Happy Holidays

This has been one of the nicest pre-holiday weeks I've ever experienced as a teacher. There's been warm feelings all around, our "office party" was well done, students have been excited, albeit reluctant to get much work done. I think I timed it so that this wasn't a problem and factored in some down-time this week to tie up some lose ends, such as finishing the (PBS) Evolution video and working on some extra credit assignments and the like.

My 8th graders had the luxury today of having laptops in the classroom so I had everyone set up their google account and post something on the class reading blog. I let them go a little crazy and post whatever they wanted (within reason) with the caveat that all would be deleted soon except for serious reading logs. I did have one student post her pre-reading entry on the book she chose, which was nice - otherwise it's a free-for-all, instant messaging, chat-room kinda atmosphere. Maybe I'll copy everything to a single post and leave it there- they can get pretty attached to their postings.

The English teacher (humanities in our school) approached me about the assignment and offered some much-appreciated ideas on modifying or augmenting the assignment somewhat to take into account the huge range of abilities and access to resources among our students. Some students have no problem getting to a public library or bookstore to find books, and no trouble picking a book that appeals to them, is at an appropriate reading level, and satisfies the requirements of the assignment. Others will be both unable to get the necessary materials and unwilling to ask for help. I will be at a bookstore this weekend looking for 5-10 titles at a range of reading levels to recommend and we will be offering to order copies for them from Barnes & Noble for a discounted price. Also the 200 page requirement may be a bit much for the 10 weeks I've given them to complete the assignment. So I'll probably reduce that to a 100-150 range for the book, and 10-15 for the articles.

In other news, I'm totally unprepared for the holidays. I am going to try to buy all gifts for next year during the after-Christmas sales this year in an effort to avoid this madness next year - although I think a lot of the after-Christmas sales are fraudulent and will have to be careful in terms of comparing prices. I'm going downtown early tomorrow morning for last-minute items, but there may not be an "early" in terms of beating the crowds.