All this sleeping in this week is making me a little laggy… When we were talking about idiosyncrasies and -isms the other day, one of the kids brought up the fact that I have a lot of “Mr. Coward-isms.” Point well taken. Examples follow. (Some of them already have their own entries.) 1. MYOB – Mind your own business. Although it’s usually said “bidness.” The initials (a staple of Dear Abby advice back in the day) are always present on one or more whiteboards in my room. When we read Tom Sawyer, it changes to TTYOB – Tend to your OWN bidness, as Aunt Polly tells Jim. As I tell the kids, “You have enough trouble doing that.” Other variations include, “Is this your conversation?” and “I wasn’t talking to you.” 2. The Quiet Stick 3. The Raffle King 4. Clickers 5. “Save it for circle time.” – Seventh graders always want to share (except when you want them to, or about what you want them to). They like to take the discussion off-track. I like a detour now and then, but…when they start wanting to share stories and “this happened to my friend” and… Well, I’m not big on
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They say that the longer you teach at a particular grade level, the more you start to resemble a student at that grade level. In my case, I was already there when I started. Some who know me say that I’m barely out of junior high myself. (My wife pegs me from 13-16, depending…) So it’s easy for me to see how easy it is for my students to drift a bit. And certain things fascinate them, so I should know better than to even open certain doors. But, of course… Yesterday, we were debriefing after chapter 19, where The Giver makes Jonas watch his “father” release the lighter of the two identical twins. (Aside: I have a set of twins this year – one year I had 3 sets – and they have been great sports about us joking about releasing one of them. In fact, their birthweights are nearly identical to the ones in the book, with the same separation. One of them we now call “Little Guy.”) They were appalled by what Jonas witnessed. They couldn’t cope. We talked about China’s one child policy, and how many times only boys were “allowed to be born.” We talked
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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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Since we’re reading The Giver, we’ve been talking about euphemisms. We’ve also been talking about the low scores on our Friday tests. Since the tests are largely made up of reruns of the warm-ups and pretests and pink sheets (grammar/mechanics) we’ve been working on (and copying into notebooks) all week, it seems like… “Well, I’m pretty much giving you almost all the answers to the test. Umm. How much easier could I make it?” A litany of what you’d expect. I should know by now. It’s like the robot Hymie, on Get Smart, or the one that parachuted onto Gilligan’s Island. They like to take everything literally. Knock yourself out. “”No, I can’t take the test for you…or just give you all A’s…or…You all know what I mean. How many of you actually study – even a little – for the Friday tests?” Two or three sheepish hands go up. All but one are probably lying. “Hello? My sympathy level for you is zero.” So. Finally I am fed up. Some of my best experiments emerge (academic word this week) when I am fed up. This is last Friday as we are looking at the scores from the test. (The
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We’re reading The Giver now. “This book is weird.” “Duh. I told you that before I handed it out. For you guys, if it isn’t weird, it’s ‘boring.’” I was waiting for the, “It’s weird and boring,” but it didn’t come. Phew. Last year was the first year I taught it, and I didn’t even finish it out, because I had a student teacher last year, and she took over after chapter 6 or so. So, this is virgin (snicker) territory for me. It’s kind of fun figuring things out for the first time, and I really like this book. I love blowing their minds. (If you have any groovy ideas or suggestions, I’m all ears, as they used to say.) Related aside: If you have time and the inclination, check out We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was supposedly the inspiration for Orwell’s 1984, Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and The Giver. I really enjoyed it. But I’m a sucker for those crazy Russian writers. Tuesday, we had read where Lily was wishing she could be assigned to be a Birthmother. After the sadness that nobody got to be with their “real” parents, the giggles started in about Lily’s vision of the
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First off: Ok, Ok. I’m starting to find my happy place with research. Thank you for the comments and suggestions; I think next year will be better. You guys gave me some good ideas. We’re working on outlines this week, prepping for research. Among other activities, I give them partially completed outlines and word banks to fill them in with. I strategically place a few clues in the outline, and they have to determine the hierarchy of the various entries I provide, and fill in the blanks. Like this (the stats are kinda dated, but it’s a topic near to my heart): Topic: The automobile has become the American Nightmare kills 265,000 and injures millions annually, road rage and reckless driving have increased, better city design to decrease auto dependence, leading source of air pollution, alternatives to the automobile, main means of transportation, too many people dependent on the car, large SUV’s: rollovers and danger to smaller cars, more cars and more roads mean more traffic congestion, average car: 5 tons of carbon dioxide each year, contributes to acid rain and smog, leading cause of death and injury, new dangers with 2 recent developments, public transportation I. Main means of [...]
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That reminds me of those great SNL skits about the Sofa King. You know, how the prices are "Sofa King" low, the deals are "Sofa King" great, etc. (You obviously have to say those phrases out loud to get the joke.)