I remembered!

At least I remembered to blog this week. On a random side note that has nothing to do with class, I found a fun website. It's Obamiconme.com. Regardless of political views, it's fun to play with the site and make your own pictures like mine. You can make them say HOPE or CHANGE or whatever you want. Just some random fun!

This was a good even if it was all mixed up. I started the week with the Juniors and was supposed to be with them both Monday and Tuesday, but Mrs. Grogan's daughter was sick and she had to be out on Tuesday, so we're going to complete our switch this Tuesday. I had fun with the Juniors. We worked on Graduation Project prep. It was fun just getting to interact with them some since I don't typically have those kinds of opportunities.

With groups B, C, and D, we wrote journals on Selling Out and being Sold Out. I wanted the focus to be on the motivation behind the behavior. We had just gotten to a point in the novel where Talley basically sells out her friend and the smoke. It was good to go beyond the book and the surface and explore why exactly we chose to sell people out. A group wrote about their day with Mrs. Grogan. They seemed to enjoy the lesson and had fun with her. It was an interesting experiment. While students might be used to having a substitute, this was different in that Mrs. Grogan is an English teacher and she planned her lesson on her own. So it was like having a different teacher for a day.

We spent time working on the quote project. For A group, it's due on Wednesday, and for B, C, and D it's due on Thursday. For the project, they were given a 12 X 18 piece of white construction paper. They had to pick a quote from Uglies and fully illustrate a poster of the quote. The had to use the entire paper and capture either the literal or figurative meaning of the quote. I've already seen a few, and I'm very impressed.

Wednesday we used the early release day as a work day at the students' request. They felt like they needed more time for both their high school and college work, so we obliged and had a pretty productive day. That turned Thursday into an A day and Friday into a B day. We used Friday afternoon to watch The Long Walk Home, a very emotionally charged film dealing with the lives of two families, one black and one white, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was a good follow up to the Mike Wiley performance we saw last week and fits right into Black history Month.

Friday worked out to be much like tomorrow will be for A group, since B, C, and D will be with Mrs. Grogan. I hooked up a set of Qwizdom remotes. They're classroom responders that allow students to respond to questions on the screen, and they get immediate feedback. It's a pretty cool system. I can then see all of the answers given and it logs things for me. I've just started to play with the software, but it looks like it'll come in very handy as we prep for the EOC. We spent the rest of class reading and talking about Uglies. We're about to finish the novel.

Saturday I competed on the teacher team during the Dodge Ball Tournament. It was a valiant effort and raised money for the Road Trip at the end of the year, not to mention a whole lot of fun.