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