Wednesday is vocabulary day; going over the homework, explaining and exampling, then the pretest. And that means the Raffle King. He decides whether or not they get to use the “cheat sheet” (the corrected homework sentences) on the pretest. As I have said before, it doesn’t really help them (it tends to make them second guess themselves), but they really like having it. And since a perfect score on the pretest means an exemption from that part of the real test, they want every edge they can get. Today, I told the friendly class that the Raffle King had been crabby all morning, and had been saying no to all classes so far. So they pulled out all the stops, and even resorted to actually using some of the vocabulary words we had just gone over. Really. It was pretty boss to see how many they crammed into that 10 second countdown. 10 – 9- “Please don’t be INDIFFERENT to us!” (Nice one, I have to say.) 8 – 7- “C’mon, I promise I won’t be SULLEN to Mr. Coward when I’m in eighth grade.” (In explaining that word, I always talk about how in eighth grade, all my former
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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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