My brain is full.

If you had any news for me today, sorry. I will not be accepting any new information; my brain is full.

I have just had 20 hours of training in adapting a business model for a classroom environment, and I haven't slept the last two nights trying to process all of it. If I was a hard drive, I'd be making that whirring sound that means something important is about to happen.

This whole time, I wasn't sure I was really "getting" it, but today when we started working on implementation steps with our principal, I had several people (including the trainer who came in from Salt Lake and her counterpart here at our school) tell me there was no way I wasn't going to make this happen.

Basically, we're looking at combining three classes--three teachers, three sets of state standards, and 90+ students--and using a business model to let students have choice and individual accountability to accomplish these standards. Our goal is to get out of the lecture-worksheet-test pattern of teaching and give students access to what they need when they need it. It really looks like a lot of work up front, and we put together a binder that's about seven inches thick and must weigh 20 pounds, but I think we have most of what we need.

I don't know how else to describe it without going into tons of details--we had three days to take it all in. But suffice to say I'll be doing as little thinking as possible for the next few hours. I'd take the weekend off, but there's a meeting tomorrow morning about possible scholarships for masters' degrees with the online university Tyson's going to, and then I have to get up to school to make up for the three days I haven't been in my room.

But for the next few hours, I'll be making homemade corned beef and vegetables and Irish soda bread instead of thinking about stuff.

One of those days...

First, let me say that I am just plain exhausted. I have been working very hard to stave off the nasty germs all the kids insist on bringing to school, and so far I have not gotten really sick, but not succumbing to the stuff going around takes about as much out of me sometimes as just being sick and getting it over with.

I was already feeling worn-thin before my day even started today.
It hit me at lunch today that I am tired of being a teacher and should find another job, but before you panic (especially you, Mom, and you, husband), the feeling will probably pass when I get some more sleep. We're starting to plan a master schedule for next year, and the state has said "you need to do something about freshmen" which we already knew; we just got statistics on where our current 9th graders came from: most from a feeder campus, and the next largest group is actually flunkies from last year who didn't have enough credits to get promoted. So the state says "do freshman academies," meaning, have facilities and instructors that just exist to teach freshmen, use teaming strategies to keep kids from falling through the cracks, have smaller classes, etc, etc, but nobody's ponied up with the money or even a working model for schools to go by. It sounds like they need to move 9th grade back to junior high and 6th grade back to elementary school, if you ask me. Trying to implement middle-school best practices for only 1/4 of the students in a high school seems like a too-complicated way to do something that really shouldn't be all that difficult. As a result, of course there's been all kinds of grousing around the lunch table lately, and people are in bad moods, but it just struck me today that I am surrounded by a bunch of people who don't really give a shit about kids, in the middle of a giant system that isn't exactly geared toward helping kids all that much in the first place. Not in a practical sense, at least.

So then I make it back to my room, and there's this really snarky email from a parent saying her kid told her he'd used a homework pass on this one assignment, but the grade report still showed it was a zero, and like demanding an explanation from me. Ok, I understand that first reactionary flare-up of "whose fault is this somebody please explain," but there are like ways of politely stating that idea that don't sound like I am your personal education slave-robot. THEN on the staff bulletin board area of the mail system there's been all this dumb high-school-style drama going on about politics and people's personal soapboxes, and apparently somebody said something negative about cheerleaders' behavior, and somebody went and printed it up for parents, or students, or something, and then there were hordes of bitchy people involved, and it made me think "for 36K a year, I totally don't need all this." Not when I could go to night school and learn to run an ultrasound machine or something, or learn to fix air conditioners or even be a mail-delivery-person.

I'm sure I just have absolutely no perspective whatsoever today, since I've been sleeping badly (waking up, startled, every hour or so) and not feeling so great. It's just been one of those days I want to throw up my hands and yell "whatever. I'm done," you know?

Plans, etc.

