Super Survey Day! aka Opportunity Cost

So while I was on the flight to Colorado from Texas I pondered a slightly questionable teaching situation that I would like some feedback from all of you on.

In one of my classes, I have three students that are CONSTANTLY misbehaving, don't do work, and don't seem to care about their grades. I've had a few cases of limited success in getting them to work. I've already given them seating charts, but everyday they test the limits by sitting together until I remind them that if they don't move I will send them to ISS (In-School Suspension). They have always moved, so it hasn't been a problem, but I have sent them to ISS before for other reasons. These are smart kids, capable of learning, and they are actually pretty good kids... when they aren't in class. What I'm wondering is...

Would it be a horrible motivational strategy to tell them that the best of the three (participation-wise) will get $20 a month if I never have to warn them about their behavior in class? If they manage to make it ONE month, it will be worth the $20 for me (or even $60 if I gave each kid a $20). I know that offering kids cash, straight up just for not messing around might not be the best message, but perhaps the fact that they get practice in being good tips the balance of the scales in the direction of it being a potentially good thing... This was merely a thought after talking to a fellow teacher about chronic behavior problems. Let me know if you have any ideas.

-----Author's Note-----
I know that I haven't blogged for the last two weeks. It'll be up, I swear. I just got backlogged and then sick. Whoops!

Connecting Counts

For those of you who read this blog weekly, I apologize for not updating last week. I'll give a quick recap:
1. I spent the whole week looking forward to the Big 12 Championship game.
2. I spent the WHOLE week looking forward to the Big 12 Championship game.
3. On Thursday, I realized that San Antonio had Chipotle.
4. Friday, the kids could have stabbed me and I still would have been happy.
5. We read through the novels and I had the kids working on their short stories.

Unfortunately, Mizzou played the worst game of the year, so the trip was less than stellar. However, San Antonio was TONS of fun and made me realize just how much I miss living in a place that makes me want to get out and enjoy the culture. Don't get me wrong, the RGV has its own culture, but it's not the same as a college town or the River Walk in San Antonio. Maybe I still need to adjust to the culture down here...

This week went by incredibly fast. This was mostly due to the fact that our team (about 140 students and 4 core area teachers) went on a field trip on Friday to see Texas A&M Corpus Christi and Texas A&M Kingsville. We didn't have enough spaces to take all of our kids, unfortunately, so our team toiled over rosters for several weeks in order to determine which kids should not be rewarded with a field trip. It was an incredibly tough decision, made even harder by lack of funds and certain program requirements, but in the end, things turned out ok. It was a whole heck of a lot of stress put on all of the 4 core teachers and me specifically as I was the one handing out the permission slips or the "you're not allowed to go" slips. It was not fun telling 40 or so students they couldn't go because of their grades, behavior, and attendance, when really it was more a lack of funding. Oh well. The kids that did end up going enjoyed the trip and I felt rejuvenated because I was once again able to see my students in a different role. They're a really good group of kids and have some really interesting personalities. I'm lucky to have them. However, things do tend to change when I'm actually making an effort to teach them, and some have that tendency to turn-off their more compassionate, driven sides and feel the need to sit around and distract others. I'm not saying that all of my students are trouble makers, but some of them can have quite petulant behavior when they feel the need. Really, I saw the whole experience as an eye-opener, since on some level I was beginning to see my students as less and less of 'people who happen to be my students' and more just 'students'. It's always good to remember that every day these kids bring a thousand things to the table and I can't begin treating them as if they will come in each day exactly how they left the day before.

Oh drat. I meant to put up my Christmas tree tonight. I guess I have a project for tomorrow.

Student Gems
From the field trip -
"Why is your bag wet?" - girl 1
"What?" - girl 2
*Girl 1 smells handbag*
"Oh no! The pickle juice!" - girl 1
"Oohhh..." girl 2 as girl one pulls out a jar of pickles from girl 2's handbag.
-Surprisingly enough, both girls seemed quite alright with the ordeal, and just accepted the fact that the handbag was now soaked in a layer of pickle juice. They were quite confident that "it'll dry"

Ahh! I meant to update last night and then again tonight! Egads, it did not happen.

Short Week, Easy Street

This week was absolutely amazing. Well, actually the last two weeks weren't too bad. Two weeks ago we had our second round of 6 weeks testing so aside from having to grade 135 papers all in one night and get my gradebook all set up and ready to go, the week was low stress and very little actual lesson planning/teaching. Proctoring tests is about as close as you can get to being paid for doing next to nothing. I spend the entire time walking around the room making sure the kids don't cheat and that they stay on task. I answer questions without giving hints at answers, and the kids are almost deathly quiet except for the sound of pencils digging into scantron bubbles and erasers rubbing back and forth every now and then.

I have a lot to be thankful for this week, but I'm mostly thankful that I finally got a chance to recharge physically, emotionally, and mentally. I was able to show the kids parts of the movie versions of their books (Of Mice and Men and The Outsiders) on Tuesday and gave a quick enrichment lesson on Friday to the few classes I did have since it was a half day. Geez, I still can't believe that I actually had 4 and a half days off. I do have to say though, I'm surprised that we had school on Wednesday. I don't ever remember having school the day before Thanksgiving, but I guess now adays students come in as much as they can. Unfortunately for the high school students, a benchmark exam was scheduled for the Thanksgiving week even though they just took the 6 weeks exam the week before. Two weeks of straight testing, school the day before Thanksgiving... no real breaks. Luckily our students didn't have their benchmark test because my department requested it be rescheduled for December. It just makes more sense to space out tests so that the kids don't get burned out.

Well, I think this about does it for this week's post. While I may be slightly recharged, I'm still not 100%. The last few days let me fix up a LOT of things at home so that I feel like my life is more or less in some type of order, but my car is not fixed, and I still have things to get ready for tomorrow. With that being said, goodnight all, and have a great week.

Spring Cleaning

So it's not actually Spring, but this far down in Texas it's really hard to tell the difference. The birds have all come south for the winter, followed by the winter Texans, but it's still hot as the dickens. I am putting up a VERY short post tonight as I've been fixing up my apartment and getting everything ready for school since grades are due tomorrow by 9 AM. I did have a good weekend though, and it was quite productive. More about the week tomorrow.

FYI - I love 2 1/2 day weeks!

A November to Remember

After grading papers all weekend, I felt it appropriate to reward myself with a few episodes of "Scrubs: Season Six". Unfortunately, I rewarded myself with the worst episode of the entire series, since it was twenty excruciating minutes of flashbacks from other episodes in the series. If you watch Scrubs, make sure to skip "My Night to Remember" as you'll be a much greater fan of the show knowing it never pulled a stunt like a Japanese anime and thought it ok to recycle material wholesale. I'll try to use this as a springboard for my thoughts though, and hopefully come up with something.

Springboard Training

Friday I went with two other English teachers to learn about "Springboard", a curriculum that our district purchased and we can now use. I'm a little at odds, however, since our department already has a curriculum that is based on the New Jersey method and only one of the other teachers is currently using Springboard. I think I'll try it out though, seeing as I have almost enough workbooks for every student in my class.

