Fowl Weather

After a couple of weeks of relatively dry weather – and even some occasional bouts of sunshine – the rain has returned with a vengeance. And it’s not even a misty rain, either. It’s a heavy rain with huge, heavy drops that plop on you as you walk into the building. There are puddles everywhere, and water runs in rivulets through parking lots, in streets, down driveways, and from unfortunately leaky gutters. (...In case there was any doubt that we're in Portand.) Outside my classroom is the dirt baseball field, which is currently occupied by a huge muddy puddle because of the rain. There are two ducks who have taken up residence in the baseball mud puddle. I can see them from my window, and at the moment, they are happily splashing around while the rain showers on them. They have returned to the large puddle (which looks more like a small lake at this point) for a couple days in a row now. I adore ducks, especially puddle ducks. They are quite cheerful about the weather today, and they have cheered me up immensely.

Worst Valentine's Day Ever

I'm not entirely sure what to say about this, except to lay out the facts. A friend who worked with Mr. Chandler and who was important and very dear to both of us died on Monday evening. Later the same night, my grandmother in California died.

As a rule, I don't believe in Valentine's Day. I was never left out of the valentine-giving as a kid, and I don't have some traumatic experience that made me hate the holiday... If anything, you can blame Safeway for my negative perspective about this stupid holiday. Safeway, where you can normally buy a dozen lovely roses for the unbelieveable price of $9.99, jacks up their flower prices around Valentine's Day and suddenly charges $29.99 for the same dozen roses. I vehemently object to this.

In the early years of our marriage, Mr. Chandler used to buy me Valentine's Day gifts anyway, perhaps thinking I was one of those girls who protests, but really does want to be recognized. HA! Fortunately, he's older and wiser now. It's kind of a waste, too, because he's quite good at gifts and valentines. The nicest Valentine's Day I think I've ever had included a couple hours playing Grand Turismo 3 on a PS2 with Mr. Chandler's brother, interrupted briefly by a singing telegram via telephone that Mr. Chandler had ordered (and paid for) from the choir at his college, and finished by 99 cent Happy Meals at McDonalds with a group of friends and a bouquet of yellow flowers (my favorite flower color) ordered by Mr. Chandler even though he was multiple states away at the time.

So my students asked me the next day how my Valentine's Day was, and I told them it wasn't my favorite holiday and that I generally don't celebrate it. I don't need to distract them with the particulars of friends and family members dying. They're young and hormonal and have other things to worry about -- like plastering pink hearts all over each other's lockers and trying to sneak in a little PDA before class without getting caught by a teacher. I let them have their fun (although I didn't let them have their PDA). They'll grow up and face real life soon enough.

Capture the Flag

This was fun and different… after two days of studying an overview of the American Revolution, I took my students outside and had them play a rigged game of Capture the Flag. It worked amazingly well, although the red team got pretty annoyed as they lost advantages throughout the game (much like the British lost their advantages over the Americans in the war). The students went home over the weekend and made charts showing aspects of their game that compare or connect to aspects of the war. They did a great job with it, too, and most of them picked up on connections during the game itself. I’m generally against activities – so hard to control, and the kids are always so noisy! But they had so much fun AND remembered so much about the war itself… So once again, I think I will have to work in more activities.

The most entertaining part of the game came at the end of the day when another 8th grade teacher sent some of his students outside to ask if they could play with us. We ended up splitting into "our class" and "their class." At that point, I didn't rig the game; I just let them play. And would you believe... even when they were just playing for fun and I wasn't directing the discussion between rounds, they STILL talked about how their game compared to the Revolutionary War. It warmed my heart! My class won, which also warmed my heart. :)

What Happened to January?

Good grief, where did January go? It’s like I came back to school, forgot to look at the calendar, and suddenly lost four weeks! I can’t believe how fast it’s gone; it’s been crazy! Now suddenly it’s February? January has completely flown the coop. It seemed to be an endless parade of meeting after meeting after meeting…

I’ve decided that the time goes by much faster when I’m teaching an integrated curriculum. If I’m mixing language arts and social studies, there isn’t a clear structure to my weeks – LA on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and SS on Tuesday and Thursday. Instead, it’s a mix of both every day… which contributes to my lost sense of time, I think. Interestingly enough, research shows that students retain the greatest amount of content and skill knowledge when they are immersed in one subject for an extended period of time. I don’t think the students like this very much, and few teachers actually use this method anyway. But it really is best for them. Oh well. For now, they’ll have to learn to live with social studies content and language arts skills meshed together.

Tomorrow

So my school district is launching this new website newsletter for keeping the community informed of our goings-on. Keep this in mind; it will come back to haunt me.

Today (which is mid-January, although I didn't manage to post this until much later), we watched and waited as the weather turned deliciously nasty. The sky darkened, and the heavy, dark, laden clouds gathered, and the daylight waned even in the middle of the day. Some teachers closed their blinds and tried to keep the students from getting distracted by the weather. Not THIS teacher... I opened wide the blinds in hopes of keeping as much light as possible in the room. I checked the online weather reports frequently and read happy reports of expected snow and ice. Gradually, we received word that evening activities were cancelled. After school, my principal came in to talk to me about something, and he, too, mentioned the pending bad weather. (I swear I noticed some underlying glee on his part at this thought.) While we were talking, he mentioned something about an email that we’d received, so I opened my email account to look at what he was referencing. As I opened my inbox, an email pop-up from the district office appeared. The subject line said, “The District Tomorrow.” I opened the email hoping and expecting to see something about school being closed tomorrow due to impending inclement weather. Instead… it was the new newsletter from the district, which they confusingly titled, “The District Tomorrow.” There was nothing about a snow day or even a two-hour delay. Stupid newsletter.