I’m out of action for family bidness tomorrow and Friday, so today was my last day of 2009. I accidentally leaked the info early to one period, (the girls’ club) so they brought snacks today and sorta forced me into a “party” of sorts. I have never been able to resist a good snickerdoodle, or two, or ten. So that meant that I had to shorten things up in the other periods too…so it was sort of a nutty day today. But in the 2 1/2 days I had to work with this week… (Aside: I’m breaking a perfect record of never having showed a movie in class, ever in 20 years. But this time I’m having the sub roll the cheesy Outsiders movie tomorrow and Friday while I’m gone. They’ve been begging for weeks, and I’ve been telling them to “wake up” from the dream, but this will be my little Christmas present to them.) …we did a little Giver epilogue and what-have-you. Yesterday, we discussed a few “literary” type questions. #4. The denouement (resolution) of The Giver is when Jonas slides down the hill on the sled with Gabriel. a) True b) False Trick Question! FALSE! There is
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We finished The Giver today. As usual, they all hated the ending. Well, hate is such an inexact word, as they would say in the Community. They don’t really hate the ending; they are frustrated by it, they find it unsatisfying. “Did they die or what? Did they make it?” “What do you think?” In my best Bob Newhart psychologist voice. “I hate when you do that!” “We’re going to read Lois Lowry’s Newbery Award acceptance speech on Monday, but…” “I read that already.” “Thank you for sharing; you’re very special. Then you’ll remember that she shares several different theories for the ending, none of which are hers. She won’t tell us.” “That’s not fair!” “I know. She gets letters all the time asking her. She wants us to decide. I sort of like it better that way. I mean, you’d feel cheated if the last line read, ‘Then Jonas opened his eyes, and he was once again on the Giver’s couch.’ Or if Jonas turned out to be a normal kid having a bad dream on Christmas Eve.” “Yeah but…” “Ok, let’s look at the ending. Right before he finds the sled at the top of the hill, he
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They read chapter 19 in The Giver last night, and so the Q/A period before the daily reading quiz had a bit of a different tone. Many had read ahead, or read the book in a previous class (curse thee once more, ye cursed book thieves), so the release of the twin wasn’t the blow that it was for the rest of them. Still… This year they seemed to obsess on the box and the chute. “Why did he put it in a box? Where does the chute go? Was it really a garbage chute?” “It’s a little more dignified and neat. Probably to an incinerator. Yes.” “Ohhhh. So sad.” This year though, a brand new question came up. We were talking about how Jonas freaks out at the thought of Fiona sticking the needle into the old people she once cared for so gently. One kid makes the point that the babies don’t know what the needle is all about… “But what if the old person starts to question the needle? You know, hey girlie, I thought this was a release, why are you sticking me with that thing?” I remind them, like the Giver does Jonas, that these
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I’m not dead yet. It’s just been a bit busy ’round these parts lately. And I’ve been sleeping in for five days, so I’m still a little dopey. Even most of the kids were quiet today; they looked sort of tattered. “Where’s all the left-over pie I asked for?” “Everybody in my family went eeewww when I asked about rhubarb pie.” (Almost none of the kids knew what I was talking about last week when I asked for rhubarb pie. Did you know that rhubarb leaves are poisonous?) “I see how it is. I’ll settle for pecan.” On the last day before vacation we finally had time to finish the video of “The Monsters are due on Maple Street.” They really like the groovy old cars (Steve has a brand new 1960 Ford station wagon) and the old-school ice-cream man. They also crack up that somebody besides me says, no dice. When Les Goodman first tries to start his car, and Woman 1 asks him if he had any luck getting it started, and he yells, “No dice.” In every class, the kids yelled at the screen (a la Rocky Horror), “Cheese Slice!” “We went to my grampa’s for Thanksgiving,
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We’re up through chapter 9 of The Giver. And I think I have most of them buying in pretty well. The ones that haven’t read it before (dagnabbit, you dagnab 6th grade teachers who “steal” books), are actually asking questions and not just trying to sneak spoilers into the discussion, so that means I turned them on to something new. The ones that haven’t read it are suitably weirded out and eager to find out more. Since it’s a short “week” (we get Wednesday off too), we didn’t have our usual spelling or academic words pretest today, there’s barely any homework to explain or whine about, and no pink sheet to preview. “Is there a test this week?” “It’s tomorrow, and it’s worth double.” “What?” “C’mon, (to quote Steve in “Monsters are Due on Maple Street”) would someone think a thought around here? What would the test be on? We have the usual reading quiz on the two chapters you’re reading tonight, but that’s about it.” So we had time for a little MadLib action. I like using MadLibs for parts-of-speech review. I like to tell the kids that one of the reasons we work on PoS so much is
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This afternoon, I asked my friend and colleague, in his experiences with junior high, how many times he could remember seeing two seventh grade boys hugging. Sincerely. “Like a man-hug, or a real one?” “What’s a man hug?” “You know, you start out with the soul shake, and then you pull in and sorta bump chests, and then the other hand sorta slaps the back.” “Not that kind.” “Ummm. None.” “I knew it. It was a first for me too!” Milk and Cheese, the “True That” boys, were at it again. They were moving their desks closer together (again), like they like to do, and jabbering nonsense. Nothing major, and technically it was before class, but I said, “Well the quarter does end Friday, and I change up the seating chart every quarter, so next week I get to move you guys far, far apart.” One of our recent vocabulary words was crestfallen. I should have taken a picture of them to use as an example. Milk holds out both arms pleadingly (and it if it wasn’t sincere, he should be an actor) and says, “But…But…But… What about The Team?” OMG. The class is dying. Half of them are happy [...]
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