The training was nice, and quite relaxing, at least until I found out that my students were hellraisers for the substitute. I don't think I've ever been angrier as a teacher when I heard that the sub never wants to teach at my school again, and it's because of MY students. Maybe it's my fault- I told them that if I got a bad report from the sub for a class, the entire class would have a test. I'm thinking that once one of the kids screwed up the whole class decided it was useless to play nice and just went nuts. I'm just hoping the weekend has calmed them down enough to help them get through this week of testing and two and a half days next week so they can gorge themselves on turkey and tryptophan and ride out the rest of the semester with good spirits.

I know that I'm making a difference in at least some of these kids lives, and hopefully I'm a positive figure for all of them. It's just been very tough lately, with attitudes going through the roof, assignments not being turned in, and kids just not paying attention to the lessons. I let it slide for some of the students, at least when I know they understand the lesson and don't really need a refresher. It's very tough to work with such a diverse group of students. Their ability levels are ALL over the board, and it's sad for me to say it, but it looks like it's better to teach to the lower-end students and occasionally have my high ability ones be bored. I try my best to give assignments that allow the students to work at their ability levels but on the same class lessons.

I'm finding myself continually impressed with how well my teachers performed their jobs when I was a student. Maybe I'm just seeing life through rose colored glasses, but I feel like they had their lives MUCH more organized than mine. I know I'm a first year teacher, but I don't think I can use that as an excuse when my job can impact 130 people's lives so much. The stress just seems to get to me at times, and it's possible that it's behind the recent back pain I've been having, but I'll just have to deal with it. Here I go for another week.

Student Gems
-From an essay a student wrote about his first girlfriend and his first kiss.
"I knew what to do, but I felt that love was transferring through our body like a Bluetooth connection transferring songs."

So far English seems to be the best subject for grading, even though it takes forever. None of the math teachers ever get as many one-liners as I do. :)

On a More Positive Note

I realized that while posting on the blog, it seems that I have emphasized the negative aspects of teaching down here more than the positives. That was never my intention, but nevertheless, I have left out a lot of the "good stories". For that, I apologize, as I am not living in a pit of despair, but I do have my own set of problems for being a first year teacher. I apologize to all of you who read this since you may have gotten the wrong idea about my life down here and teaching in the valley in general. I am doing just fine. Yes, I get very stressed and sometimes I feel like I made the wrong decision, but I'm not packing up and leaving. Teaching is very rewarding, and I had to relearn that this week and last week. I'll try to do a better job of balancing the pros and cons of life down here, but just be aware that I still do not intend to sugarcoat things. Writing on this blog is as much a time for me to reflect on what I did incorrectly as it is a chance for you all to read about my life. I just need to also reflect on what I've done well...

Relearning That Teaching is Rewarding
The Friday before Halloween our school had a party. I made a point of staying after school to attend said party so that I could hang out with the other teachers and not feel like I had to prepare anything for the students besides my personality. I had a plan though, and it included a board game: Blokus. I asked my UIL team if they wanted to stay afterschool to play the game, and two of the girls said that it would be fun. So we played the board game for about an hour and a half, after which time the girls left, I walked to the cafeteria and the party, and was immediately stopped by two boys who were intrigued by the game. Mind you, I didn't say anything to them, I just had the game in my hand as well as my bag of work I was taking home to grade. Another two students came up and I spent the following hour just hanging out with students, teaching them how to play a game that is incredibly addicting and quite intellectually challenging. (It's a "Mensa Select" game). Interestingly enough, when I told my two UIL girls that it was a Mensa game and asked them if they knew what "Mensa" was, they laughed at me. I assumed that they were laughing because "why wouldn't they know what Mensa was?" but when I asked them, they just said, "Of course we know what mensa is... but that's kinda mean." I greeted this comment with a dumbstruck face, because clearly I was not on the same page as my students. I asked again, "Do you know what Mensa, the ORGANIZATION, is?" They looked at me with blank stares. I explained to them that Mensa was a group for the world's geniuses, to which they bursted out laughing. "What? What's so funny?" I asked. "Mensa means 'stupid girl' and menso means 'stupid boy'." said one of my students. I hadn't heard of that, but I guess it's slang down here, and it's absolutely hilarious.

Anyways, I felt a whole lot better about my entire situation down here just by bringing in a board game to play with students after school. I had been feeling disconnected with the students and found myself becoming more and more of a teacher rather than a recent college graduate. Now, normally becoming a teacher since I AM a teacher would seem like the right thing to do, but I felt like I was getting more work out of my students and having a better time doing it when I was the "recent graduate who is also a teacher" rather than just a "teacher". One of my strengths in motivating the students is my relatively similar age, and I don't want to forget about that.

This week
The week literally flew by. I spent two days introducing the short story unit, Halloween was a "themed" day with candy and spooky short stories, and the last two days of the week the students were in the computer labs typing their papers. I was very happy to finally be using some technology with the students, even if it was only Microsoft Word. All the students were working, I was able to go around and edit papers, and I helped out students with technical problems. The only problem was that one of my students definitely caught me off guard when his spell checker was in Spanish and he needed it in English. I haven't fixed up language settings in oh... I dunno... 10 years? It took me about 2 minutes to find it, but while I was looking for it, the kid, (granted, he's one of my more rambunctious ones) would say really loudly "What are you doing? You're just clicking on things! You don't even know what you're doing? Ha ha ha!" Ooh... he really got under my skin with that one, but I don't think he really knew it. Still, I managed to fix it, and had to do it about 10 more times throughout the day on other computers. EVERY single other question I had was much more in-depth and I guarantee other teachers would not have known how to bring back corrupted Word files, but I did. The students were not delayed in their work, I was on top of things, and I had the class running smoothly. But dang... if that one student didn't find something that I didn't instinctively know how to fix in the first 10 seconds. Just because I had to read through the menus (Word has that fun "auto-hide" menu feature which bugs the heck out of me because you never know what each menu holds unless you "un-hide" the entire menu. WHY CAN'T YOU JUST LEAVE IT UP THERE FOR ME TO READ?!). Anyways, the students worked hard, I was able to give a whole bunch of editing comments to students, and had at least 12 that I sat down and put detailed comments on and then had the students respond to the comments, fix up their writing, and hopefully get A's. Sure, my students might not have that many computers at home, and some of them are slow at typing, but hot diggity if I was able to give instructions and have students understand them instantly. Well, some of them didn't instantly get it, but a friend would lean over and help. Sigh... if I only had more than 2 working computers in my classroom, the things I could do...

The Positives
I got a note from two of my students. One was from a student who received detention and wanted to apologize to me about missing class. The kid's a great kid, and it takes a heck of a lot of motivation to write a letter to a teacher saying you'll miss class and include all the work you were supposed to turn in. That's the only time I've EVER heard of a student doing something like that... and I wasn't the teacher that sent him to detention. I also received a letter from one of my mod students, who asked me to let him pass the class, but wrote my name as "Mrs. Johnson". He tries hard, but that letter had me laughing so hard, I was just glad I didn't read it while students were there. I told him the next day that it wasn't up to me to let him pass, it was HIS decision, to which he smiled and said "I'm going to get 100% on the paper".

