Monthly Archives: September 2009

528. (Do the Math II.)

September 30, 2009
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The volume of e-mail from parents this year has been unprecedented. Dunno what’s different this year. Actually, I think I just figured it out. PowerCheese. Sorry, PowerGrade. I finally made the switch after being a Making the Grade fan for years. Our school bought a site license years ago, before the current IST dictatorship, and they gave us free upgrades for life! (We also had to take things to the superintendent to keep the right to keep using MtG when the district made the switch to Powerschool/Powergrade. Oh, that was ugly.) Anyway, with MtG, our site has been posting grades online for years. I made the switch because they finally upgraded the software to a point where it was (barely) good enough. And with IST wiping our computers every year, and then (grudgingly) giving us an outdated version of MtG on the network, and since we can’t download at school, it’s a pain to get everything working again in the fall. So I went to the dark side. I started last year for the second semester, so this is the first year I have gone with PG from the beginning. It’s a clunky, fairly lame gradebook program, whose main virtue

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Confession

September 29, 2009
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Regular readers of this blog (I think there are a couple of you) know that I did the Catholic school version of junior high; first through eighth grades at one school. I had a nun for a teacher six of those eight years. And I just realized today at lunch — Monday is chicken and mashed potatoes day…mmmmm…taters — that I didn’t have a male teacher until ninth grade. Then, all of a sudden, I have a math teacher who has me “by the short hair” and an English teacher who throws erasers at us if we turn our heads away from him. Dunno what that might mean, but I do know that a lot more of today’s kids need a father-type figure in their lives. Who has them by the short hair, so to speak. Anyway, we were “introduced” to the idea of confession in second grade. I’m sorry if I’m offending anyone, but even then,  I was like..Hello? I don’t think I’m going to go tell a stranger all the bad things I did, or even THOUGHT about doing. Not exactly the way the second-grade mind works. Or seventh-grade. Or… Especially if you had brothers like mine.  I

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“…more than I can chew.”

September 24, 2009
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“…more than I can chew.”

I’ve already said something about how silent my two student assistants are. But a couple of days ago… Interruption: I’ve had a few people contact me, very surprised and dare I say, jealous, that I have any student aide at all, let alone two, in these troubled times. Let me just say again that my hand-picked student aides are my ace in the hole, as they say. And I’m sorry you can’t have one. Back to the story. This year I have a mixed pair of aides, boy and girl. Since they’ll probably turn up in future posts, let’s give them pseudonyms right now. How about Chris and Tracy, after the two Partridge Family members who never got any lines. Anyway, during my prep period, once they get their instructions and start working, if I don’t initiate a conversation, we could almost go the whole 54 minutes without a word being said except, “I’m done.” This is a new thing for me. Usually I have the opposite problem. I once even had to “fire” an aide for jabbering too much; (s)he wasn’t getting anything done. Not to mention the fact that I couldn’t get anything done either. Last year, my

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50% New Material

September 23, 2009
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We  finally had a regular schedule today (54 minute periods). Monday was our weekly TCT (Teacher Collaboration Time)/Late Start Schedule (43 minute periods – the kids start at 9:30 instead of 8:20; not as collaborative as hoped) and yesterday we had the ASB election assembly (assembly schedule: 47 minute periods). (Aside) As ASB election assemblies in junior high go, this one was pretty good. But… Back in the day (2 years ago), when we actually still had a full time drama teacher on staff (she retired after almost 30 years and they didn’t replace her), the election assembly was always jazzed up with short skits that promoted recycling or previewed the upcoming production. I really miss those skits, as well as having actual drama classes at our school. NCLB. Bah. So this year, it was the usual intros by the “campaign managers” (I keep waiting for one of them to bring the candidate a towel, or fan him Elvis stylie, during the speech), and then strings of empty promises (more activities, loosened cell phone restrictions, soda machines, “listening to your ideas”). But most of them were relatively well prepared, and one even quoted Gandhi and JFK. There was the obligatory

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“Can we read Outsiders today?”

September 21, 2009
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The down side of reading the book entirely in class is that there’s usually a lot going on in class. What with the warm up, a little grammar work, vocabulary, and whatnot (there’s always that dang whatnot), sometimes it ends up… “Dang it. We’ll have to get back to reading tomorrow.” We’re a little behind this year, so we’re only up to where Pony begins his flashback (literary term!) about Johnny, while he waits with Cherry in the snack bar. I always have to explain what the “concession stand” is, and they can’t cope that you can get two popcorns for 50 cents (“Two-Bit flipped me a fifty cent piece”) at the drive-in in 1967. And since most of them have been hooked (even the kid who really, physically, cannot stop moving, even for 30 seconds) since Pony bit down on the hand of the Soc trying to shut him up in chapter one, and since that was last week, I’ve been hearing a lot of… “Can we pleeeeeeeze read Outsiders today? We could skip the warm up. And adjectives. But can we watch Mr. Morton?” (The whole “have your cake” and etc.) Today we read the part where Two-Bit

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Random Featured Post

Three-Word Phrases

Seventh graders “communicate” mostly in three-word phrases. If the phrase isn’t really only three words long, they can usually pare it down. “What’d I miss?” It sounds like  “Wuddeyemiss.” And it always comes right as you’re starting class. Raise your hand if you have had this happen in the past week. Past three days? Today? AAAAAARGH.  They want 54 stellar, well-planned and executed minutes of instruction summarized for them in 30 seconds as the class bustles in.  What did you miss? “Absolutely nothing. You might as well take the rest of the year off. CHECK THE WEB PAGE! COME BACK AT BREAK!” “Oh yeah. I forgot.” LOL (These days, they’re getting it down to three-letter phrases.) “What’s my grade?” This one is usually from the kid whose grade is in the bottom 15% , and s/he finally turned something in, and wants immediate gratification. And it always happens right in the middle of something else, something totally unrelated.  Yesterday we were talking about how Charlotte is finally seeing Captain Jaggery for what he really is. (Aside: If you haven’t read The True Adventures of Charlotte Doyle by Avi, I highly recommend it. I picked it up a few years ago [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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