Little lessons and questions

1. Don't use wet-erase spray to clean your dry-erase board. It makes a gunky mess.
2. There is no reason that 8th grade girls roll their eyes, make those faces, and sigh those sighs. It's just how they're built.
3. A little quiet respect goes a lot farther than volume and yelling.


1. Why do I feel like one of the primary goals I've been asked to achieve is to quash personality?
2. Why has no one ever explained to these kids why they say the pledge of allegiance? Or what it means?
3. My students, my loves. If Dr. Martin Luther King can't keep your attention for less than 1/3 of the incredibly powerful "I Have A Dream" speech, then what hope do I really have?
4. Are there really new teachers who can't own up to their own shortcomings? I can't really see anything else right now.

Today was good. I'm learning things for home at school, and things for school at home.
Today I achieved my goal of over-preparing.
Someday soon I will have to tackle the problem of different hours trying to learn at different paces.
That will probably look a lot like differentiated learning.
I need to go back and read up on differentiated learning.

What am I looking forward to about summer?

Time to lesson plan.

The hotter it is, you know the harder it gets (Lyle Lovett, "It Ought To Be Easier")

Today was good.

I gave my first test. Classroom management was decent. Being observant and clear-minded makes a big difference.

So does preparation. Preparation makes or breaks my day. Am I ready to engage my kids in their learning? Am I ready for what I don't know is going to happen?

Someone told me, "The thing you think will take ten minutes takes an hour. That's no big deal. It's when the hour thing takes ten minutes. That's when you're screwed. Are you ready for it?"

There's so much to say. There's so much I want to tell you all. So much I want to remember.

Right now I'm like the Pink Floyd lyric:

so you run, and you run

to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking

racing around, to come up behind you again

The sun is the same, in a relative way

but you're older

shorter of breath

and one day closer to death

I love it.

It humbles me.

It humiliates me.

It grows me.

It ages me.

It breaks me.

It wrecks me.

It makes me.

The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else's story. And that's enough. (quoted from here.)

*Oh yeah, the average grade on my test was 46%. That's on me. Mostly.

Too much

Yesterday (Friday) was too much. Parents asking to have their kids taken out of my class, students who just wouldn't quit talking, more discipline than I wanted to hand out in a year, tears and/or embarrassed anger from my students.

Yesterday was too much. Yesterday I didn't feel good about things.

I've never welcomed a weekend with such fervor.

More later.

I just want to alert you all to the resurrection of this space.