Other Updates
I was working on the school website again. Feel free to check it out. http://todddonnaisd.sharpschool.com The header will change, but I had to send in the new header to the company that owns the servers (I can't change it from my computer). Most of the pages still need to be updated, but I had training sessions a few weeks ago with all the department heads, and told them that if they sent me what they wanted, I could post it for them. Reminder e-mails went out again today, so hopefully the site will look more "finished" shortly. On the bright side, the Todd site is one of the more "finished" sites, and I think it's one of the more comprehensive. :)

I'll be starting novels this week, and I'm hoping to have my students work on a wiki page. It'll be interesting to say the least.

Forgive Me, For I Have Been Watching Baseball

Yep, I supported my team for the last few nights. I watched every painful minute of it. We were so close in games 2,3, and 4. (There was no chance with game 1). Because of this, I'll update tomorrow night after watching Heroes and carving pumpkins. Hope that doesn't ruin anyone's day.

Sad thing is, I found myself remembering how much I liked baseball when the cameras would pan to the Red Sox and they would be goofing around in the dugout. The coverage was a little Red Sox heavy, but there aren't that many teams that goof around in the Post Season. I still wanted them to lose though.

Tick tock tick tock

I picked up a stop watch at Wal-Mart a bit ago and recently started using it in class to keep things on-time. It certainly is nice for me to see how much time I'm spending on different parts of the class, but the kids are complaining. "Sir, why do you have to time EVERYTHING?" Well, part of it is because I was running out of time at the end of class and not getting things done. The other reason was that some students would do nothing until I said they had 1 minute left (and it was mostly arbitrary) and then would not finish the task.

I taught similes, metaphors, personification, and figurative language this week as well as some basic leads. The kids really understood the leads, which was the lesson I taught on my first day back from a 4 day break. I'm sad to say it but I'm glad that I got sick. The sinus infection sucked, and I'm still taking pills, but it gave me a few days off to just NOT teach. I was feeling burned out, but I still don't really know what it was that was burning me out. I think it's the same thing that burns out other teachers... I'll take a guess that it's a "highly promoted" curriculum that is somewhat vague when it comes to the actual content. Anyways, I've been taking small liberties with the curriculum and it's really making me feel better about my classes in general.

One of those liberties was my class on similes and metaphors. The original reading material our department was going to read was a short story called "Cut". The story had a lot of examples of metaphors, similes, personification, and imagery, but it was about a kid who was dealing with depression and cut himself. As a teacher, the material seemed a little adult for my kids. Well, "adult" might not be the best word - "too real" would be better. The day that I was supposed to read the story, I noticed that one of my students had carved "loser" into her arm, (didn't look like it would scar though), and I didn't see any reason to egg on some of my more unstable students. Yes, I have a few cutters, but they tend to be the smarter children. Strange how that works. I also didn't want to read the story because I was selfish. With a hyperactive Vagus nerve, the imagery used when the kid cut herself was enough to make me a little queasy. I didn't want to think about having to read through it with 6 classes and have the kids asking "what happened" as we discuss the imagery used. Instead, I found a much more lighthearted story called "The Cricket War" at Eastoftheweb.com. I found the site this summer and I'm a BIG fan of it. It shows reading levels, pages, and all the stories are free to use. Plus, I was able to have kids draw the personification of crickets waging war. Some of these kids were pretty good artists, and drew battle lines and crickets with rifles and helmets. I'll have to scan one in when I get a chance.

In other news, I've definitely been spending more time working on the whole "work-life-balance" thing. Being sick for four days gave me some time to play some new video games (namely Halo 3 and Beautiful Katamari), call friends, and catch up on the news. I remembered how much I liked being able to just relax, and for a while I didn't feel stressed at all. However, the stress eventually comes back. It has always been like that. I'll have some type of project or responsibility, and I just throw myself into the project 100%. The only problem is that I eventually lose my fervor, need time off, and then feel like I've just been neglecting what I should be doing. Right now, that "what I should be doing" is fixing up the school website (it's mostly done, but I need to add some images and fix up pages that some of the departments have not sent me material for). I could also be planning out my second unit, since it's coming up oh... next week. It's just so tough to stay motivated throughout the week and then on the weekend. After grading tests and papers for hours on end it I just don't feel any real drive to get ahead and plan out more things that I'll eventually have to grade again. It's a vicious cycle. meh

Updated: A Little Notoriety

Just wanted to give you all a quick news update. One of the girls from my school is speaking in a panel at the UN. She's not my student, but it's still cool.

Check out the article here.

There's also a video of her at the UN. It's a lot less impressive than I would have expected from a UN conference, but I guess they keep the big rooms for the big wigs.
Click here for The Monitor's page that will allow you to download the realplayer video file.

Gimme a break, Gimme a break, break me off a piece of that ...

This last week, including the weekend, was less than stellar. I took my first sick day on Friday since I had not been feeling well and needed a refill of my allergy medication. The doctor was very helpful, and gave me a couple prescriptions, so I was finally able to use my new medical plan that certifies me as an adult. Unfortunately, the sub again had problems with the class, and I really am starting to believe that I should only give worksheets when a sub is needed. It wasn't even that tough of a class... The students were supposed to take a quiz, then work on their revisions of their drafts. Apparently, many of the kids complained that they did not have their rough drafts even though I specifically told them that they would be given in class work time and needed to bring them. Maybe it's a testament to my teaching that I don't have these mishaps, or maybe I do and I just downplay them. Eh.

To be honest, I was glad I got a sick day. I really needed a break, if only to recharge. That might be the stress talking, that might be the sinus infection (or the E-coli that I could apparently have from contaminated burgers I bought at Sam's CNN Article here). Two of my kids got in a fight in class on Thursday. It was my smallest class too, and I even have an aide, but neither of us saw it. It happened in the last 5 minutes of class. The two boys were horsing around, just pushing each other a little bit, and one pushed the other one in the face and cut the kid's lip. The victim promptly punched the offender in the eye. They were both REAL quiet about it too, as the punched kid quickly put down his head and covered his face with a hood. I honestly don't know how only ONE other student saw this. I constantly move about the room, so the whole altercation must have taken at most 30 seconds. But nonetheless, it happened right under my nose. After telling the class what they needed to do before they could leave, I looked back to the kid with his head on the desk and his hood pulled up. I tapped him on the head and asked him if he heard what I said and if he was going to take his work home for homework (he had done next to nothing in class). He muttered something, so I said again, "You didn't do much in class today. Are you going to take your work home?" He looked up as tears streamed from his eyes and I quickly sat down to see what was wrong. The bell rang and the rest of class left, as he finally managed to say that the other student had punched him. Sure enough, he pulled back his hood and he was going to have a pretty nice shiner. I immediately told him we'd go to the nurses office and get ice, and that I would be writing up the other student (both of them ended up getting written up since they were egging each other on). I found the other student in the hall near the office after dropping off the punched student with the nurses, and told the quick-fisted child to come with me. He instantly knew what was happening, and had the gall to say, "You're bringing him in too, right?" Didn't really care about his own situation, just wanted to see the other kid also punished. Yeah, ok, you have a cut lip now. Why the heck did you punch him in the eye in response? Needless to say, I was frustrated, and it put a damper on my already dismal day, which was peppered with sneezes, reports of bad student grades, and many schedule changes for athletes.

