Sadly, the first thing that happened was that I locked my purse in my teacher locker. The keys to the lock (along with apartment keys, metrocard, cell phone) are IN my purse. D'oh!
The janitor saved my ass and broke the lock at the end of the day. Before that though, he was like, well, at least it's nice out today, you can sleep outside. I was like, eee, don't tease me!
Let's see. My Do Now was easy-peasy: Define 'cereal.' I used that to talk about more mythology. I shared the story of Demeter and Persephone. Right on cue, a girl in Class A asked, what does this have to do with cereal? I said, good question! Any guesses what Demeter's Roman name is? It's Ceres. And that is where the word 'cereal' comes from. Ta-da! I think they were a little underwhelmed with this one. But hey, I can't be thrilling all the time with this stuff. At least they listen when I read them the story.
All the classes took a practice test today. It was short. After I collected the answer sheets, I used overheads of the first passage and question set to model the strategies for answering multiple choice questions, and how to look for clues and tricks and stuff.
During this part in Class A, Mr Principal stopped by, with another AP and a special visitor. They looked at my assessment notebook. A few minutes later, Mr Principal came over and told me that he LOVED it. Whew! I was happy and relieved and grateful.
Oh, before they got there, there were announcements made by the special visitor. Little K goes, as a kind of throw-away aside, "White!" I turn and raise an eyebrow: "Is there something wrong with that?" He giggles and goes, "No, I--" and gives me a hug. Heh. It was cute.
During my one free prep/lunch of the week, I got a coverage, naturally. It was seventh-graders, and I started off with my now-routine spiel: "Hi, I'm Ms C, I teach ELA in 6th grade. So you have two choices today. We can do a writing assignment, or we can play a game. Who votes for the writing? [no hands] Who votes for the game? [all hands] Okay, great, let's get started." And it went quite swimmingly. Or at least dog-paddlingly. Phew!
Class B was rowdy. No, that's not true. Three boys were rowdy and that distracted me and everyone else from hearing or paying attention. The rest of the class, bless them, patiently raised their hands when I did for quiet and showed me they were attentive and waiting for me to continue.
Class C I had to rush through just the test, no Do Now and no review. That will be tomorrow. Two smart boys who finished quickly began grading tests from A and B while the rest of the class finished up. Sweet!
After school I had to finish up my bulletin board. Before school, I'd put up my objective, rubric, and title. After school, I had time to actually put the work up. I'd made copies so that I could give the kids back their work, since it is their next draft.
Soon enough, it was time to leave to go to my own class. It was WARM out! I love it, but it sucks to be me, because I'm always lugging all kinds of shit around, including my giant long coat. Time to switch to the cute little red corduroy coat, methinks. Anyway, lugging in the warm weather is no fun and not ventilating.
The first class was alright. Not terrible. My cute nice friend who gives me rides had decided to skip, and some others were contemplating it, and I decided to be spontaneously 'naughty' and also play hookey. Whee!
Here's my rationale. Not like you need it, but apparently I do. I'm a good girl. I go to class. Like, always. Even though math last semester was stupid and TOTALLY useless, I never missed a class. Of any class so far, actually. I have already missed two sessions this semester, but those things were beyond my control (conference night and vacation in Seattle). I will not skip again, I'm sure. But the second class is SO USELESS. We're not missing anything by missing class. We don't gain anything by BEING in class. We just sit and write notes back and forth to each other (me and cute friend). Fun, but still a waste of 'classtime.' If I can spend an entire class session grading my OWN papers, clearly something's wrong.
Again, I'm a good girl, I'm pretty game for most things education. I'm good at telling myself, well, this may be boring, but there are some interesting or useful or fun things, it's not so bad. This class? None of that.
I'm being overly defensive because again, I'm a good girl. Too good, if I have to rationalize to this extent. :)
Once home, I got to eat a decent attempt at dinner (corn on the cob, frozen pizza, and orange juice!), watch a wee bit of tv, and also get going on my report cards. Yay! I got all the grades bubbled in. Now all I have to do is the comments. Here's to hoping that during my three preps in a row tomorrow, I can get most, if not all, of them finished. It would be SO AWESOME to turn them in at the end of the day Thursday and be able to forget about them already. Bah humbug.
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