Yay! I'm on vacation!
Remember the scene in High School Musical X where the bell rings at the end of the last school day, and all the kids pour outside and start a big song and dance number? Or Alice Cooper's "School's Out For Summer??"
The end of the year was nothing like that. It never is.
Our year had basically ended last week, as originally scheduled. We had a few students trickling in ... I had one fellow, "Legolas", who did enough missing work to get his grade up to passing for the quarter. He was already passing for the year, but had slacked off at the end. I gave a call to his stepfather to let him know that he was now okay for the quarter as well, and I think he wins a trip home to Puerto Rico or something. Another girl was up to date on homeworks, and made an extra credit poster on matrix arithmetic to bump her grade from a C+ to a B- so she'll be on honor roll. Hurray for initiative! And those two students actually made an otherwise tedious week quite worthwhile.
We share a building with three other schools ... our students were the only ones in the building. I'm not sure how the other schools justified it, but apparently they had just called it quits at the originally scheduled date. And this extended year was a pain in the butt for many different reasons, one of which was that the city had scheduled a whole bunch of "professional development" sessions for the week after school ended ... and those didn't move after the school year got extended. So we were missing about a third of our teachers on any particular day of the entire week.
The students showing up this week were the ones who either needed to be there, or wanted to be. In fact, there were some we couldn't kick out the door! They were playing spades, or You-gi-oh, or helping teachers disassemble their classrooms. I can't say I blame them. It's a comfortable environment; they have adults who care about them; there's free food, even if they complain about it and it's all assembled from USDA surplus crap; their friends are there; and they won't get randomly shot dead on the street. Or, in the case of "Zardoz", his parole officer expects him to be there.
The end of the year was nothing like that. It never is.
Our year had basically ended last week, as originally scheduled. We had a few students trickling in ... I had one fellow, "Legolas", who did enough missing work to get his grade up to passing for the quarter. He was already passing for the year, but had slacked off at the end. I gave a call to his stepfather to let him know that he was now okay for the quarter as well, and I think he wins a trip home to Puerto Rico or something. Another girl was up to date on homeworks, and made an extra credit poster on matrix arithmetic to bump her grade from a C+ to a B- so she'll be on honor roll. Hurray for initiative! And those two students actually made an otherwise tedious week quite worthwhile.
We share a building with three other schools ... our students were the only ones in the building. I'm not sure how the other schools justified it, but apparently they had just called it quits at the originally scheduled date. And this extended year was a pain in the butt for many different reasons, one of which was that the city had scheduled a whole bunch of "professional development" sessions for the week after school ended ... and those didn't move after the school year got extended. So we were missing about a third of our teachers on any particular day of the entire week.
The students showing up this week were the ones who either needed to be there, or wanted to be. In fact, there were some we couldn't kick out the door! They were playing spades, or You-gi-oh, or helping teachers disassemble their classrooms. I can't say I blame them. It's a comfortable environment; they have adults who care about them; there's free food, even if they complain about it and it's all assembled from USDA surplus crap; their friends are there; and they won't get randomly shot dead on the street. Or, in the case of "Zardoz", his parole officer expects him to be there.