We got our six weeks grades back on Thursday as well. My students performed almost on all categories below the average of any of the other English classes. Aware that I'm a new teacher and realizing I probably have not put in the amount of effort I should, I was worried. I ended up talking to my department head/mentor for an hour or two after school about the scores. Maybe it's not that bad. They were only off a couple of percentage points (averaged) on one 20 question test, and many of the other teachers have more than one Pre-AP class. I also have the greatest number of "mod students" (special needs that usually are lower performing. I say usually because some are VERY bright in certain areas). I felt better after the meeting, but I'm still not really happy.

I don't know what my main problem is. I'm happy when I'm teaching, and it's great to be with the kids. I just get extremely frustrated when they just decide that they want to not do ANYTHING at all. When they don't really care about their lives at all. I dunno. Maybe I can relate to them, because that's how I felt this whole weekend. I didn't want to do anything and school/work was the last thing on my mind.

I'm pretty sure that I don't want to teach after my two years are up. I really despise getting up before the sun, I feel like my creativity is really confined (thank goodness I got to design the school website), and I don't really see a long future of teaching in my life. This isn't really news, per say, since I joined TFA with the intention of getting two years of an experience out of it and then going on with my life. I'd help out for two years, say I did my part, and see if it changes anything about my life. I can already tell that it's going to keep me organized differently, appreciating solid teaching skills, and able to explain myself in as few words as possible. Time will tell. As for now, I've got a splitting headache and I don't plan on taking tomorrow off since I have nothing ready for a sub, so I'm going to bed.

Many Apologies

I neglected posting to the blog last night as I was working on the school website. I was actually doing the same tonight, and possibly tomorrow night as well, but I will try to post sometime tomorrow evening.

Update

Well, it seems that more than just the teachers noticed that I was breezing through the trainings. I received an e-mail today requesting that I do not attend training on Saturday and instead read a Gifted/Talented book and write a 5 page summary. The e-mail was cordial, though there seemed to be some slightly snide undertones. They said that I seemed quite "knowledgeable" on the subject to the point of being "bored".

I promptly sent back an e-mail that was equally amiable and snarky, with my principal and one of the district administrators CC'ed. Basically, I said that I hoped the e-mail was in response to me being informed on the topic rather than a disruption to the training seminar. Then I asked whether they would like my paper to be double spaced or single, and if it should be a formal paper with footnotes or if it is a more informal reflection-based summary. Either way, I don't have to go to training this weekend, and thus saved 8 hours of my life. Sure, I'll have to read a book and write a 5 page paper, but I think that I'll learn a lot more from a material-heavy text than a 48 size font powerpoint that is about as general as you can get.

I'm still wondering if I was sent the e-mail due to me questioning the purpose of a half-hour activity, or if it was in response to me trying to get the group back on task. Either way, I think I just fought the man and won.

Man: 0
Me: 1

I had a date... with Data

I think I had my first "regular" week of school. Nothing terribly interesting happened aside from my projector bulb dying at the start of the week thus ruining any chance of higher-technology being used in my teaching, and nothing incredibly drab happened either. I taught, my kids learned and worked, but they also got off task, needed to regain focus, and missed assignments. We covered theme for two days, then brought back summaries, voice, and text to self connection. I taught some solid lessons even though the kids were confused that there was no powerpoint, and the students produced a good amount of writing. Thankfully, my students' work seems to have improved for the most part, as grading the essays was a lot less "decoding" and more of just reading

Speaking of grades, I gave up yet another weekend. Saturday was spent at the second of three "Gifted/Talented" training sessions, which was about as fun as watching paint dry. Actually, less fun than that, because if you watch paint dry, you can probably comment on it as there is no expectation of you to listen and not create excess chatter. I was smart though, and took some work to grade while listening, which burned up maybe 2 of the 8 hours we were there. Our group was supposed to be at the training for 10 hours, but I managed to ruffle some feathers and get us out early by occassionally mentioning that the conversations were going off topic. And boy, if some of those other teachers got angry. I don't really care about that though, because they were trying to hijack the meetings to discuss their own situations that had absolutely nothing to do with "Gifted/Talented" students or information that might be pertinent to the rest of the group. I wasn't that much of a horrible person though, as several other teachers thanked me afterwards for taking the bullet and getting the gabby teachers to hush up. Heck, I didn't even get out early to go do random things, as I quickly got back home, graded some more, and then went to UTPA, (University of Texas-Pan American), for their annual HESTEC (Hispanic Engineering, Science and Technology) conference. The MythBusters were there along with Billy Ray Cyrus, (don't know what he had to do with Engineering or Science), and several of my students. I'm happy to say that out of 49 different high schools, ours managed to get first place in the robotics competition. I had not one, but two students on the winning team. Woo hoo!

Sunday was again ruined by grades. My students' Six Weeks exam is coming up as well as their Progress Reports, and I wanted to get a jump on grading. Since many of my students neglect to turn in their work and I'd like to not fail them unless they really try at not succeeding, I'm giving them this week to turn in some of the key assignments. I've already given students zeros on assignements that they've had weeks to complete, but since a few of the larger assignments (namely rough drafts) will be used in the coming weeks, I wanted to make sure they get them in and for a reducedgrade. Hopefully my kids will take me up on my generous offer, turn in their work, and make sure to turn in the rest of their work on-time.

Who am I kidding.

Student Gems

When asked to make a "Text to Self" connection with a story called "Oranges" by Gary Soto, a story about a boy who is forced to pay for his girlfriend's chocolate with an orange when he doesn't have enough money, a student wrote:

"That reminds me of back home when we would buy stuff with tacos."

Training To Be Awesome... or Subbing to Skip School

This week was an interesting one, if only for the fact that I taught only Monday and Tuesday. Last week, my principal told me that I was going to represent our school at the SharpSchool training and become a "Trainer of Trainers". In layman's terms, this meant that I would be spending Thursday and Friday learning about our district's new web hosting/template system so that I could be our school's webmaster. The training was quite fun, and the system is pretty user friendly. I had a few qualms with the design system, as it's a little limited and will be frustrating to set-up initially, but it's better than most web template services I've seen. I'll be sure to post the link when I've got it up and running.

