other teachers) think of her, and speaks her mind whether it’s “appropriate” or not. She currently teaches 8th grade US history, and has been going toe to toe with a particularly pesky student I had last year. Now, this “Steve” sends me e-mails about how the posts he’s reading in the discussion forums on our Moodle don’t have enough thought behind them, and he has a real brain. But he’s a loud-mouthed pain in the rear, whose parents it seems, are wrapped around his finger. I was probably the only teacher he got along with…until Mrs. G. He’s still a pain, and though, like me she recognizes and likes the Steve underneath, she’s not afeared of giving what she gets. So… Food is not allowed in our classooms. [...]
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That reminds me of those great SNL skits about the Sofa King. You know, how the prices are "Sofa King" low, the deals are "Sofa King" great, etc. (You obviously have to say those phrases out loud to get the joke.)