Day Sixty-Eight
One of the school districts over in Maine was closed today, and, of course, there were rumors that there’s a Covid outbreak. In reality, it’s that we had an ice storm over the weekend and a bunch of their buildings still don’t have power. So that totally sucks, but it’s a normal kind of suckage.
Meanwhile, we learned midmorning that one of our students had tested positive- this is our third positive case- so anyone who’d been in close contact with them had to be sent home. I spent the next half hour or so hoping none of the admins would show up at my classroom door to do dismissals (they did not), and trying to go about my lesson (on the history of Rwanda, to connect colonialism to conditions that promote armed violence). It went all right, and afterwards students had the remainder of class to finish revising their Book Papers.
I’m particularly impressed with the improvement in my first block class. They’re writing so much better than they did on the Religions Essay, and I think this assignment’s harder. I had an awesome breakthrough with one student today, too. He came into the year spoiling for a fight, refusing to listen, blowing off work, etc... and he submitted his paper without citations, so I returned it with a comment that asked, “Do you need me to teach you how to do these again?” He wrote back that he did, so I went and sat beside him, and talked him through MLA format. He picked it up quickly and thanked me for my help, which I was not expecting. And not only did he add citations, he also wrote more detail into his body paragraphs. I’m so psyched about this.
The lunch time prank war continued with Mrs. O trying to lock us out of the staff room (our keys don’t work on first floor rooms, but Mrs. T’s a department head and has master keys, so she let us in). Mrs. O and the other first floor teachers eat after us, so our retaliation was to hide the lunch table once we were done eating. We left the chairs sitting around nothing, and ran back upstairs, laughing the whole way. We passed a few of the admins, whose reaction was, “We’re better off not knowing, aren’t we?”
I said, “Probably.”
But, hey, we’re having fun!
