Homie Base was just beginning, and kids were still straggling through the door and jabbering at each other and at me, and I felt a poke in my shoulder. Someone was penetrating the bubble. At first I ignored it. Maybe I was mistaken; surely they know better than that. But the poking continued. Finally I turned, and there was Mrs. G, she of the infamous line, “I’m sick and tired of smelling your nuts.” A fixture at our school, and in our district. No other teacher in the district (450+ teachers) has been here longer (45 years — my wife had her in jr. high). I like to joke that in 25 years, the only teachers who’ll still be here will be me and Mrs. G. She has her hands behind her back and she’s doing her thing of repeating a phrase out of the blue, as if you’re supposed to understand what she’s talking about. And because you don’t understand what non-sequiturs like, “Can you believe what that woman is doing to us?” mean, she repeats it to aid in your understanding. (This one was about our head of IST — I figured this one out right away. The
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I have a SmartBoard in my room these days. When we were awash in grant money a few years ago, our site bought three. Two were mounted in classrooms, and we put the third one on wheels (just like the pic in the link) so it could be moved from room to room. The idea was that one would allow people to try out the idea and learn how to incorporate it into actual lessons. Then we might buy more. The reality was that when I got all the software dialed in and all the issues worked out so I could do tech support for the others (about a month), I passed it on to my then-BTSA mentee for his social studies classroom. I figured with all the maps and pics and suchlike, he might be able to use it more fully than I could in English. I mostly just doodled on it. He’s had it ever since. A week or two ago, he asked me if I wanted it back. He said he hadn’t been using it that much, and he was going in the computer lab for a while, and then…etc. He wasn’t going to use it for
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(Sung — way off key, and sort of warbley — to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree.”) I guess we need to talk about the King. On Wednesdays, after we go over the vocabulary homework, and discuss the words, I give them a vocabulary pretest. If they ace it (100%), they are exempt from the vocabulary portion of the Friday test. I used to have one of them flip a coin to decide whether or not I let them use their “cheat sheet” — the homework page we just went over and corrected — on the pretest. What they don’t believe when I tell them — even though it’s true — is that, on average, their scores on the pretest are lower when they use the cheat sheets, and fewer of them get an exemption. But they like to think it’s a security blanket, so I play along. Then I discovered the King. I would give you the URL of his creator’s web site, but he has some other, shall we say, inappropriate shtuff. (You can do a Google search if you really want to check it out.) So I took the liberty of “cloning” the King. If you click [...]
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