Italics.

As I approach my first "hump day" of my teaching career, I am loving the fact that I have 2 more days until the weekend.  By no means am I washed up already, but good god I'm tired- and I haven't even taken over the classroom yet.

Here's a synopsis of the past three days:

Day 1:  Car windshield is frosted on the INSIDE.  Attempts to scrape said interior ice were futile as my much needed defroster blew the ice back into my face.  I waited a bit for the windshield to have a little circle of ice-free vision and I was on my way.  Being my first day I got to meet some of my surrounding teachers who are all off-puttingly hilarious (I say off-putting because part of me still expects teachers to be a bunch of tight-wads.  Hypocritical, I know).  During classes my role consisted mostly of standing up to introduce myself.... explaining that, much to my chagrin, I am not related to Steve Nash and walking around to the occasional student who had a question I could answer. 

Day 2:  Car windshield again frosted on the inside.  I was prepared for it this time and gave myself ample time to defrost that baby.  I had a solid oval of seeing space today.  However, to counter my small defeat over the cold this morning... I show up to school and the boiler is broken (sidenote: I'm teaching in an annex building with about 5 classrooms.... the main building, of course, was just fine).  Since today Teacher Monica has a prep period first, we moseyed over to the library and kicked it.  And by kicked it, I mean we graded papers. On Tuesdays the school has advisory and as part of their spirit week stuff (cue high school flashbacks and excessive school pride) student council put on a "Lip Dub."  Don't be alarmed if you don't know what this is.... I didn't either.  But upon further research, The Office did a little rendition of a lip dub for the Season 7 opener.  In summation it's people walking through a setting, lip synching to a song while a bunch of neat stuff happens around them. So the kids did that throughout the school and ended with an aerial shot of the gym with students spelling out NC.  I was the top part of the C.  With a row of fellow teachers.  We also were responsible for pumping students up to jump up and down when the camera rounded the corner.  Comments such as: "You're going to be immortalized!  This is going to be on YouTube!" may or may not have come out of my mouth.  I'm happy to say I rounded up a group of timid freshmen to finish off the curve of the C. I'll be sure to post the video once it's leaked.

Also- in probably more important news- I got to teach 2 mini lessons today.  After watching Teacher Monica do one class, she asked if I wanted to take it away for the last two.  I threw caution to the wind and did the damn thing.  I introduced satire as a writing style and had myself a grand ol' time.  A couple kids laughed.... they al remained semi-focused... and overall I'd call my "lessons" a success.

Day 3:  Today I woke up just as the radio station told me I would- to a winter weather advisory.  Apparently it began snowing around 11pm (I wouldn't know, I passed out at 10) and continued throughout the early afternoon.  I gave myself even more time to defrost/desnow/skid to school in my car.  As I was struggling to drive up a hill, I remembered that schools have snow days... and I got real excited.  Except I guess I was spoiled by my Portland snow days (aka the whole town shuts down for an inch of snow fall) and found out that cars stuck in ditches, cars spinning out and the accumulation of 5 inches in less than 24 hours is not enough to cancel school.  I'm not sure I want to know what is.  Anyway, school went on as per usual, and I'm proud to say I left my house looking like a real teacher, carrying my bag of student teaching materials, my lunch, my purse, my bag of gym clothes, a thermos of coffee and an apple (breakfast slipped my mind).  As far as classes go, Teacher Monica was prepping the kids for their final next week and I spent most of my time grading a stack of papers and was left less than thrilled by what I saw. 

My depressing educational reality check/blow to the soul comes from a sentence in a student paper about the cultural conflict in the movie, Bend it Like Beckham:  "Within the movie italics, a Indian girl wants to play soccer even though her family wont let her"

No, my qualm is not with using "a" instead of "an."

I had an idea of what was going on, so I flipped to the student's rough draft where they wrote the title of the movie but had it underlined.  The students' peer editor circled the movie title and wrote "italics," correctly telling the writer to place the title in italics.  Where things went wrong was when the student decided to utilize zero critical thinking skills or thought whatsoever and replaced the entire movie title with the word, "italics"

After giving out a wealth of not-so-swell grades, I asked Teacher Monica if I could take a group of students (I recorded names while grading) during class on Friday and do a little writing workshop to address the recurring errors and hopefully give them some useful tips.  Thankfully she was all for the idea, and I'm really hoping I SOMEWHAT get through to them.  In my idealistic world, I picture the students kissing my feet and thanking me for reaching out to them because they always wanted to write well but no one ever took the time to go over it with them.  Realistically, however, I'm sure I'll get lots of responses more along the lines of: "writing is (insert negative adjective here)."  Anyway, I can't stand the thought of these students continuing on to higher education (not even college, I'm talking junior/senior year) unable to write a competent paper.  It cheats them of any chance for success in just about any subject, ever.

So there's my educational diatribe and my lengthy recap of the past three days.  I'll try to do better about updating daily so you don't have to read this much and more importantly, so I don't have to write this much.  The end.