Coming to You Live

A neighbor stopped by the other night to chat. She was giving us the latest on her 5-year-old niece who recently started kindergarten in another state. It seems they have a behavior plan in her class that involves a 10 point system. Her niece is never quite clear on how many points she has or where they went by the end of the week. The family suspects a bit of truth-stretching here and there; it's hardly surprising-- who wants to report unflattering news, especially when you're five?

That's okay, though, our neighbor told us, because the point system is going to be online in a couple of weeks with live progress reports for every kindergartener.

Of course it is.

(Shakes head and turns off the computer.)

The Whole Story

I got a look at the first examples of my new students' writing today. After we read "The Follower" by Jack Gantos, I asked them to identify a possible theme of the story. Don't follow a bad leader; be yourself; monkey see monkey do; listen to good advice, were all accurately offered. The next step was for them to write the story of a time when they learned that lesson themselves.

Given the nature of the prompt, it's hardly surprising that many of their pieces included the sentence, We got in big trouble. Every single story left it there, though, and because I don't know these kids very well yet, I was curious about their definition of "big trouble."

Turns out, it doesn't take much more than a few harsh words or a tap on the wrist for these kids to call it hot water. Well, either that, or they were taking creative license. It doesn't matter though, because it was a great opportunity for me to remind them to elaborate.

"Tell me everything!" I encouraged one student. "What did the principal say? How did you feel? What happened then?"

He frowned and shrugged. "Details, details," he sighed.

I laughed. "Exactly."

Late Summer

What to do when the high temperature for the whole year falls in September?

Fire up the grill!

Traction

This is our fourth year of doing Tolerance Club, and today's meeting was full of surprises. In other years, we have embraced the largely sixth grade participation as a good thing, hoping that we could count on their commitment as their middle school time progressed. That was never the case, though. For some reason, Tolerance Club just wasn't appealing to 7th and 8th graders, and all but our most faithful participants dropped out. This year, we made the conscious decision to be happy with whoever we got-- everyone can use a little tolerance, right? So, imagine our delight when the majority of the kids who showed up were in seventh grade, most of them our alumni from last year.

Could it be that this tolerance thing is finally catching on?

Laying Odds

And so the weekend ends...

with a wet and happy tired dog,

and a homegrown butternut squash casserole.

If the week ahead is half as satisfying, we'll do just fine.

Standard Time

Getting used to a 48 hour weekend?

Gonna take some practice.

Rolling with It

A long time ago I heard a piece on the radio about how you can calculate the temperature by counting the rate of the crickets chirping. I was driving to the mountains on a beautiful fall Saturday in the September of my first year of teaching, and everything seemed so perfect already that this information was as intoxicating as spiked koolaid-- the blue skies, leaves turning in the golden light, and the slow but steady singing of crickets marking the entrance of Autumn was all almost too much.

Today, the first Friday of the school year, was an equally lovely day, and tonight I hear the peeping of crickets outside my open windows. I paused a few moments ago to count their chirps and applied the formula I heard so long ago.

48 degrees? That seems a little off.