Surprise!!!

I went home for my Mardi Gras break. (Yes, I had a Mardi Gras break.) We had a snow day last Friday, so I drove home Friday and met my family at our favorite restaurant at home. Then I spent the weekend and came back yesterday (Tuesday). It was a nice stay - very relaxing; I did no work for school, and only a little bit for my ACE coursework.

A couple things to report today - I did ALL my lesson planning for the entire (3-day) week last night after I got home. That means that I wouldn't feel like I'm staring down a daunting amount of work to do if I had done any of the briefcase-full of grading I took home for the long weekend. Hopefully I'll have everything caught up by next week.

I have 10 of my 23 7th graders absent yesterday. I don't know if it's because Mardi Gras was too hard on them or their parents, but either way, today has been nice so far.

Two fun new ways to keep my students accountable. Instead of just give zero after zero for students who don't do their classwork, I'm going to start requiring them to bring their classwork worksheets back with a parent signature. That way they will either feel some need to do their work in class, or I can tell their parents that not only are they not doing their work, but they're then not getting your signature to at least get some credit. The other development is a little more fun (for me anyway). I have seven of my 7th graders spending PE with me this week for being extremely disrespectful and unruly last Thursday as we tried to line up from lunch to class. Not only am I making them write lines, I just had the awesome brainstorm today that their presence shouldn't interrupt my planning period. So I turned my Pandora station on (Pandora is a website that plays songs that resemble your favorite songs or artists). My Pandora mix includes country, soft rock, and classical. I cranked it up, and they couldn't say anything (unless they wanted to start over on their lines.) I'm pretty sure they hated it, and every time the songs changed, the guy in front of my desk turned around like he wanted to say something. I almost laughed out loud a few times.

Several of you have asked about my community issues. Basically, I just get annoyed but don't say anything. To avoid getting annoyed in the first place, I go to school and work. I also had plans on a few days that my community decided last-minute to do something (for example, I had plans in December for two Fridays ago, but my community decided to do something that night on Thursday at dinner). So, I was missing some events and I wasn't around much. I spent part of last night cleaning my room, and we're meeting tonight to restructure some community guidelines. I think it'll be fixed. (In my personal opinion, there's not much to fix because I have to get the work done. Now, instead of going to school, I will hopefully keep my room clean enough to work there.)