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Musical Chairs

Whew! What a week! We played musical chairs for the last three days... except that instead of music, it was notes from the counseling center. I had two entire classes moved (which really sucked) and a class where students wounldn't get out of their seats for fear that I'd immediately give it away. I believe that class is currently at 33 students. If you counted the total number that appeared at one time or another on my roll sheet, the number would be closer to 45.
Of course, this means that almost nothing was done. I'm not even sure that everyone got a syllabus. My sophomores did get AR books and a jump on reading them because there's no real point to even going over procedures.

We had Open House on the 2nd day of school. I'm not sure if it was the schedule confusion or what, but the only class where I had more than 3 parental units show up were the AP course. One parent was shocked by the fact that she was the only parent there - sadly, given the class, I wasn't. Many parents feel that meeting teachers at the high school level is a waste of time, they've heard it all before and their children should be given some independence or some other shlock. This flies in the face of the federal government requirement to increase parent involvement in non-athletic ways. The school pays for huge BBQ right before the "meet your teachers" part... and even free food isn't enough. It's hard to say if past issues have caused this apathy or if that's just the way it is 'round here. It does make for a somewhat boring night.

My AP class did get their feet wet with Rhetoric. There was an awesome Letter to the Editor in the local paper last week - it even included mentions to people they knew - to begin with. There was an immediate click in looking at the argument and how the author shaped it. We also watched "Shift Happens" and started on that - it'll be interesting to see what they came up with over the weekend to talk about in class.

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