Since I'll be serving as the webmaster for the entire school, I've decided to push back creating my own website. Perhaps my thinking will change and while I'm working on the school site I'll need a break and some time to be creative, but I really need to get the school page up and running as soon as possible. Right now, all I really have is a random image script in place for the main page so that it switches between 8 different school photos (that I can change often and easily), a few classes set-up, and all of the students in as users. I still need to meet with the principal and administration to see exactly what they would like for the site, and I will have a lot of data entry to do with the teachers and classes. (Getting the students in the system was much easier because we could use a spreadsheet with their student numbers... teachers might have to be put in manually, by me, and their classes will definitely need to be put in by me). Basically, this means that I have a lot more work, but at least it's work that I know I'm good at and can finish with little stress.

What happened to Wednesday?

Wednesday I was supposed to teach. Tuesday I was supposed to be in training for Open-Ended Rubrics, (so the kids can do better on standardized tests). Unfortunately, neither of these proved to be correct. When I did not receive a sub for Tuesday, I was forced to skip training and scrounge together a new lesson, since there was no reason to teach the "substitute lesson" and I couldn't teach Wednesday's lesson out of order and confuse the heck out of the kids. Imagine my surprise on Tuesday when I heard that I didn't have a sub and that I might be in training on Wednesday... not the OER training, but a different one. Interesting, since had I attended the OER training I would have only taught on Monday.

Now, when I say I couldn't teach the substitute lesson, I'm being fairly liberal with the meaning of "lesson". Every teacher on my campus has said that the best you can do with a substitute is worksheets. "Don't ever try to give them a full lesson because you'll only have to teach it again the next day", said everyone else. Me, being the naive, dapper young fellow that I am, tried to push it a little bit. I figured that I would use worksheets on Tuesday and give the students writing time on Thursday and Friday for their rough drafts. It shouldn't have been that tough, even for a sub, who can technically be an 18 year old high school graduate who has taken a weekend class to become a certified substitute teacher.

The worksheets went amazingly well, and the substitute seemed more than competent, (he used to work with the school's disciplinary department). However, I had a different substitute on Thursday and Friday, and I guess my "quiz/rough draft writing" was a little more than the kids could handle. Some of them did very well on the quiz and the writing, but others... well, I don't know what I can say because they had a substitute. I was told to only give the kids worksheets, but I didn't want to lose the better part of a week. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. I guess I'll just find out tomorrow.

Pics of the room

I finally got some pictures of the room, so here they are. It's smaller than the other rooms, and doesn't look like a typical teacher room, but it's mine, and I'm comfortable with it. Heck, at least the kids notice the movie posters and asked me about them. They didn't say a dang word about the traditional educational ones though. Maybe I was on to something with my idea to "educationally" vandalize popular movie posters.
*click to see the full size pictures

Student Gems

Not really that funny, but I'm sure all you other teachers have heard it a million times.
"Why did you fail me sir?" - generic failing student
"I didn't give you a failing grade. You earned it by not turning in any of your work" - Me
"But why did you fail me?" - same generic student
*Smacks head* "Turn in your work and maybe you won't be failing. Let's take a look at your grade after class." - Me

Grading

Progress Report grades are due tomorrow at 9 AM. I spent a few hours on Saturday working on the grades, and the greater portion of today grading as well. Luckily, Alexia was willing and eager to help me grade as well, otherwise I would be up until the middle of the night getting all these grades done. I'm convinced that English is the hardest subject to grade, at least down here in the valley. I tried to put comments on all of the papers, circling spelling mistakes, crossing out unnecessary words, putting in all the correct grammar markings, and giving comments on the papers. Normally, you wouldn't think that this would be a big deal. However, the majority of my students do not know how to write correctly and spell phonetically, or not at all. Sometimes I would just circle words because I didn't recognize them in English or Spanish. Those made it quite the challenge to understand the essays. Fortunately, these were just rough drafts, and it is the start of the semester.

I'm quite nervous though. If it took me THAT long to grade a few weeks worth of work, and the student essays were between 1 and 2 pages a piece, how long is it going to take me to grade their much longer assignments?

All I know is that I'm tired, I'll update more tomorrow, and hopefully I'll have pictures later this week.

Oh, and next time the students write drafts, I'm having them peer edit.

Any ideas or suggestions from all you other teachers out there in internet land?

Anger Management

This past week was a mix of feelings. The kids were more or less amazing, partly because of their four day week. I, on the other hand, had the pleasure of getting up on Saturday for a day long "Gifted and Talented" training. I don't know why it had to be the whole day, or even the two-hour shorter than scheduled 7:30 AM - 3:30PM. The trainings that I have been subjected to mostly amount to me being talked at as I look at 3 ring binders full of Power Point slide print-offs. That may have come off a little harsh. The trainings are helpful, and I do try to get the most out of them, but it just seems that the time could be managed much better, especially since I have to give up almost an entire Saturday and a Friday night just to be there. (That's what they didn't tell you when you signed up to be a teacher: almost every other weekend you will not have a Saturday to sleep in). Even worse is the fact that I have to do the same thing for the next 4 out of 5 Saturdays. Oh well, one down, several to go.

Friday hit me with quite a surprise, which made me legitimately angry enough to rip a phone book in half (and without using the scientific way to rip it apart). At the start of the year, I had pegged one of my students as being in need of modifications, or in layman's terms, special ed. The student had a horrible time trying to read, would not read aloud, and got frustrated enough to shut down for the rest of the class. Being a nervous and shy child, I figured that it might take some time to build up the kid's confidence to attempt reading aloud in class. Nevertheless, I spent several hours with the head of the special ed department talking about said child. When I received the student's modification folder at the end of the first week, I was aghast, as modifications were required for every class but English. I expressed my frustration, and the SPED department head said she would look into his file and see about getting him tested again. Without any additional information, and holding a file that said my student was supposed to perform as a regular student in my class, I trudged along through the lessons.

When I gave my class their reading diagnostic, (beginning of the year test to let me see where they are), I made a point to try and test him extensively for reading comprehension and fluency. I started him off with a 6th grade text, to which he would not even attempt to say even the first word. Feeling his frustration rise, I quickly switched to a 3rd grade level text, and asked him to read it aloud to me. I encouraged him, told him that he would do great, and it was not for a grade. I let him know that it was ok to not know the words, and that I just wanted to be able to help him. Again, I was stonewalled. I tried pointing to the words and having him read along, only to get barely audible gasps that I would expect out of someone on the verge of death. Again, I switched out the reading passages, and gave the kid a Pre-K passage. The passage began with "Joe saw a Goat. Joe liked the goat. The goat walked up to Joe." The kid took one look at the paper, looked up around the room at all the other students taking the test, and promptly shoved his face into his hand and looked down at the floor. With no other options, I turned to my aid (I have enough modified students in order to warrant a teacher's aide), and asked her to take the student outside and see if he would read anything else. Since he had actually gotten out a few words before looking cautiously at his peers, my best guess was that he was embarrassed to be at the front of the classroom. That, or he was incredibly intimidated by me. The aide didn't have much more luck than me, as he only read through the Pre-K passage before giving up. He was on the verge of tears when the aide tried to get him to come back into the classroom.

