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Summer Daze

Summer hit this week with full force. It's been hot and sunny and most of the student body shows up to school half naked. How do you nicely tell a student that no one in their right mind would care to see said student's butt or boobs? There's been a increase in the male teachers coming up to the older female teachers, quietly asking them to "talk" to a student in male teacher's classroom. "For the love of God, tell her to put some clothes on!"

This week had a crammed in inservice time. Gotta use up the money that's offered - the topic was "Active Reading and Note Taking in the Step Up Model." For those of you who haven't checked out Step-Up to Writing, you should. I love it! The models are great, it's easy to understand and you can slap it in to pretty much anything. It took me 13 minutes to write up a unit plan for research papers using Step-Up tools. Then a couple of collegues and I got to use the other 11 hours, 52 minutes of Step Up to Writing classroom usage planning time to plan out next year's curriculum. We're getting new textbooks (the ones that have been test piloted all year long) and with them, new novels! Definately going to teach Farewell to Manzanar and trying to figure out if My Antonia will make it into the Freshman curriculum at some point. It would mean cutting out another book... and I'm not sure how to do that. In looking over the past year, I realized that I only taught two actual novels! The rest were short stories, poety and R&J! I think I'm spent too much time on certain aspects that didn't really deserve it.

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