I Vote More Tuesdays Off.

Election weeks are a little tricky. On the one hand, it's nice to end the weekend knowing you've only got to teach for one day before you get to sleep in again...and the 3 day week tacked on to the end is just the right length. But that wasted Monday and the super-short Tuesday weekend just don't do a lot of good. Fun week though.

For all of you visual learners, here are a couple of classroom-related pictures. The first is the front of my room, and the second is the view out my windows. Just to set the scene.




I did this lesson on Monday that just seemed to go completely over my kids' head, and I can't figure out why. We talked about doctors going to medical school, how they have to study all of the body even if they're going to be a foot doctor. Why? Because you understand the whole body better if you study the parts. We got that mechanics have to know how all of the parts of a car works, even if they are going to work in a brake shop. Why? Because you understand the whole car better if you understand the parts. So why do we study the little parts of matter? Because then we can understand the bigger things better? No. "Because it's all around you" or "because it's important" or "because you've got to know what you're dealing with." Don't know what happened there.

That election day off ended up being a lot of me running around. I wouldn't recommend spending a special day off taking your cats to the vet that is 30 minutes away to have their claws trimmed and anal sacs emptied. It is not a particularly pleasant experience, needless to say. It was also our first Smart Start meeting (me acting as a co-facilitator for the firsties)...it is really great to see them tryingso hard and being so honest about what's going on with them. I'm really excited to steal their ideas, too.

On Wednesday I had another failed lesson, where we somehow learned that crumpled up paper weighs more than flat paper (something weird going on with air resistance there, I think) and massive chaos. I think I may have recovered from it in the handout I gave out today...we'll see later on. See, I'm having the kids spend a lot of time looking at misconceptions this year...I think it's really important to see the errors in their thinking and to understand those errors so that someday they can self-diagnose their own misconceptions. The first start with this was the paper ball lab. They were supposed to test that misconception, then come up with one of their own to do a community survey about. A few of the kids got REALLY excited about the project, but most of them are still looking at me like "Huh?" when I explain it. Oh well.

For class on Thursday, we all had to watch the movie Thirteen, which we missed the week before. Tom came over and we had pasta and ice cream and were uncomfortable with the ickiness of the movie. If you haven't seen it and you enjoy f*ed up movies, then I'd recommend it.

I made up for my shortcomings as a teacher by getting the portable laptop lab on Thursday and Friday to work with SimChem with my kids. I had them watch some simulations and play with some settings to get a sense for the particle nature of matter. They really enjoyed it. On Friday I asked them to write something creative that included a description of the molecules in solids, liquids, and gases. A bunch of them even typed their responses, which I think is cool. They got to learn a bit about computers while we were at it. Here's a picture of some of my babies in my tiny class (more than 1/3 of the ones who were there that day) working studiously:



While we're on the subject of class size, it is just out of control. I added up my current roster this weekend, and I have 215 kids...that's split among 5 classes. My smallest is 31, my largest is 54. Of course, the average attendance in the huge classes is good (about 35 each day), and in the smallest class (my last period) usually only has between 7 and 10 showing up. It does make a nice way to round out the day, but I hope to God that my list drops. Supposedly we're merging with 412, and hopefully that will mean that some of the kids will get dumped onto another teacher for Chemistry. Please God.

The weekend was really laid back. Matt and I finished the first season of Lost and went to the Barnes and Noble in the powerplant down by the harbor. Here's a picture of the inside...it was pretty nifty.



I got stung by a wasp 3 times on Sunday, and had a panic attack because I've never been stung and I thought I might be allergic and then I would die...but by the time I went to bed that night there was nothing remaining of the stings. Not even so much as a bump. Sort of sucks to have all that trauma and then not even a souvenir!