I met him at the door and promptly apologized. This kid was emotionally beaten. I know some teachers might have told the student to return to their desk and finish the test, or tell them to stay after class and scold them for not doing anything. Noting that he did not want to leave the safety of the threshold to the room, I left his test on a table near the door, told him he could keep working on it if he wanted to, or leave it there. I also told him that it was ok to return to his seat or stay right where he was. Within two minutes, he picked up his test, wrote one word, and looked at a few more passages until the bell rang.

Luckily, our school started "team teaching" this year. I'm paired with three other teachers who all have the same students, but for Math, Science, and Social Studies. One of the teachers mentioned that she had been able to get my student to produce some work in her Math class and actually finish assignments. We talked for about an hour about how to help our mutual student, and parted ways with her saying that she would try to figure out what his interests were. We both thought that it was possible that he was intimidated by my presence (I am a large, tall, white male, and some kids tend to have a problem with this, or so I've been told). I needed something, anything, any kind of "in" so I could help him. I got my "in" the next day, and almost blew my lid.

The Math teacher had a chance to talk to the district head of the Special Ed department, who knows all of her students files by heart. Our student, as I learned, was dyslexic. Hmm... let's think about that. He's got modifications because he's dyslexic, but for some reason he DOESN'T need any modifications in an ENGLISH class? Yeah, that sounds about right. Reading disorders are much easier to deal with if you don't actually address them.

*Note*
I received an e-mail not 30 minutes later from the head of our school's Special Ed department about my student, confirming his disorder. I really like our special ed department, as they truly care about the kids. I was just absolutely livid at the fact that for some reason, no one from his 8th grade (or sooner) campuses felt the need to include in his mod file that he was dyslexic.

Thanks. I feel really great now that I forced him out of class and further lowered his self-confidence. I'm sure he really needed that - and it's a darn good way for me to start the year helping him.

Student Gems

From some of my diagnostics -
"What are descendants?"

They are very slow people.

"Did Amelia Earhart have a good imagination as a child? What in the story made you believe this?"

Yes, because it said she was a horrid little girl.

One Week Down...

I am offically a teacher. It's a little strange to think about it. I know that I taught this summer, but I didn't have 6 different classes, planning periods, and 130-150 students a day. Now that I do, I can honestly say that it's fun, frustrating, and exhausting. I'm not quite sure if I'm exhausted from dealing with 140 9th graders during a day, working for 9-10 hours, or from getting up at 6 in the morning. Right now, my bets are hedging on getting up at 6 in the morning. I know that right now my dad is laughing at me because of all those times I bugged him about getting up early every day and going to bed at 10. Well dad, you win. Getting up at 6 AM is not my idea of fun. I could work for 14 hours a day as long as I don't have to get up before the sun. I guess I'll just have to give it time and let my body adjust.

The kids were great. I actually had more show up than I was led to believe, but I still was only able to accomplish minimal amounts of actual teaching due to the ridiculous amounts of schedule changes the students were put through. Being a 9th grade campus, some of the students take elective classes at the high school, which is just down the street. Unfortunately, if the high school sees a need to change the time of that elective class, the student is then forced to change just about their entire schedule. I would like to think that these kinks have been worked out over the years, but as I noticed at least three of my students show up to different class periods throughout the week and tell me that their schedule got changed yet again, I find myself thinking that creating schedules is an art form not yet mastered by my district. At least the students remain in high spirits as they're jostled about from class to class. It puts a little bit more of a burden on me as a teacher, since now I have a few students that sit through two of the same classes or miss a class, and all of my group/partner work must be changed on the fly. I find time to laugh at it though when I see those same students on my roster for 4 different classes. They're getting quite the English education.


Snafus

Several of the other veteran teachers have been kind enough to inform me about the bureaucracy that is teaching in the Valley; everyone tries to be the winner of the "not my job" contest. I'm sure that I'll meet my fair share of snafus, but attendance is by far the worst that I've encountered in my first week. With all the schedule changes, I'm quite empathetic for the attendance ladies and the counselors, especially since everyone had to work with paper schedules for the first day. We were told that once we got our online gradebook up and running, we could submit attendance online. "Great!" I thought. "Here's something I can do that plays right into my electronic/technical wizardry that is going to save me time and energy." I stayed after school that night, determined to diagnose exactly why the gradebook wasn't working for the entire district. After about an hour of trying to install the provided "fix" using different prompts, I noticed that the computers were locked out of some essential permissions for running java scripts. Basically, I could do nothing else, so I told my tech guy what I found. Next day, there's a new patch that doesn't require any java scripts to be performed over the net. Interesting. Without gloating (hey, I didn't make the patch, and I could have been completely wrong), I happily began submitting my attendance online. I was happy, the attendance ladies were happy (it saves them TONS of time to have it online), and even the students were happy, because one of them didn't get to be "special" and take the attendance to the office. Wait... did I say that? Cause the kids LOVED that job. Anyways, not a day after submitting all of my attendance online do I get a visitor from the office with a new paper roster, saying that I need to give them a hard copy for the next two weeks. Bummer.

Unfortunately for a few of my students, I did not get my list of "mods" (students with special needs) until Friday afternoon. I can only imagine the confusion they felt when the lesson was nowhere close to what they needed in order to learn. By chance, I happened to teach to the modifications of about 80% of the students, and they did just fine. For the other 20% though... I'll make it up to them.

Distractions

I found myself a little bit distracted this weekend. I felt the need to play around with my copy of Adobe CS3 (specifically photoshop) which I am trying to teach myself how to use. I've got the basics down, from selections, to feathers, strokes, color sampling, and layers (which were a headache in themself to figure out initially). At Mizzou, I figured out how to create graphics using Photoshop that I could then chroma key out in AVID (video editing). For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, chroma keying is basically using a blue or green screen to create special effects, similar to what your local weatherman uses on his nightly segment. Anywho... I felt like I'd try and get a grasp on it so that I could design a flyer or two for the UIL Journalism group that I'll be a mentor/advisor to this year. Unfortunately, we don't have a room picked out, a time to meet, or our first meeting date. So I promptly changed my gameplan and worked on making a few icons for my desktop. Like I said before, it's a distraction. I'm hoping that during the year this will come in handy.

Student Work Gems

Not one, but TWO of my students said in writing that if they could change their name to anything they wanted, they would choose "Jet Li".

My students, particularly my girl students, are fascinated with my "colored" eyes. They ask if my eyes are really colored, or if I wear contacts. I have to explain to them that I do wear contacts, but my eyes are naturally blue. Funny thing is, they never say "I really like your blue eyes". It's always just "colored".

Tomorrow my life begins

Well, this is it. I'm finally going to start teaching. My room is ready, (at least I think it is), I have my first 3 weeks roughly planned out, I've looked over the curriculum for the first 6 weeks, and I have possibly the best investment plan known to man - I'm raffling off an iPod nano at the end of the year.
My colleagues have cued me in to the fact that students down here go crazy for raffles. At one point last year, a student was raffling off two $7 movie tickets (or it might have just been one) and about 100 people paid the $1 entry fee. I guess you'd think that the students would not pay $1 for a chance at a $7-14 prize that they have very little chance of winning, but they love their raffles!

