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 list of women who could be “doing something” to us is rather long in our district. I just went to the top of the list.)
“Every good deed should be rewarded.”
“?”
“Every good deed should be rewarded.”
“What did I do?”
“And you shall have your reward.”
“What did I do?” (Now she’s got me doing it.)
“Do you know what you did?” (No, I didn’t reverse the order of that exchange.)
“Ummmm. No.”
“And you shall have your reward.”
She proffers a rather sizable chocolate cigar.
“You got your hair cut.”
I spent the rest of the day pointing at kids with my giant cigar. All I needed was a pinkie ring and some chest hair…
In other news…
We finally used the SmartBoard for more than doodling. I copy/pasted a few old sentence scramble exercises into the SmartBoard software. I made each sentence chunk a movable piece, so they could come up to the board, and physically drag the pieces around to show the sentences they’d put together. Since each sentence can go together in more than one way, it’s groovy to move the pieces around to change the rhythm of the sentence. (“Now you’re getting all Shakespearean on me! Nice.”) It’s like those magnetic poetry things, only with sentence pieces. And a few grand worth of equipment.
A lot of them had some trouble with the dragging. Their fingers would bounce and the board would think they had tapped or double-tapped, and a menu would open up, and they would flip.
Click for full-size.
“AhhhUhhh.”
“Just tap somewhere else, and it’ll go away. You’ll be fine, try it again.”
“OhhhAhhh. What’s that?”
Still, it was pretty groovy, and the kids had fun, and I think I might do it again.
If’n you have a SmartBoard, here’s a copy of the notebook thing.
