This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Blogs.

I am probably one of the top ten worst bloggers ever. I have written four entries since late August and went months without writing anything. Forcing myself to sit and post on here on a more regular basis is going to be a mixed bag; I’ll have more entries, but it’ll be more work for me and I am so horribly lazy. I wish I had some sort of theme or list for this particular blog entry, but I got nothing this time. Instead I’ll just title my random thoughts and see if anyone pays close enough attention to notice that there is no theme…

Exam Week

Exam week definitely has pros and cons. I love half days, I love not having to lesson plan, and I love that I usually get a chance to finally clean up my classroom. I hate sitting in silence for an hour and a half at a time, I hate seeing kids I want to pass end up failing, and I HATE SITTING IN SILENCE. The 9^th Grade English midterm is divided into two parts: a writing section and a multiple choice section. The multiple choice section is based off of the SOLs, but the writing section always can get interesting. Most of the kids don’t read the prompt all the way (we aren’t allowed to help) and end up giving me a plot summary, resulting in an automatic F for that section, but every now and then you get something hilarious. My favorite this year came from a member of our school Modeling Club. She is a sweet smart girl, but she acts extra ditzy so that no one knows. In the novel Animal Farm, there is a horse named Mollie who only cares about eating sugar lumps, wearing ribbons in her mane, and being taken care of by humans. Our girl decided she was going to write about the conflict that Mollie the horse faced. My favorite lines: “Mollie had to decide what she wanted to do. She realized being taken care of is the most important thing in life, so she chose to leave the farm and go with the people.” I just hope the irony wasn’t lost on our “Mollie.”

Rugby

On Wednesday, we had our first practice. Some key faces were missing, but we had a great first day. The guys aren’t in amazing shape and don’t have great passes yet, but they are extremely eager to learn and even more eager to impress. Knowing this (and being sadistic when it comes to conditioning my team), I created a new drill: The Horse Race.  The Horse Race consists of me picking four guys of reasonably close size and making the team pick who they think will be the fastest. Everyone who guesses wrong has to do five burpees. We figure out who is the fastest by me or one of the other coaches kicking a ball and the four guys racing to get it. However, because I am a conditioning sadist, I cheat. Rather than always booting the ball as far as I can, sometimes I kick it to the line of guys that only has two supporters…just so the rest have to do way more conditioning. If I can get the big boys out to practice soon and get them in shape, we can definitely be looking at a potential state championship.

Professional Development

I am no good at being a professional. Like seriously, not at all. I need to be somehow developed into a professional before I can be professionally developed. That is all.

Poetry

The first unit of the new marking period is poetry and is definitely my least favorite part of teaching English. I was never any good at interpreting poetry and never saw anything great about it, with the obvious exception of limericks. High School Benn hated poetry so much in fact that the title of his (my?) poetry packet in 10^th grade was “The Poetry Project That Was a Complete Waste of My Time That I Could Have Spent Working Out for Football or Even Taking a Nice Relaxing Nap.” Poetry is by far the hardest unit for me to teach because of my feelings about it and the difficulty in interpreting many of these poems. I usually try to solve the problem by involving songs and trying to encourage the students to come up with their own interpretations and read deeper. If anyone has any really great things that they remember doing with poetry, I would love to hear about it. They’ll be doing a poetry interpretation project that usually leads to some good presentations, but I would really like to have some more (creative) to help scaffold things for them.

Awesome Wrap-up

When I paid my rent this month, I mentioned that I am a teacher. I received one of the two usual reactions that I get: disbelief because I look young (it probably doesn’t help that I haven’t had a haircut in a while so my hair is getting more moppish by the day). I then got the usual follow up question: do any of the girls have crushes on you? I typically try to avoid this question because it is hella uncomfortable. The answer is…I sure hope not. I hear rumors, but I always ignore them. Crushes on teachers are ridiculous in high school anyway; I feel like they are just because the teacher is older and in a position of power…and I’m not just saying that because I don’t remember having any cute teachers. I know I’ll be answering that question, as well as the usuals, many more times. At least people reading this won’t ask me! Unless they are jerks. Then they’ll probably still ask me.