As for the iPod, the thing was just sitting around wasting space, and I had even tried to sell it in order to buy a camcorder the kids could use. Luckily, my school most likely has grant money that I can use, so there's no reason to spend my own money on a camera. Instead, the iPod will be used to get my students in class, on task, and interested. I've decided that all 139 of my students will compete for the iPod, which will be raffled off in December. They can get entered into the raffle for having perfect attendance for an entire month (no tardies either), having all assignments turned in on-time, or for getting an A on a major project or test. Since my students might not all be there this first week, as I guess it's just the culture to not show up until a week or two into school... I'm going to give each student one raffle ticket for each day they are present this week, but ONLY if all of the students show up by Friday. We'll see how it works out.

Reflections on the week

Every day closer to the start of school we got, I felt like training got better and better. The problem is... for the most part it didn't. True, the school training was better than the region training, which was better than the TFA Orientation, but none of it compares to TFA Institute. I felt that all of these August training sessions were merely reiterating things I had already learned, or repeated things that happened in a training session 2 days prior. And the trainings just went ON and ON and ON. It was like the Energizer Bunny was training me: while that might sound cool, the little guy can't talk and does nothing other than beat his drum incessantly. Any who... the trainings did occasionally offer a nugget of wisdom, which I will no doubt use in my class. I just wish that I had more than Friday to set up my classroom. Friday was our only day of in-service, but luckily the administration let us come in on Saturday and Sunday as well. It's a good thing too, because I would not have been done on Friday, since I had a HUGE cabinet of supplies to go through, computers to (fix) and set up, and rules and posters to hang. Luckily, Alexia was kind enough to help on all three days, so it was much more enjoyable and relaxing to sit and watch her do all the work. (I kid, I kid, but she really did help out a ton).

On a side note, I had a very interesting Thursday/Friday combination. On Thursday, I was approached by my English department chair to work with the UIL Journalism club. I agreed, of course, and will be one of the three faculty mentors for the club starting this September. While I was talking to one of the other faculty mentors for the group, I mentioned that I wanted to create an after school Multimedia and Film Club. He was genuinely excited about my idea, and told me to talk to our assistant principal, and was gracious enough to walk me through the maze that is the administration area to her office. She ushered me into her room as soon as my faculty guide told her that I was interested in starting a club, (vanishing immediately after making that statement), and simultaneously closed the door and offered me a seat. I only got about half a sentence of, "I'm interested in starting an after-school Multimedia and Film..." when she asked if I was interested in heading up FCA, or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Seeing as I came into the office with the intent of doing a Multimedia and Film Club, which is pretty much the exact opposite of athletics, I showed her my best befuddled look. She explained further, saying that I would be able to work with the FCA kids and teach them multimedia, work with them during the day, and advise/support them at events. Not wanting to be rude and not wanting to turn down an offer that I still did not understand, I took the safe route and told her that I would get back to her the following day. I left the office feeling like a deer that just barely missed getting hit by a Mack truck in the middle of the night- confused, in shock, and unaware of what just happened. I talked to a few other teachers, and looked through the pamphlet that she had given me about the organization, and slept on it. It's not that I didn't think I could run the club or help out the kids; I didn't go into that office with the intention of being the FCA mentor, and Texas religion is a whole different ballgame then I'm used to. I'm the kind of person that gets a little anxious around people who shout "Praise Jesus" for 5 minutes straight. Yeah, I'll praise Jesus, but wouldn't it be better to spend those five minutes oh, I dunno, serving food at a soup kitchen rather than yelling at the top of your lungs the same few words over and over again? It's possible that my students wouldn't be like that, but I wasn't sure I wanted to take the chance and feel awkward for a year. Plus, one of the other TFA kids already expressed interest in the club and spent part of his summer on a mission trip building houses in a colonia in Mexico.

I went into my AP's office the next morning, explained that I wasn't comfortable heading up the FCA, and told her that it didn't really fit with my goals of teaching ANY interested student Multimedia and Film. As part of the FCA, I'd only be helping members of the organization; I can't imagine that an entire class of 1,000+ 9th graders are interested in sports and are devout Christians, so I'd likely be missing a good portion of the population. And there was always the potential that the students in FCA could care less about Multimedia, and then I'd be stuck. Luckily, she was very receptive of my refusal to head up FCA. Perhaps it was my winning personality, or the fact that I told her that another teacher was interested in the position. Or maybe, it's because my administration is awesome and this job is going to be great. Whatever it was, I think I win.

Student Work Gems

I know that I don't actually have students yet, but I did find some old student work, including a binder full of floppy disks.
This picture doesn't do the binder justice. I'll have to get a pic of the real thing for you all sometime this week. Even though it's cool, (not as cool as this binder though), I will never, ever go through all of the floppys. I instead stuck to rifling through some of the hard copy student work, feeling confident in a student's project on "Animals". It was a fairly thick packet, with a lot of graphic organizers, a fairly hefty 7-page report, and some comparison charts. On closer inspection, there was very little transition between paragraphs, but it didn't matter once I hit the top of page two. Throughout the entire project, each paragraph was dedicated to a specific animal, such as a blue whale, a bottlenose dolphin, a border collie, or a jackrabbit. Paragraph one on page two, however, was all about "the ass mammal, better known as the donkey". I have never in my life heard anyone refer to a donkey as an "ass mammal", but I guess the description is correct. Since everyone down here seems to refer to donkeys as burros, it's probably an innocent mistake on the part of the student, but it had me laughing so hard I almost fell out of my chair. I know it's horrible to laugh at a student's work, but I'm not laughing at the student; the project was genuinely well done.

Just For Fun

Check out this website for other cool crafts like the crazy floppy disk binder. One of the guys on here has a floppy disk messenger bag and a USB monster. It's interesting stuff.

Mexico, thanks for getting my back
Well, it looks like we're not going to get hit by the full force of the hurricane, but there is still a good chance that the RGV could get some severe flooding. Apparently Dean is the third largest hurricane in all of the Atlantic, and Mexico is looking at 20 inches of rain where the 'Dean hits. That SUCKS... As you can tell from the picture, it looks like we're still going to get a good deal of the northern arm of the hurricane, so we'll likely see a good amount of rain. I'm already taking precautions and parking my car on the street where the water drains considerably quicker than in the area behind my apartment. True, I'm not under a covered area, but at least my car won't have to drive through 8 inches of rain in order to get out of my subdivision.

We went over the New Jersey method today in training (which amounts to lots of visuals and hands on work). I couldn't help thinking though, that my plan to incorporate a good deal of multimedia in the classroom is essentially the New Jersey method on crack. The main idea of the NJM is that students will learn more if they are actively engaged. Unfortunately, some students are turned off by the potentially lower-age-level creative projects. With video, stop-motion animation, storyboarding, and the like, I'm fairly certain that my students will find themselves challenged enough to be interested, involved, and therefore learning. We'll see.

