I don’t know about you guys (remember the old Electric Company intro: “Hey You Guys!”), but I’m having trouble finding any sort of groove so far in 2012. The kids are all dopey and spacey (I know; how can you tell?), nothing much is happening around school, my student servant doesn’t even have much to do right now, things are just feeling …weird. … They seem to be enjoying The Giver though. I have a Q/A each day before the reading quiz, and the questions have been coming fast and furious. “They don’t know what elephants are? What are they, stupid?” “Are all the kids adopted?” “So you don’t get to pick who you marry?” (Ask Depeesha over there in the third row.) “Why do they call it a family unit?” (What? They’ve never seen the Coneheads?) ‘Why aren’t there any cars?” (THAT sounds like utopia to me.) “Why is this book weird?” (I know you are, but what am I?) … Regarding the discussion beginning over there on the right side: Mrs. M, I really want to read that book. I went to their web site and read their brief excerpts, which were no more than one sentence teasers.
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On the second day of Christmas… I had been crabby for the first half of the week for many and various reasons: a “mama bear,” a moron or two, a faculty meeting, the brrrnesss of the weather lately–30 degrees on my bike to school every day this week…really? Really? I thought this was California… But today was full of laffs. aside: For some reason, I just really love spelling it that way and seeing it spelled that way. I don’t know why, I just smile every time I see it that way. Here’s one of today’s knee slappers. (I think I might need to save some of the others for days 9 or 10, if the well starts to run dry.) A few weeks ago, I found a stash of the “consumable” workbooks that I thought we were out of, and we’re working (haha) our way through the “reading in the real world” type exercises. Yes I have blogged about this before, but instead of making you click the link to get the back story, I have conveniently included it below, along with the related “video,” which this lesson gives me an excuse to drag out each year. I’m sure my old
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I know, I know. Thanksgiving is over. Time for a new post. Well, I’ve been busy… I’ve been learning a lot about maintaining a thirty year old pinball machine. And, ummm, playing one. Digesting food. Seriously. I weighed myself TDay evening, and then again then next morning (barely–it was almost afternoon). Six pounds difference. I don’t know where it goes. Well, I guess I know where at least some of it goes. Trying to stay ahead of my video class. Since there aren’t as many hardware issues this quarter, things are moving along much more quickly. I have a couple of pairs who are two weeks ahead of last quarter. D’oh. Enjoying our 70+ degree weather. In November. Sorry. It’s one of the reasons I live here. Reading. Latest in progress: Damned (narrated from Hell by a 13 year old girl…there are certain contexts when a 13 year old girl’s perspective is the best one to have), by Chuck Palahniuk, the same guy who wrote Fight Club (never read it or seen it… I might now). Damned funny. Sorry. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (an epic in three parts totaling 1000+ pages — I’m about 1/4 of the way in). I love his work. It’s
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When I was a rookie, I was always on the lookout for some sort of regular activities that would happen every week, and give me some sort of skeleton to hang the rest of the week on. When you’re a noob, that 54 minutes show looks mighty long and hard to fill. When I started here, they already had a few of these sort of things in place department-wide. Nowadays (as the kids say) I would chafe at the idea, but back then I was stoked to have some of those minutes already filled. “OK. Monday we have a spelling pretest (the lists were even provided back in the day…and probably will be again soon…sigh), we all had to do a current events thing of some kind (I liked that one…hmmmm), we checked KBAR on Fridays…” KBAR? Wait. I just realized I already ‘splained the history of KBAR back in 2008, when this here blog first started. So here you go. (December, 2008.) When I started at my school (1993), they had an independent reading program they called Kick Back and Read (KBAR). Mostly, it was a chart with a picture of Snoopy on it. Actually there were two kinds
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When I was a kid and lived and died baseball (I gave it up forever after the ’99 strike), I bled St. Louis Cardinal red. And growing up in suburban Sacramento like I did, the only chance I would ever get to see my beloved Redbirds was when they would come to Candlestick Park in San Francisco (90 minute drive) to play the hated Giants. And one of my fave memories of going down to see them is the guy selling programs outside. “Ya gotta hava program! How you gonna watch da game if ya don’t hava program? Ya gotta hava program! Ya gotta hava program. Hey kid! Ya gotta program? Ya gotta hava program!” What was this New Joisey guy doing in SF? He talked like Archie Bunker. I loved it. My friends and I must have put dozens and dozens of different words in place of “program” over the years. Brainstorm and discuss possibilities. It has to be a two-syllable word. Then I moved here, and went to a few Dodger game down in SmellA, and realized that that guy used the same shtick. I still loved it. Where I’m headed with this near record-length intro is that middle
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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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