Day Sixty-Five
I didn’t get to write this entry sooner because I had to drive to my dad’s house after work today, but hi! Here I am! Happy break to everyone who’s got tomorrow off, too, and condolences to those of you who don’t.
Today was one of those days that was pretty chill in my world, but definitely not in other people’s worlds. Like, the SRO did not have a chill day. The Principal did not have a chill day. I don’t know what happened, but I know they were very busy with whatever it was. Meantime, I was in my Cavern of Learning with Mrs. T, editing rough drafts of Epic Book Papers. It was a very quiet cavern today- so much so that when Ms. N walked in, she asked what had happened! In fact, two things: rough drafts were due today (so some students were feeling the time crunch), and I’d pointed out that striking up conversations just because they’d been told not to wasn’t original, edgy, or impressive. I honestly wasn’t expecting that to be as effective as it was, but I’m not going to complain!
I spent a good chunk of time helping one of our highest needs students with her writing. She hasn’t mastered paragraph-building yet, so I just kept asking her questions and having her write down her answers until she had an appropriate amount of information on one of her book’s themes. Then I had her “enter key and tab” (the phrase many students, not just her, are more likely to know than “start a new paragraph”) and started the process over again. It was slow going, and we took lots of breaks so she wouldn’t get overwhelmed, but a full draft appeared one sentence at a time. Ultimately, when she saw that she had two pages of writing, she looked a bit awed. I’m counting that as a big win.
The class’ attention held, really, until about the last ten minutes before Block 4 ended. After that, it was all giggles, silly noises, practicing basketball moves with crumpled paper, and other shenanigans. Mrs. T and I ended up just laughing and letting it happen. The students did so well for the majority of the day, so it’s all good.
After school, the MfoL kids and I went to one of the hotels nearby to decorate a Christmas tree for an auction put on by a local charitable organization. There were students from other clubs there, too, so we were jokingly scoping out each other’s work, which was pretty funny. Each tree had to have a theme, so we decorated ours with ornaments in our school colors, and draped it with ribbons in the “cause colors” for mental health awareness, domestic violence prevention, and gun violence prevention. The club’s president, who is also one of our tallest members, put the star on the tree, we plugged the lights in, and it was perfect.









