Mr. Snow Miser

I had already seen it happen once today, and so when what seemed like a serious snow squall gusted outside my classroom, I ignored the huge flakes blowing sideways and silenced the excited chatter of sixth graders anticipating an early release.

"I predict it will stop snowing and the sun will come out before this class ends," I told them.

They were skeptical as they returned to work, but sure enough, the storm tapered and then halted. Ten minutes later it was blue skies and sunshine. "Ta da!" I spread my arms wide.

"How did you do that?" they demanded. "How did you know?"

"Maybe she can control the weather!" one student suggested.

"Trust me," I said, "if I could? We would have a lot more four day weekends!"

Practice Accountability

It's something I tell my students over and over:

Skills are improved with regular practice. I use that argument to justify their daily reading requirement, often with the analogy that you'll get stronger by lifting 20 pounds every day, but you'll probably get hurt if you lift 100 pounds on Sunday.

I believe it when I tell them, and I shake my head when they don't follow through, but that was definitely me frantically practicing my ukulele for an hour before my lesson this afternoon, and for the record, I hadn't touched it since Saturday.

Oh, I didn't get hurt, but I have to confess that my lesson fees might be better spent should I actually be more prepared. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't practice at all if it weren't for the lesson.

Conflicted

Every week I give a little skills quiz to see how my students are testing on topics for which they are mandated to demonstrate mastery.

This past week it was on conflict-- they had to list the four basic types (character v. self, character, society, or nature) and then identify what type of conflict was described in a brief scenario. To their credit, most students did quite well (for those data crunchers out there, the pass rate was 90% and the average was even higher), but there were some misperceptions that we'll need to go back and address.

For example, my favorite incorrect answer was in reply to this: You can't decide whether to have spaghetti or tacos for lunch.

One student called that man versus nature, and even as I marked it wrong I couldn't help thinking that man! Those must have been some tacos.

Flasher Cards

One of the coolest things about giving every sixth grader an iPad is seeing the ways they find to use it to learn. (Of course, they are finding ways to use it NOT to learn, but the reverse is definitely true as well.)

Watching 80 people use something as simple as a glorified flash card app is amazing; all of its functionality is on display: some love the matching feature and try over and over to beat their best time, others prefer to practice vocabulary by filling in the blank. Many have discovered the dictionary feature embedded within, and some have even realized that they only need speak the words to make their cards.

This latter feature can be a little glitchy, though, particularly when one tries to use it in a room full of chattering sixth graders. Thus it was that I came upon one of my more conscientious students repeating the word dictate over and over into the screen of her iPad.

"I hate this thing!" she complained.

"Try saying it really slowly," the student next to her said.

Our class was ending, and many students were filing by her to put their English binders away as she enunciated the word in two elongated syllables.

"Oh my God!" one of her classmates said, and I looked over to find them both wide-eyed and giggling, looking at her device with bright red faces. "Here," he continued, and then leaned over her shoulder and typed d-i-c-t-a-t-e."

Pretest

A big focus of the quarterly reading class I teach is getting sixth graders to begin to identify theme as it relates to author's message. Most often, they want to boil it down to a moral or lesson, and that's a pretty good place to start. Today I read one of Dr. Seuss's lesser known tales to the class and then asked them to write down the message on an index card.

The story was "What Was I Afraid Of?" from the Sneetches collection, and for those who are unfamiliar, it is the truly bizarre account of a strange yellow (everybody is yellow in that book) nocturnal bear-like creature (the main character) who is (not surprisingly) terrified when he repeatedly runs into an empty pair of green pants that is able to walk, ride a bicycle, row a boat, and shiver in fear. In the end, he realizes that the pants are just as afraid of him as he is of them, and they befriend each other.

The moral of the story? According to the vast majority of my students it is Don't judge people by the way they look.

It could be, but here's the rub: I always ask them to test out their theories about theme by telling a story from their lives where they learned this lesson. Today? Not a single child of the 18 present could muster an anecdote of a time when they judged someone unfairly by their appearance. Neither have they ever been so unfairly judged, according to them.

Wow! Could it be that mankind has progressed that far?

Either that, or I have some work to do this quarter.

Degrees of Separation

We wake up to news on the radio every morning, and I often lay abed visualizing the conditions described in the traffic and weather reports before I rise. I was actually up and about the other morning though when I heard the news that there was a huge fire nearby. This time I didn't have to imagine a thing, I simply looked out the balcony door from our bedroom and saw hundreds of flashing lights surrounding a grayish-orange glow in the sky.

I'm ashamed to admit that my first thought was to whether all that activity would make it harder for me to get to school rather than for the people who were in danger of losing their property and so much more. Later, after I made it to work without any problem, I heard that a 73-year-old man had died at the hospital after being rescued from the burning house, and just today? I found out that he was the grandfather of some former students. We're going to reach out to them tomorrow from school.

I've written before about how I learned years ago that it's a mistake to be aggressive or rude on the road around here. You just never know who you might be flipping off. This lesson was (literally) driven home to me when I encountered a rather impatient driver on my way to summer school on the first day. The light had just changed when she laid on her horn, gave me the bird, and whizzed around me to shoot up the crowded drive. Traffic being what it was, she wasn't that far ahead of me when we both pulled into the middle school parking lot, but she made haste in getting inside the building before we met face to face. All her efforts were in vain though, because ten minutes later, in the staff meeting, I was introduced as her supervisor.

Now that was instant karma thrash, but I tend to believe that everything else is, too, we just don't recognize it as such.

Be good!

Trade Offs

There's this graphic I saw recently that I keep going back to-- it shows that half of the U.S. population lives in 146 counties, leaving the entire rest of the nation to the other half!

Living in one of the more populous regions as I do, I find myself fantasizing about life somewhere a little less crowded: Like somewhere you didn't have to show up 20 minutes early to a movie just to find a seat and still sit shoulder to shoulder with all the other patrons. Or maybe someplace where you could find a restaurant you liked where the wait for a table on a Saturday night was less than 45 minutes.

All that sounds great until I wonder if in those wide-open spaces the movie I want to see would even be playing and then consider just how far I'd have to drive to get to that restaurant.