Ring Out, Wild Bells!
Quote of the Day: "Kick your mother in the ass and tell her to send her brother an e-mail." - my uncle Stan (who is nuts)
Today I forced myself to stop worrying about the upcoming unit test and writing simulation and read Tennyson's "Ring Out, Wild Bells" with my students. I pretended to be a foreign language teacher and we pretended to be minstrels and we translated stanza-by-stanza into contemporary slanguage-- "ring out the grief that saps the mind," for example, became "trash the sadness that stresses you out." Then the kids wrote their own Ring Out / Ring In poems. HOORAY POETRY! If nothing else, I had a good first day back because of it. Every once in a while, I need to do this-- to stop worrying about whether I'm following the pacing guide and do a little literary analysis because I enjoy it and maybe that will rub off on the kids! I loved some of the kids' poems so much that I made copies of them, typed up a more articulate version of my lesson plan, and added them to my portfolio, which is really more of a teaching scrapbook since I'm not job hunting :)
Also in an attempt to save my teaching sanity in 2009, I am going to be very picky about what I assign for homework and which groups of students I assign it to... I will never send another novel home with my second period, for example, because the kids' quiz scores showed they hadn't read and I'm now missing half the class set. And essays are all going to be in-class from now on, and will not leave their writing folder in the meantime, because otherwise rubrics and rough drafts don't get turned in with the final and I can't give an accurate grade. Likewise, when I am stressing about the pile of papers to grade I am going to remind myself that we are only required to have nine grades each grading period and only score assignments that reflect whether or not students have mastered a particular skill.
until next time,
heather***
Today I forced myself to stop worrying about the upcoming unit test and writing simulation and read Tennyson's "Ring Out, Wild Bells" with my students. I pretended to be a foreign language teacher and we pretended to be minstrels and we translated stanza-by-stanza into contemporary slanguage-- "ring out the grief that saps the mind," for example, became "trash the sadness that stresses you out." Then the kids wrote their own Ring Out / Ring In poems. HOORAY POETRY! If nothing else, I had a good first day back because of it. Every once in a while, I need to do this-- to stop worrying about whether I'm following the pacing guide and do a little literary analysis because I enjoy it and maybe that will rub off on the kids! I loved some of the kids' poems so much that I made copies of them, typed up a more articulate version of my lesson plan, and added them to my portfolio, which is really more of a teaching scrapbook since I'm not job hunting :)
Also in an attempt to save my teaching sanity in 2009, I am going to be very picky about what I assign for homework and which groups of students I assign it to... I will never send another novel home with my second period, for example, because the kids' quiz scores showed they hadn't read and I'm now missing half the class set. And essays are all going to be in-class from now on, and will not leave their writing folder in the meantime, because otherwise rubrics and rough drafts don't get turned in with the final and I can't give an accurate grade. Likewise, when I am stressing about the pile of papers to grade I am going to remind myself that we are only required to have nine grades each grading period and only score assignments that reflect whether or not students have mastered a particular skill.
until next time,
heather***