Second Week of March

MONDAY
Resolution Report: I tired of spending so much money on my Starbucks mistress early last week, so I’ve gone back to my faithful classroom coffee pot. Let’s see if I can stay true to Mr. Coffee this week.

I missed my lunch and prep today for a meeting with a union member (teacher) and the principal. After school, I have another meeting with the principal. I have to read three chapters in my stupid, hateful textbook tonight. I have papers to grade, but I have no idea when I’m going to get to them. 10 school days until spring break...


TUESDAY
This morning we had another action team meeting. Hurray! I love those! (Oops, I might have dripped a little sarcasm there…) About halfway through the meeting, the sole male member of my action team looked at me and rolled his eyes at our two colleagues, who were once again interrupting each other and talking over one another. One of them is harping on us about getting something finished – even though we still have two weeks according to the deadline we all agreed on a month ago. The other is ranting about the philosophy of writing instruction and whining about the lack of time to plan together and how everyone else in the school scores work samples incorrectly.

When we were finally done having our lesson plans and scoring abilities questioned, I escaped to my classroom and immersed myself in a fog of formatted responses for connections to literature. I love this lesson, and the students typically do very well with it. Today my students are working on Connect to Text, Connect to Self, and Connect to World responses, and they had some fabulous ideas for connections to the story we read. There are days when I miss the nice people I worked with at my old school, especially my two dear language arts friends who knew what I was teaching. Then there are days like today when I am grateful for the isolated nature of my new position at my new school; it allows me to escape toxic meetings with opinionated people and retreat into my classroom and into the lessons. I am a language arts expert, and I like to think that I make it fairly interesting (or mildly entertaining) for my students. I’m going to forget about the stupid meetings. My kids are interacting with literature, and I love it.


WEDNESDAY
This is fun: Today in class we were discussing the four types of conflict in literature. I walked them through each type of conflict, and then we talked about examples from real life and from literature that we’ve read. Because I work at a middle school named for a semi-famous (not really) teen adventure author who wrote a ton of books about the wilderness and wild animals interacting with humans, my students had a very easy time coming up with Person vs. Nature examples. I usually teach this part by saying something like, “Nature is trying to kill you.” We start out talking about the obvious – hurricanes, earthquakes, being mauled by a bear – and end up in the silly section – a person trips and falls because gravity is trying to kill him. They have easy examples for Person vs. Society too (peer pressure), and Person vs. Person (who broke up with whom at lunch?). It’s such a fun lesson!


THURSDAY
Modern teaching is a crazy thing. When I was in high school, I had to type my papers in Word Perfect, a pre-Windows, pre-Microsoft Word, DOS-based word processing program. I printed my papers on a dot-matrix printer with paper-feed tracks on either side of the paper. In my freshman keyboarding class, we used actual typewriters. I don’t remember when I first got an email account, but it wasn’t until I was in college. (I’m pretty sure my parents started with Juno.)
Yesterday, I assigned a summary paragraph in “final copy form.” That meant the students had to write out their paragraphs in pen, with no mistakes or cross-outs. They asked if they could type their papers, as they always do, and I gave them my usual speech about not accepting excuses, even if their printers break or their computers crash, etc. I say things like, “If your printer breaks, grab a pen and start writing.” Every time I do this, I tell them (or someone asks) that it’s okay for them to email me their assignments or bring in a flash drive. (Good grief. Remember floppy disks?) Today I opened up my email account and had assignment emails from seven different students. I don’t mind; in fact, I try to compliment them on being so responsible. I’m just amazed at how technology has progressed, I guess.


FRIDAY
Good grief. I’m so exhausted, and it’s definitely affecting my brain. Today a student asked me to sign his assignment paper. His name is Alec. I took his paper and signed it, then handed it back to him. He and the students around him stared at me like I was crazy… which I obviously am. I had signed his paper “Alec” instead of “Mrs. Chandler.”

Resolution Report: I am back on track! 5 days of school, 5 days without Starbucks… 5 days of faithful Mr. Coffee. I could also claim victory because I didn’t visit Starbucks at all this week, even after school, but it’s really only because I was so busy. This will make my rendezvous with Starbucks that much sweeter tomorrow. Even better, it will make checking my grocery budget for the month less stressful.