So I met yesterday with my new DC at Foothill to go over some general school/course information, and I got a better idea of what I'll be doing next year:

English I Honors (9th grade):

1. Great Expectations
2. Romeo and Juliet
3. The Importance of Being Earnest
4. Of Mice and Men
5. The Odyssey
6. Tom Sawyer

assorted grammar/vocab/writing stuff

American Lit (11th grade):

Chronological everything, from early Native American oral tradition to contemporary poetry. I flipped through the textbook, and I'm not liking some of the stuff they picked from authors I usually like. There's no "Rip Van Winkle" or "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" for Irving, a single essay from Melville (hello?! Where's "Bartelby"? Or "Benito Cereno"?), nothing good from Hawthorne (I'll just have to find "Young Goodman Brown" or "Rappacini's Daughter".)--basically, it reads like an anthology of B-sides from famous American authors. They should call the textbook What They Also Wrote because very little of it is the best, famousest stuff. And really, this is high school. They can just read the famous stuff for a while longer.

On the upside, lots of my paperwork, such as drafting semester exams and course syllabi, is pretty much done. Woot.

Now I can start getting some really good thinking done.

All the Latest

Man, you guys are so awesome for entertaining me and yourselves for two whole weeks between posts! I will definitely have to do something like that again.

Anyway, in the days since we've seen each other last, a few things have happened, the most exciting of which is that last weekend I learned to ski! No kidding!

I understand that some of you are probably a bit skeptical, and understandably so, but I really did a good job. A student-parent at Tyson's school comped our lift tickets and ski rentals at Mt. Charleston last Saturday, then patiently skied down the bunny slope with me all day until I had the hang of things. I can stem my turns now and not fall when getting off the chairlift, and several other very impressive skills. I will need them in a few weeks because we are going to Keystone for spring break. Now I can actually show myself a good time while Ty and Nico go off and tear it up on the black diamonds.

On Thursday, I made Tyson come up to my school for a family night, which was the first time he had ever been to my school. He actually said he was jealous of my classroom, which felt awesome, considering I see 160 more kids a day and teach at the same skill level or lower to my 7th graders as he does for his 4th graders. Yesterday I subbed for a band class during my prep (for about $25, plus karma), and we listened to this thing about Tchaikovsky's life and music and everything, and it made me want to get all my classical stuff back out. I really, really loved Tchaikovsky back in my pre-Tyson, high-school life. It made me realize that I just stopped doing certain things over the past few years that I always thought would stay important forever. The funny thing is that I don't think I've really replaced those things with other stuff. I've really turned into a regular old boring grown-up in a lot of ways.

I'm not actually in the mood to do more than just comment on that right now; while it sounds as though it would offer a great avenue for personal exploration, I am simply in no mood. It's Saturday afternoon, the trees are just about to be all leafy again, and it's 85 degrees outside. Spring is no time for being depressed. Hope you all have a very good weekend, and I will see you for our next Audience Participation Monday.

Three down, 177 to go....

Whew! I made it through my first week of school! Well, there was a whole week of meetings and stuff beforehand, but the kids finally came back on Wednesday.
Things are looking good so far. Not too many kids spent the summer devising new and exciting ways to make trouble, so I haven't been driven to the edge yet. Although I will say that one of my afternoon classes has 27 boys and 6 girls in it, and I'm already worried about the testosterone bomb that will one day detonate.

Anyhow, I could tell you all sorts of news about our new school-wide discipline plan, or about the unit I'm starting next week, or how not being able to show PG-rated movies is going to put a serious crimp in my movie unit entitled "Introduction to Type Theory," I have a feeling most people's eyes would just glaze over. That's why I'm married to a teacher--so I don't bore my friends to death.

I had intended to check in last week to deliver a couple of movie reviews, but they no longer seem topical, so I'll just say that Snakes on a Plane and Little Miss Sunshine, while very different in style and substance, were both worth seeing, even at $9.50 a ticket. The difference is that Sunshine is worth seeing twice.

So that's it for a little while. I am still working on a little something to generate some audience participation around here. It's a long weekend; I'm sure I'll be back in tomorrow or Monday.