Busy/Lazy

I guess it's been a few days. Not much has been going on, except a lot has been going on. I guess.

Like yesterday: after school, I did laundry, worked out, and entered some more grades, ending with Heroes. Good job, me.

Grades are due Thursday. Today at school I bubbled in the comments and midterm grades. Right now I have just finished updating the last grade stuff and so, if I were so inclined, could sit at home bubbling the grades to finish everything up. Yeah, well. Actually, first I need to find where I put the final grades from first quarter. Any ideas?

We are slowly making progress with our media unit. My middle class appears to be utterly incapable of behaving themselves. So three of the last four days I've seen them, comma time! Interestingly, that they can handle. They all get to work fairly quietly and industriously. Weird, right?

The other two classes are doing better, though. We finished up newspapers and moved into magazines. The workbook I'm using has excellent worksheets that help the students break down and analyze the sample articles. Tomorrow--cross your fingers--we'll actually get to handle real magazines. I'll be hoping that they can keep track of different sections and amounts of ads, photos and features, and the like. To attempt a prevention of trouble, I told the classes that the students who work hard and behave well will be together, working with the magazines, while the students who do not work or behave well will be separated and working with commas. They were like, a-ha/uh-oh.

On Friday, my afternoon class and I had a good time. To help them in identifying f!gurative l#nguage, I played them Simon & Garfunkel's I Am a Rock. (You may remember this from a post almost exactly a year ago.) I played the first stanza and chorus a whole bunch of times, and each time more and more kids starting bopping and moving to the music, and then even singing along. It was quite entertaining. Especially when a kid asked amid the din, "What kind of music is this?" And another kid answered, "Hip-hop." I couldn't help laughing at that!

Um, so I think it's Tuesday now. My prints from Amsterdam arrived! They are so pretty, I want to show them off all over again.