Stories of Seventh Grade

Christmas Stories

December 22, 2010
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I’m on my 16 day weekend. Sixteen glorious days of sleeping in. They say you can’t bank sleep. “They” are wrong. I do it every weekend and vacation, and draw from the bank during the 183 days of working. I go from getting up at 4:30 AM to about 9:30. For me, that’s the best part of vacations. This year the weather gods are not smiling on us. We have gone from 80 degree days a mere week and a half ago to five straight days of rain. Twelve inches of rain and lakes in my back yard. I haven’t missed  four days in a row of skating in YEARS. You call this vacation? I couldn’t imagine living in places where they get real weather on a regular basis. Anyway, before I go into hibernation and start hitting you with reruns  (“If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!”), I have a few stories for you. Some of them are even Christmas related, a couple are even mine. (Actually, I started this post last Friday, but…) I usually try to stick with the routine during the  last week before vacation every year. Usually on the last Friday, it’s raining, and

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Ooooh, Scary!

October 29, 2010
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I must confess that I am not really a fan of Halloween. I have always hated costumes and dressing up. In fact, I got married on Halloween  just so I wouldn’t have to wear a costume on Halloween any more. (We bolted for Vegas in the little red Porsche she had at the time and we went to one of those chapels on the Strip.) My wife says it was because it was the scariest thing she had ever done. The bartender at the place where we waited for the “limo” thought we WERE dressed up for Halloween. But ever since we had the boy, I’ve had to do Halloween again. I do like the candy part. The kids think Halloween is bigger than Christmas. No lie. I think they’d give up a week at Christmas to have Halloween and the day after as holidays. I can’t cope. Every year it’s the old… “Are you going to give us homework on Halloween?” “I’m gonna double up. Halloween is NOT a holiday! Besides, you’re too old to trick-or-treat. Sixth grade is the cut-off. Escort your little brother or sister and take your percentage of the candy, but you’re too old to trick

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CSI?

May 17, 2010
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Every year, I threaten to stop putting myself through this. As I have said before, let social studies or someone else teach the research paper. Let someone else slog through in-text citations. (“What? After every fact? There’s gonna be a ton of them.” Yes, I know.) Let someone else read another encyclopedia paper about the “History of…” Let someone else nitpick over the latest MLA format for the works cited list. Because, you know what? I don’t really care. My thing is to try to get them to stop with the old putting it your own words thing, and to stop relying on one source so much. I want them to know how to take notes on what they read, and be able to explain what they’ve learned to someone else, coherently,  in writing. My French teacher back in high school used to say that if you can’t explain it to someone else then you don’t really know it. I tend to agree. The kids can’t cope when I say this. (Aside: Yes, I took French in high school…only because it was the only language, besides English and Gaelic, our nuns back at St. Mel’s knew. So our foreign language

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Whatever it is…it ain’t working.

May 12, 2010
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Prologue: “Nancy” (she of fraternal twin fame) announced yesterday, “They changed my medicine, and I’m supposed to be able to pay attention better now.” Let’s see how that goes. Here on Earth. That dreaded time of year is at hand: Research. We’re going into the library next week, and we’re trying to get topics dialed in. I make them put their topic in the form of a question, and then their thesis is their prediction for the answer to that question.  I’m trying to eliminate the dreaded “all about” paper: France, Soccer, Hitler, Cheese, Dolphins. Anyway, we were going over the first handout today. It’s the one with all the technical requirements and length  and suchlike. It’s the only part anyone (especially parents) thinks is important. How long does it have to be? What size font? (Do I look like an idiot? Does ANYONE actually believe that the old giant-font-size trick works?) When’s the final draft due? Do we hafta have pictures? And etc. I was at the part in my speech about the old “putting it in my own words” method of research paper writing. “I’m betting that for you guys writing a research paper looks a lot like

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This is what I’m working with this year.

May 6, 2010
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This is what I’m working with this year.

29 mo’ day.  Never has that seemed so far away as this year. Here’s the sort of crowd I’m dealing with… We’ve been practicing with outlining in preparation for (shiver) research projects. More on that later. One of the in-class activities we did involved a brief excerpt (I actually got it from the textbook!) from an article about twins. The excerpt talked about the differences between fraternal and identical twins. I. Identical twins A. One egg splits into 2 B. Identical genes 1. 2 girls 2. 2 boys C. Occur once every 250 births II. Fraternal twins A. 1. 2. 3. B. C. Their job was to fill in the second half of the outline covering the part about fraternal twins. Of course, in seventh grade, nothing is as easy as it sounds. Immediately we veered into, “I knew these twins who…” and etc. Then… “I’m a fraternal twin!” “Yes ‘Nancy.’ I finally realized (only about two months ago!) that your brother is one of the pains in my heinie earlier in the day. I hadn’t realized you were even related you are so different.” Now Nancy is one of those people (in my experience they’re usually girls – sorry)

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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 [...]

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

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