parents

What I Did Instead of Work I Should Have Been Doing

September 11, 2011
By

This one will be short, because I’m going to bed early. It was a rough weekend. The wife went out of town this weekend, leaving the boy and I to our own devices. We went to the climbing gym, and were literally the only ones there. It’s a co-op, so there aren’t any employees, and we used our keycards to get in. We cranked up the house sound system, and (literally) rocked. I wish I could say it was midnight, but it was closer to noon.  Then I took a nap while the boy worked on his web site. We ate fries. We played Wii. We read books. Mine: David Lee Roth’s autobiography, Crazy from the Heat. One of my fave books of all time. It’s out of print (a shame) and not even available in e-book format, so I’m reading an actual hard cover book! My friend got it on Amazon after I had raved about it awhile back. I’ve almost killed it in a weekend. The boy’s: He finished the last of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books this weekend. We watched football. Oh yeah, and I took him to a punk rock show. The old 80′s silly punk band,

Read more »

Various…

December 13, 2010
By

More grumbling… How about this classic? You give in to much pleading and allow something to be turned in very late. After-everyone-else’s-has-been-graded-(none-too-quickly)-and-returned kind of late. And then…THE NEXT DAY, you start getting pestered, “Have you graded that yet?” I’ll get right on it. Grumble… Or this one: You get handed a pile of stapled work. “What’s this?” “My mom said I needed to get my grade up, so she made me do all this work.” “When did you ask what you could make up or even IF you could?” “We thought I could get some extra credit.” I’ll get right on it. Grumble… More seventh grade straight lines… We’re still grooving on The Midwife’s Apprentice. They were cracking up at Jennet’s “economies” at the inn where Alyce works. The over-yeasted bread, the weighted mugs, the fakie on the clean sheets… Oooh they gross out at that one. “Better not be sleeping on the bedspread at a motel…” “Ewwwwww.” They also can’t believe the sawdust in the piecrust. “Ewwww.” “Sometimes they put cellulose into those high fiber breads. You know what cellulose is?  Wood fiber.” “Ewwww.” They also can’t believe how they used to drink beer at every meal back then. Even

Read more »

Grumble…Grumble…Grumble…

December 6, 2010
By
Grumble…Grumble…Grumble…

“How long have you been doing it like this?” “Years and years.” “And you’ve never had a problem before?” “Never.” I don’t know about you, but this is my 21st year of teaching and my 18th year at the same school, and I have been having the above conversation more in the last couple of years than all my previous years combined. The term that is currently in vogue is “helicopter parenting.” It always begins with kicking out my servants. My servants work during my prep, and that’s when the principal comes for me. “Could I talk to Mr. Coward for a minute?” D’oh! What have I done (or more likely in my case, not done) now? “Well, I got an email.” I used to hate seeing that red light on my phone that meant I had voice mail. As I have said many times before, I hate talking on the phone, so I was stoked when the light stopped working. But these days, most people jump straight to email. And they like to try to jump straight to the top of the chain of command. Here are a few snippets of what comes next… “They don’t like how you have

Read more »

Grandma’s Hose

March 17, 2010
By

Just a little circle-time sharing… One of my classes just loves to share. I keep telling them I don’t care, but…they keep sharing anyway… I’ve had to institute the “WTP?” rule. What’s the point? “Last night, I ate Chinese food.” “Thanks for sharing. And the point is…?” “Ummm. I thought the Kung Pao chicken was tasty. But it was realllly hot.” “Still waiting…” “Ummm. The point is…if you eat Chinese food, you should probably order Kung Pao chicken, but make sure it’s not too hot.” sigh. But every now and then, they share too much, even for them.  One period a day has an extra 10 minutes for school bidness and handing out paperwork and etc. Any extra time, they want to spend sharing. A while back, during “circle time,” we were talking about nicknames. “I have a nickname for pretty much every one of you.” “What’s mine?” “You don’t want to know.” “I hate nicknames. In elementary school they called me Pi_ er Diaper.” (I swear, I still can’t even type it without cracking up. That just rolls off the tongue.) After everyone in the room had expired from laughing continuously for five minutes, I managed to say, “You

Read more »

Random Featured Post

“Do you love me?” (Also: Weird “Week”)

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 [...]

more -->


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

Archives

May 2012
M T W T F S S
« Apr    
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

Recent Comments

Links

Privacy Policy

Tags

cartoons Charlotte Doyle Class Activities clickers CPS CTEL Flashback grammar high school idiosyncrasies irony Mailbag Me mechanics middle school teaching Monsters on Maple Street Moodle online learning oral reading Outsiders CHapter 5 Outsiders Chapter 7 RaffleKing Ray Bradbury Reading Richard Cory Seventh Grade Behavior Stories of Seventh Grade substituting Teaching Teaching Tips teaching with technology teaching with technology teaching writing Technology techology testing The Earth Men The Giver The Midwife's Apprentice The Outsiders Tips Tips for teachers Tom Sawyer Wiki Writing