New Ideas

wow. last week was a long one, for a myriad of reasons. we had a number of emergency drills, or emergency evacuations (gas leak), a lockdown, etc. it was a bit draining. i also heard from veteran teachers at my school that they have never experienced a week with so much drama like that.

yesterday i spent the entire day at a conference in east palo alto. in some ways i was dreading going, because it meant spending my whole saturday not working, yet working. but as it turns out it was incredibly helpful. i went to three workshops:
1. teaching writing with the force of 10,000 fires
2. wielding the grammar hammar
3. tips and tricks for micro and macro investment learning

(#3 probably doesn't make much sense. i will say more later.)

today has been a little bit trying. i am starting a new unit tommorow, i am also start table groups tommorow (named by colleges), i am starting grammar tommorow....i showed a movie in one of my classes last friday. basically, it is a big day tommorow and i really want to be ready for it. so i have been planning all day today and i am starting to get really zoned out from looking at the computer. my computer has also gotten very hot--maybe a sign that i should take a break from it. oh well.

so i had a slow start this morning, probably owing to the fact that i spent yesterday at the conference, worked for about 2 hours last night before going to a friend's birthday party, and then started working at 9 am today. suffice it to say that i'm going a little bit slowly.

but, i finally got going after talking with a friend at the cafe where we were this morning about a good story to use. i chose a story called "the streak" by walter dean myers and i will be showing a section of the movie "Juice" to give an idea of characters and setting in the movie. "Juice" is set in Harlem, and "the streak" is in a book of stories called "145th street" and they are all set on that street in harlem.

so tommorow we are working on proper and common nouns and their associated capitalization rules; previewing and starting "the streak"; and some teamwork exercises. i have a goal of not talking "too much" which i should probably quantify but i am not ready to do that yet. i made a lecture sheet and a graphic organizer that the students will take notes on, so my mini-lesson on grammar should be pretty brief.

oh, the reason i mentioned the conference earlier is because out of the three workshops, i am using like 7 things in my classes tommorow. that is amazing! i don't think i've ever been to such a useful workshop. how cool, eh? some of the helpful ideas were "hooks" for lessons--just little things that get the kids engaged right at the beginning. if you show or do something cool at the beginning of the lesson, often they will stick with you and pay attention and be pretty into it. it just takes a little jumpstart. so that is kind of cool. i am using two hooks tommorow--one is a clip from "Juice," and the other is a bag of objects that are all nouns.

well, this is a little bit of a mixed up post but i will just say that i worked all weekend, i learned a lot, i still have more work to do, i'm tired, but i have to do grades.
grrr.

signing off....hopefully i will have more updates soon.