A Twisted Kind of Day

I felt discombobulated all day yesterday. When I left for work at 5:45 a.m., it was dark and windy. Weather was threatening to put a warp on my TGIF mood. Before first period, the assistant principal gave me the news: I'd be in the lunchroom with my kids first through third period. We were under a tornado watch.

Anytime we have a watch, we have to evacuate "the trailer park." Tim, Steve and I take our classes into the school building and are given the task of attempting to teach something/anything in the lunchroom, the media center, or -- worst of all locations -- the gym. If the watch goes to a warning, which means a tornado has been sighted, we hunker down with the students against the cinderblock in the central hallway. The worst thing about hanging out in the hallway is that it becomes VERY NOISY when filled with a hundred middle schoolers. Hallway usually means headache for me, and a bad one to boot. There's no teaching there.

I have to give my students in 1-3 periods credit, though. Yesterday, I had a lesson plan, and by gum, I stuck to it. My sixth graders completed their homework from the night before and worked in their Holt readers (which I'd lugged in from the trailer). The seventh graders completed their homework and worked together on an assignment I'd cooked up for a unit on the Seminoles, reading and responding to an article on the 1837 Christmas Day battle with the U.S. army. I guess I could have been severely disappointed that the kids didn't do their homework at home, but this gave me an opportunity to work with them individually and make sure they understood the assignment. We just started a unit on parts of speech and did prepositions/prepositional phrases on Thursday. By the time they got through their homework, they were seeing prepositions everywhere. Success.

One of the other teachers asked, "You're trying to do something with the kids today?" I told him, Oh Yes. If I have to come up with a lesson plan, I'm going to do my best to make sure the students work in my class. This seems a good precedent to set early in the year. They know what to expect when they come to my class. Also, this tactic prepares them for high school where the scholastic load will be far more strenuous and stressful.

After third period, I lugged the workbooks back out to the trailer and prepared to go to training. The language arts teachers had half a day of training yesterday dealing with FCAT writing requirements. Four other teachers and myself shared catered sandwiches and ideas about how to improve writing instruction. We looked at some of the sample essays and how they were weighted. We discovered that we were probably much "harder" graders than the FCAT writing scorers. Nothing wrong with that. Our school has been at the top of the heap in writing for the past several years and we'd like to stay there. Sixth and seventh grade students take the county test in early February. Eighth graders will take the FCAT writing test later the same month.

I discovered during the training that my seventh graders will have to write a persuasive essay for the county test. Dang. I spent 9 weeks teaching expository writing, but now I'd have to go back and devote more time to cover persuasive. That's what I'm doing this weekend: developing a plan to teach persuasive writing. I wanted to start on a poetry unit this week, but that will have to wait.

Of course, spending the afternoon in training meant that I had a substitute for fifth and sixth period. I wasn't happy about it, but there was nothing I could do. I felt fifth period would do okay, although they'd been naughty on Thursday and, as a result, lost their privilege of going to the media center. Sixth period was just bad. I hated to leave those kids with anyone. As soon as I got back to my room after school, I looked through their workbooks to see what they'd done. Very few of them completed the assignment. Several kids didn't even bother, merely scribbled in their books. I recorded grades, zeros and "C"s and a couple of "A"s.

I missed being in my trailer yesterday. I bought some stuff over the Christmas break, and I've taken down the student book report posters and have put up bright, new ones: The Writing Process, The Parts of Speech, Literary Genres. I moved a few things around and the room looks inviting, clean and comfortable. It may be a portable, but the space has come to be "my room." I like spending time with my students there, and I enjoy working there on my own. I bought a DVD/VCR at Wal-Mart and hooked it up this week. Major accomplishment. I also bought a big cork board, and I'll soon have it hung. It will give me a place to post students work with pride. Being in a portable gives me a sense of autonomy and, in a strange way, it's become my safe place, no matter the weather. I missed it yesterday.

Today, it's a gloomy day Down South. Ed and I did chores this morning, and now he's gone off fishing with the dog. He didn't have any luck last week, and he probably won't catch anything today, but that doesn't seem to bother him or hinder his enjoyment. All life should be so simple.