Friday, Another 15 Hour Day. Yahoo!

The alarm seemed to go off at 6:50 a.m., although it may have actually been set for 6:15 a.m. I just don't remember the snooze going off.

I had a meeting at 7:40 a.m. It takes 25 minutes to get to school. You do the math. I was rushing to get out the door on time.

I had my meeting and got back to the classroom with just enough time to turn on and log in all of the computers before a hoard of students hungering for knowledge came streaming in the door.

We worked for about 2/3s of the class period, as we usually do on Fridays. Then, we take the rest of the class off (about 30 minutes or so) to play games. It was fun, for the most part. I still have trouble with some of the kids, even in my best classes, getting squirrelly. 15 and 16 year old young men sometimes just act immature. Not much I appear to be able to do about it.

After my three morning classes, I had a quick lunch of chimichangas, one of the very best offerings at our school cafeteria. Then, I headed out to the local park adjacent to the school grounds for lunch duty. My job is to keep an eye on the kids and make sure nothing untoward goes on. Then I wave everyone in for the last period class at the appropriate time.

I had planning period in the last block of the day, followed by my personal favorite, Homeroom. Then, I had a meeting with a struggling kid after school, followed by a meeting with the kids of the Tech II class to discuss options for our electric car project and some fund raising/sponsorship ideas. By that time, it was pushing 5:00 p.m. I met Shannon and the kids at the pizza parlor up the street for a quick dinner. John Cochran, the Social Sciences teacher up the hall and my compadre in the announcer's booth at the football games, met us for dinner. I was bouyed by hearing one of my students in the pizza place telling his friends, "That's Mr. B. He's my Tech teacher. He's awesome!" That make most of the long day worth it!

Then, it was off to the game. We played hard, but got our hats handed to us by the local rival Eaton Reds, 41-12. It is getting pretty cold out there in the booth in the late evenings.

Game let out at about 9:45 p.m. By 10:00p.m., I was in my car on the way home.

Geez, what a long, long day.

It's Eeyore Time!

Every Monday, I spend the first couple of minutes having "Piglet Time." We get together in a little circle and talk about how things have been going over the weekend, in the class, and in general. I use this time to try to connect with the kids on a "Not Having To Do With The Classroom" Level. For the most part, it seems to work. The kids enjoy it and let me know a little bit about their real lives outside of school. I also have a platform for discussing issues as needed in the classroom.

Today, I had "Eeyore Time."

Piglet is the happy and optimistic character from the Winnie the Pooh.

Eeyore is not.

He tends to be crabby and gloomy.

I was crabby.

5th Period, the bane of my teaching existence, really irritated me on Tuesday. We took the day off from the textbook to play "AutoCAD Pictionary." The kids play Pictionary, but have to draw all of their clues using AutoCAD instead of pencil and paper. 5th Period whined, complained, cheated, threw chairs, accused me of cheating, etc. It was embarassing.

During "Eeyore Time," I sat everyone down and told them what I thought of their performance on Tuesday. I chewed them out pretty hard.

I had no idea what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised when one of the main culprits in the fiasco on Tuesday actually apologized in front of the class. That was a pretty brave and cool thing for her to do. Others seemed contrite and willing to try to make things better in the future.

We'll see.

In 6th Period, We Move Some Robots.

OK, my 6th Period is a great class. First off, it is little, with only 11 kids in it. Great number for a class. Second off, the kids are, by and large, smart and relatively motivated. They work hard when I ask them to, they try to figure stuff out by themselves, they don't whine.

We did some tough problems today and had about 20 minutes of class time left, so I pulled out a new game that I got recently, called "Ricochet Robots."

In this game, a board full of wall and obstructions are set up across a grid. There are a total of 4 different colored robots on the board. The object of the game is to move one of the colored robots around the board, following certain simple rules, to a predetermined spot on the grid. Basically, robots can move straight until they hit something, then they have to stop. You move the robots around the board to create a path to the goal square.

It is a pretty cerebral game, recommended to me by a number of gamers as a great game for kids learning computer stuff.

I stink at the game. I have a great deal of difficulty visualizing the movement of four different robots across a large grid 10-12 moves ahead. I thought that the kids might get easily frustrated and give up.

I was wrong.

I dragged the game out, set up the board, told them the rules and they got right to it. Five or six of them were seriously analyzing the board, considering moves, challenging each other that they could get to the goal square in fewer moves and so forth. They really came up with some great stuff and I was immensely pleased. I am also happy to see that the young women in the class dig right in and analyze and experiment just like the young men. A couple of them are downright brilliant in their ability to visualize solutions to the game.

Cool, cool, cool.

(If you might be interested in the game, you can see an online version of the game at: http://www.ricochetrobot.com)

We Paint a Picture in My Graphic Arts and Web Design Class

In my Graphic Arts and Web Design Classes, we have been learning stuff right along for the first 7-8 weeks of school. Most of what we have been learning is building to the last couple of projects that we will be doing, The Song, The Monkey Wrench and The Quilt.

We have started doing The Song project over the last day or so. Last class period, in both of my Graphic Arts/Web Design Classes, I had them listen to a reading, then a playing of the song "The River" by Bruce Springsteen. It is a song about a young man with dreams that gets his girlfriend pregnant, marries her and has a miserable life. Nice topic, huh? It is easy to identify with and relate to for teenagers, though. We analyzed the song, what it means, etc.

The kids then had to pick a song that has meaning for them. I wanted them to locate a song that fills them with feeling, memory, angst, images, whatever. Kids took that song's lyrics and gave me a couple of paragraphs outlining why that song and why they thought it was important in their life.