Rock You Like A Hurricane

*Disclaimer* - The following two paragraphs are very similar to a user's manual. Since I said this, I'm sure half of you will skip ahead to the third paragraph. Go ahead... the first two paragraphs aren't interesting at all.

Well everyone, I promised myself and several others that I would blog about my life as a teacher for the next two years, so now's about a good a time to start as any. I plan to update at least every Sunday, but if I happen to get any interesting stories or information, you can expect more than one entry a week. The original plan was to create my own website with more than the "just a regular blog" feel, but I was unable to get my copy of DreamWeaver until recently. The other big holdup is that I won't be getting a paycheck until late September, and I don't see any reason to purchase a domain name and web space with money I don't have that could be used for food and water that keeps me alive.

As for a few more rules of this blog. I can't actually post any pictures of my students, or even their names for legal reasons, so I'll be referring to them much like Agent Friday did on Dragnet back in the day. Also, I'm not certain if I'm even allowed to say which school I'm working at on a public blog, but seeing that everyone that COULD potentially read this is someone that has my cell phone number, I'm not too worried about the school name (W.A. Todd). Should my website get more than a handful of readers or I become some internet phemon, I'll have to go back through and delete any potentially dangerous information. On this same token, should my students wander upon this website, I'd appreciate it if the comments were kept in good taste (I'm looking at you, friend) so it makes my life easier.



So I live in Mexico. Not literally, but for all intents and purposes it is. I live almost as far south in the U.S. as you can get without living in Brownsville. The border patrol is 60 miles north of me, and free trade zones abound. It's $.25 to go across the border into Mexico and $.50 to get back, and you don't even need a passport.

(The little yellow line here is the border. Sorry about the size of the photo, but that's about as good as I can do until I have my own website fixed up. The dots above the border are the towns I live in, work in, or drive through often.)

Palm trees abound, but there's also a fair amount of cacti littering the more remote areas. It's like South Texas can't decide if it wants to be tropical or an arid desert. At least while I've been here it's been much more tropical - the RGV (Rio Grande Valley) has seen record rainfall, which I had the pleasure of letting my car swim through.

(Reynosa, which you can see here, is a pretty nice tourist spot in Mexico, and is about 15 minutes away. RGV relies on it a lot to provide cheap labor for the economy.)

Seriously, this place can get rain for 10 minutes and the streets are flooded. This brings me to my next order of business - Hurricane Dean. I'm sure that most of you have heard in the news that Hurricane Dean is bearing down on South Texas and Mexico with all of nature's wrath. Should the hurricane hit, the entire RGV will most likely be wiped out as it's a floodplane that takes 2 and a half hours to drive from one end to the other. Because of all the construction and several decades of drought conditions, you never would have known that this area used to occassionally be an extension of the Rio Grande River or the Gulf of Mexico. I'm constantly bombarded with signs that tell me to "Keep Your Gas Tanks Full" since it's "Hurricane Season". I think this is pretty good advice, but then again, the Texas Department of Transportation has managed to close an entire highway on me with no detour signs directing me to an alternative route (and on a day where I was taking my teacher registration test, no less!). Oh, TDOT has also come up with the gem, "YOU DRINK DRIVE, YOU LOSE" that can be seen on the way back from South Padre Island. Everyone else has decided to take TDOT's advice though, and gas rose 20 cents a gallon today. It's still at reasonable levels, but should Dean hit Galveston as a few TX media outlets have predicted (on no real statistics), "gas could rise to $7 a gallon and collapse the entire U.S. Economy!" Right... right. Well, I'm not particularly worried, as the current path of the hurricane has it hitting the Yucatan and just barely grazing my newfound home.



The Weather Channel seems to have a good handle on things, and the locals all say that RGV has about 3 hurricane warnings a year, but they haven't been hit in something like 100 years. "It's bound to happen!" - fearmonger. I'm not too terribly worried. My car works, I have renter's insurance, and I have until Thursday when this sucker hits ground. I find it strange to think about the items that I would definitely need to take with me, but there really aren't that many items: it's mostly paintings, important papers, and photos. I'll keep you all updated on the Hurricane though, and if I'm forced to evacuate.

Too Cool For School
School starts a week from tomorrow. Some of my students *might* be there. From what all the other teachers have told me, I can expect class sizes from 7-12 students the first few days. By the end of the third week, I'll probably have over 20 in each class. A lot of my students will most likely be from migrant families and other towns, as Donna (my school district) has a population of 14,000 and my 9th grade academy will have over 1,000 students. I highly doubt that 7% of the city population is attending 9th grade. I'm really looking forward to teaching though. Houston was a blast, and I feel like I can really make a difference in my students' lives. I'll be teaching English, but I'm hoping to incorporate multimedia and have my students turn their readings and writings into animations, movie shorts, or slideshows. I got the idea from the iLife Challenge and a professor I saw at a conference who teaches a class called Writing with Video. Apparently I have a good chance of getting grant money, because while the building is old and there aren't many funds for books, there's a bit of money for technology and not a lot of people are taking advantage of it. At least that's the word on the street. I still have to actually apply for the things, but I'm just happy that my chances of receiving funding are greater than zero.

If there's one thing I've learned from this summer, it's that "professional training" can eat up your entire life. I've been in training 10 of the last 12 days, and by the time school starts, I will have had an average of 8 hours of training for 16 of 19 days. That's right - I only get Sundays off. I do it for the kids though... and Sunday has never felt more relaxing. We've had training for lesson planning, assessment, accountability, special needs, lesson planning and unit planning, expectations, legal jargon, sexual harrassment training, and everything else under the sun. There has been so many acronyms thrown at me that I'm starting to think the military uses less. There's TFA, IEP, LPT, RSAT, IRL, ESL, ELL, DISD, LSSP, TSTA, NEA, AEIS, PAID, PEIMS, TAKs, TEKs, TAAS, TEAMs, NCEC, CIP, and enough others to make my head explode just thinking about it. At one point I asked a question about the acronym ADB because, well, every other capitalized word was an acronym, and I got a confused look from my instructor who told me it wasn't an acronym at all - it was a code. Lovely. Now I get to learn how to tell the difference between acronyms and codes. Training really wasn't that bad though. Our meals were more or less paid for by various teacher associations wanting us to join, and I got some cool schwag: not one, but two mousepads, several bajillion pens, two bags (one is really freaking cool and has my school district logo on it), cookies, markers, hi-lighters, and a couple of coupons to different restaurants. I was slightly depressed that I didn't win any raffles, because they were giving out tons of gift cards to Target, Jason's Deli, and Wing Stop. Every day I'd look longingly at my meager stub of a ticket, hearing those first two numbers called out to the delight of my body and soul, only to have the last number, usually a "3" or "9" called out as all hope was lost. Oh well. There's always next week.