Dancing on the Ice

3.5 hours of decorating = one semi-formal dance.

It's an ice theme. While going through suggestions, I jokingly said "someone in Florida chose Ice, Ice Baby!" And they loved it. The students can even recite all the lyrics to the song. It's cool. Everyone over the age of 30 is still shaking their heads. However, the decorations ended up looking quite nice - we did have an argument about the colored rocks (fake ice)... some students really wanted to scatter them on the table. Every teacher/parent knows where those rocks would end up in a matter of 3 seconds. Flying through the air... so they're regulated to the glass bowls. It should take them about an hour to figure out tossing the rocks and if you add in an hour to wait in the photo line, and time for waiting for punch, using the restroom, making out with your date and a dance or two, they just might not have enough time.

The semster ends next week. It's been a hard semester. Partially because the AP class produces at lot more work and there is a lot more explaining responsibility to the students. (they all thought I would read the novels to them in class!) However, I think it's been more of a change we made last year to the English Department - we started offering "Honors" classes in 9/10th grades. That meant that the "regular" english courses ended up overloaded with students who hate everything. They hate school, homework, reading, writing, books, stories, poetry, drawing, coloring and virtually everything that does not include the word "movie". Negativity is a huge motivation killer. Next semester the students are being mixed around. I'm hoping that it will create a little more positivity.

Awesome Find

YouTube has tons of poetry readings! Really good ones, by some of the best young poets! Plus, whole vidoes about Slam Poetry. So far, I've spent an hour looking for something that doesn't include swearing, and having the greatest time!

WARNING! NOT SCHOOL APPROPRIATE!

Pro-Cert classes

In WA state, anyone certified at 2001 (or something like that) has to go through a "professional certification" process after teaching at least two years. The teacher has to take a pre-assessment seminar to figure out where their deficits are and how to improve them. There's a period of time (1 to 9 years) in which the teacher can work to improve these deficits and then it's on the assessment seminar. In theory this sounds like a positive thing.

Yesterday, my pre-assessment seminar included a 5 minute discussion on how the "refresh button" works on a browser and how everyone should just take a picture of documents because "scanning and shrinking is just too difficult." And let's not forget the conversation about how our "evidence pages" are all on power point and should include pictures, rather than graphs or results. Why are we creating what will be a roughly 50 slide power point? No idea. If we have to present it to anyone I may have to quit to avoid deep embarrassment.

I realize that everyone is very, very busy. We are all required to teach full time during this class - because we're experiementing...mwaahhhaaahaa - not to mention coaching, serving on comittees and tabulating the number of copies made this month so far... but I don't think it's too much to ask that people take the time to learn how to resize their documents or to produce a document that includes actual data. We're teachers... we're supposed to like learning.

After two years, how jaded can you be?

Procrastination

How to procrastinate like a professional?

Project 365

Sign yourself up for a year long project that requires a photo a day for an entire year! Here's mine... rather boring at the moment, but what do you expect for a free website and procrastination? Honestly. It is much more interesting than the fact that I've read all my emails about a million thousand times and it's nearly 2pm and nothing has been done that is actually on the to-do list. Ah, well... there's always tomorrow.