Today, I played another song, one of my favorites, called "The Eye of the Hurricane." It is a song by folk singer David Wilcox, wherein a young lady rides her motorcycle too fast to escape her miserable life and then one day, in a rain storm, has a truck pull out in front of her. She dies. Another nice song. But actually, the theme and the actions of the song are easily understood by high school kids. We analyzed the meaning of the song and then talked about creating a picture from the song.

The kids gave me all of the shapes, colors and images that they thought should be included in the artwork. I then gave a little assignment to everyone in the class, to get me an image for the work, or draw me a shape in the right color, etc. Once I had all of these images, we began to sort through them and create our picture. It turned out pretty well, considering we completed the creation of the composition in about 20 minutes. It was fun to hear the kids arguing over the images. "No, that's too big!" "That should go on the other side!" "She doesn't look right there, put her over there!" "The flowers should be red, not white!"

Now, the kids know what to do in the creation of their own song painting.

I Try to Play a Game in 5th Period.

Well, this hasn't been the best day of my teaching career.

It started out poor and got poorer. First off, I needed about 45 minutes to get things started in the morning before my first period class. However, when I got here at 7:30 a.m., I found out there was a staff meeting. Well, I made the staff meeting, but I had no time to get things ready this morning.

Then, I found out that the sub yesterday had the kids turn off all of the computers in the lab at the end of the day, which means that I had to restart them today. This process takes about 90 seconds for each computer. This chews up more of my life.

Then, I realize that the stuff that I had prepared at home last night for use today was still at home. Argh!

I threw in a quick video for the kids to watch while I booted the computers up. It was about the birth of the personal computer industry, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, etc. Pretty interesting, I thought. Then the kids worked on some problems from the book for the remainder of the period.

In 5th Period, I need to have a perfect lesson plan together to teach the kids Arcs, which are pretty difficult in AutoCAD, at least it is if you don't have any motivation to learn, whatsoever, like a number of the kids in that class.

As a fun filler activity, I thought I would play a game. Jill showed me the secret "Pictionary" game hidden in the back of the cabinet. She said it was perfect for filling time. We play just like regular Pictionary, except the drawers have to use AutoCAD to complete their drawings instead of pencil and paper. Each person on the team draws, using the overhead computer, the rest of the team tries to guess what they are drawing.

After the first round or so, it became obvious that the game was going too slowly and I would never get everyone involved in the drawing part, so I changed the rules a little. The new way had each team drawing on their own computer, first team to guess a word based on their team drawing won the point. It was fun in its own way and some people enjoyed it.

What surprised me was the way some of the kids acted regarding activity. Some kids tried cheating, others accused me of cheating if another team guessed before they did. Others said that if another team got the word before they did, the other team was cheating. After one close call in guessing of words, members of one team starting throwing their chairs across the floor. Another two girls tried to go to their computer and start looking up stuff instead of playing. Another girl laid down on the floor and would only participate when I told her to join in or head down to the office to lay down.

Why?

Why is this such a trial with this class?

Argh!

I Take a Day Off.

Well, today, I had to be back at court to finalize my stupid ticket. I was doing 65 in a 55 and did not have my insurance card with me at the time, so I have to appear in court. I already did this once, a month ago. At the time, I thought that I would be able to get in and out and make it to my 3rd Period class, no such luck. I had to reschedule. This time, I took the whole day off.

Unfortunately, I still went in to school. To get things ready for my substitute, I was in school at 6:30 a.m., preparing worksheets, writing assignments on the board, etc. Ms. Hicks, the sub, got there at about 7:45 a.m. and I spent 30 minutes going over everything. She finally just kicked me out. Apparently, I was more worried than she was. I had the same feeling that one gets when leaving the newborn with a babysitter the first time.

After my court ordeal, I went back to Cache La Poudre Junior High School, where I did my student teaching last fall. It was great to see all of the friends that I had made in my time there. I even ran into some of the kids that I had in class last year. I am talking with Mr. Jewett, my cooperating teacher while I was there, about getting my step-son, Joshua, into wrestling. Joshua is in 7th Grade at Ridgeview Classical School, a Core Knowledge school without a wrestling team. He can join the CLP wrestling team if we wish. At 85 pounds, Coach says that he will have a good chance of wrestling Varsity. Practices start in three weeks.

I think that wrestling would be good for him, as it is an individual sport and CLP gets good support for its wrestling program. Plus, he will get to direct some of his energy into competition.

Tomorrow, I am back to work...

I Do Some Shopping.

For some stupid reason, over the two weeks, I have managed to get bright red magic marker on three different pairs of my work pants. In one instance, I made the mistake of putting one of my markers into my pocket without putting the lid on and leaving it there for a couple of hours. One of my kids says, "Mr. B., are you bleeding or what?" I look down and there is this huge red spot all over the front of my pants. Doh!

The other two pairs, I don't have any idea, but they have red on them as well. I tried washing them. Didn't work.

So today, I took some of my hard earned pay and went to the local thrift store, my haberdashery of choice. I found two nice pairs of Dockers for a total of Nine Dollars.

But wait, there's more.

John Cochran (my cohort in crime in the announcer's booth at the home football games and the history teacher up the hall) and I have decided to secretly start wearing floral patterns on our shirts on Thursday, just to see if anyone notices. I already have 3-4 nice floral shirts, but found three more this afternoon, all on ridiculous sale, for amounts like .99 cents and 1.50. I like 'em! One is bright pink with blue flowers. You'd have to see it.

I think I will wear it on Thursday!

Anyway, my total bill for two pairs of Dockers and three nice Hawaiian Shirts (and one nice Eddie Bauer Polo Shirt): $14.95.