It is a new Trimester, which means a fresh start for my students grades, and for my inspiration. I am hoping that both of those things will be rejuvenated!
Until then :) I'll just report on some silly happenings in my classroom.
1.) I gave a quiz on Friday. One of the questions asked for the students to analyze a certain paragraph from The Cay and draw an inference about what may happen next. I had five students ask me, over the course of three classes, "where do we draw it?"
2.) A student was giving his example of the day's "Daily Sentence Composition," (a writing activity that we do each day to help enhance their manipulation of commas, clauses, so on and so forth. One student was reading his example sentence, very emphatically, and in the middle of his example, he said, "...that BASTARD!" The class, naturally, started to murmur to each other, and appealed to me to see what I was going to do.
Another student said, "Dude, you can't just say that." The student repeated his sentence, explaining that no, there weren't any bad words in his example. Again, he repeated 'bastard,' getting the same shocked response from the class. I just waited until he had finished his sentence, and explained that it is actually a word that we do not say in school. I asked him to replace that word with something else, but unfortunately, I think he was far too embarrassed and asked for us to move on.
3.) I had students write a simile poem. It was pretty adorable at the amount of boys who wrote about girls, and not in a psuedo-name way, but in a very obvious, deliberate way. One boy, let's call him Peter, wrote about one of his many crushes, Allie. He said some very cute things about her, in simile form, and ended with, "her family is like a pack of lions." He was very proud of his piece, and I unfortunately was instantly drawn to the bit about the pack of lions. To him, he meant that they were a tight-knit family, but to me, I took it as they are fierce defenders, ready to shred any intruder to pieces. He looked at me with worried eyes and asked, "oh, should I do it over?" I laughed and explained of course not. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have even mentioned his faux-pas with the pack of lions.
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Currently Reading
I'm only two pages in, so I can't make an intelligent comment on this.
Also reading:
I'm having a handful of my higher readers read this, in their own small group, while the rest of the class reads The Cay. It's an interesting plot, told by a student that harbors so much anger inside, he doesn't know how to process his feelings, and lashes out at everyone and everything. There's a lot more to the story, but I don't want to tell too much and spoil the story :)
