Wednesday, August 31, 2005

The Third Day

Tomorrow is the first day of my third year of blogging!

*****

It is possible to spend an entire hour teaching sixth graders

  • how to take the laptops out of the cart
  • how to turn them on
  • how to use the little dot in the middle of the keyboard that works kind of like a mouse
  • how to turn them off
  • how to put them back in the cart, neatly


I borrowed a page from Mz. Smlph's blog and rather dramatically informed the students that if the laptop cart were to become a mess, I would have to stay at school to fix it, instead of going home and cooking dinner and feeding my cat - and that my cat and I would be very hungry and I might even cry. The sixth graders just looked at me, not sure whether this was a joke or not.... a few nervous giggles. Over the next year, they will come to understand my sense of humor, which they will most likely come to disdain by the end of 8th grade. C'est la vie.

The children are smart and charming. I can't say it often enough. The other teachers, who introduced them to our school's "core values," reported that they ate up the activity, which was to create short skits to illustrate right & wrong according to the core values. Some groups were begging to do not one, but two or even three of the core values!

I should have stayed at school to organize my files and decorate my room and find permanent homes for all the science supplies... but it was just too sticky. Also, I only got to drink half my coffee this morning, and apparently, I need the whole cup to fully enter the world of the living.

We are in a kind of limbo regarding the hiring of a new science teacher. The details are boring but limbo is a little disconcerting given that school starts in a week. Either I'm teaching 5 periods a week of physical science to three classes, plus health, or I'm teaching 4 periods a week of physical science to three classes, plus 4 periods of earth science a week to 1 1/2 classes, no health. I'm not particularly stressed out about it - it's out of my control - but I am finding myself having trouble starting anything with such a large loose end looming.

I resolve that today I am going to move all the files from my old computer to my new one, a task I dread so much that I put it off for two whole months. That is, if I don't get distracted by this week's Carnival of Education.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I hope the kids put attention!
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