Tag: Stories of Seventh Grade
“There’s already something on the back of mine.” (Also: Racial Harmony.)
It was our first day back in the classroom after 8 days in the library. We were all glad to be back. “Oh, my clicker…how I’ve missed you.” One of them actually said that. OMG. What a day. Full of action, and laugh after laugh. First there was the video. YouTube is blocked in our […]
Continue Reading...What’s a Rerun of a Flashback Called?
I was trying to wait until I reached 100 posts before I did this. You know, like in television, your series used to have to reached 100 episodes before you could go into syndication ands reruns. But I figure with my bad paw, I have a bit of an excuse. (It’s getting much better, but […]
Continue Reading...What if they…? (The Gas Effect.)
The hand is better. I’m not The Craw any more. (I hope the vintage Get Smart reference doesn’t date me too much.) It’s not all the way better, I still don’t have use of my most important finger for bicycling in traffic, and I still can’t actually pick up much of anything with it, but […]
Continue Reading...Oblivious
They call it a teachable moment. One of the arts of teaching is recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities that happen spontaneously. Opportunities where a combination of what you said, how you said it, which class you’re in, and how they reacted to what you said, combines for that golden moment where you can get […]
Continue Reading...Insert the G.
We finally finished Tom Sawyer. Some of them just gave up on me. Some of them realized it got easier as they went along. Some of them actually enjoyed it. But ALL of them had fun during one of our last discussions of the book; it’s chapter 33, where Tom and Huck go back to […]
Continue Reading...Sometimes they’re actually listening!
Wednesday is vocabulary day; going over the homework, explaining and exampling, then the pretest. And that means the Raffle King. He decides whether or not they get to use the “cheat sheet” (the corrected homework sentences) on the pretest. As I have said before, it doesn’t really help them (it tends to make them second […]
Continue Reading...Out-to-Lunch Middle Schoolers Say the Darnedest Things
This past week just disappeared on me. I’ve been spending my time monitoring the Tom Sawyer Moodle Experiment, and thinking of ways to expand and build on it (it’s working beauty so far). I also need to figure out the accountability angle; all my grade grubbers are wondering how they’re going to get their extra […]
Continue Reading...There were tears in our eyes.
We’re reading Tom Sawyer now. Future posts will address the increasing difficulty with reading that book with today’s seventh graders. I’ll also talk about what we’re doing and all that. But now, I just have another classic seventh grade line to share. Yesterday, we were going over chapter three, where Tom sees Becky (“The Adored […]
Continue Reading...“I like how you’re all mean.”
Today we were working in pairs (Que milagro – pairs in Mr. C’s class!) on one sentence summaries for the first seven chapters of The Midwife’s Apprentice. Sometimes I have to remind them that this is English, and we do have to put down our clickers and write now and then. They actually liked this […]
Continue Reading...“But, what’s a…?”
OK. I’ll get back to the -isms eventually. I just have another great seventh grade line to share. Or two. A seventh grade class is the perfect straight man; they often don’t realize how funny they are, or how often they set you up for a funny line. We’re reading The Midwife’s Apprentice right now. […]
Continue Reading...“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 […]
Continue Reading...Let’s Play: Can You Understand a Seventh Grader?
The last one was easy. Let’s really up the ante. We’ll have three rounds. Go! Today we were talking about euphemisms. I’m starting to get them ready to read The Giver. (I’ll be talking soon enough about the end of The Outsiders and starting up the new novel. Dunno how that slipped by.) After explaining […]
Continue Reading...A First!
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 […]
Continue Reading...Old School (St. Mel’s)
Is there a today’s equivalent of the old Mutt and Jeff duo? SpongeBob and Patrick? What do you call a dynamic duo of 7th grade boys? These are the kind that drive you batty, but there’s just something about them that makes it hard to get mad at them. Like Ponyboy describes Two-Bit. But they […]
Continue Reading...Chapter Nine – Part I (Also, sarcastic comedy.)
Admittedly, chapter 9 has some filler. I still don’t get Pony’s little poll about why each of them fights. I finally eliminated questions about that from my quizzes. Unlike almost everything else in the novel, this feels tacked on, maybe just to build tension for the rumble. There are a few laughs. Soda trying to […]
Continue Reading...