- Class count is 159 as of this moment. There is a backlog of applications of students waiting to enroll. The high school alone has hit 10,000 students with an additional 2000 K-8 students. We're a little top-heavy.
- I have a ridiculous number of students who have yet to turn in a single assignment. I'm on my second round of trying to contact everyone by phone. Sharon's having some weird issues and hasn't called any of our DEC students, at least not that I can see. I hate to think of all these students at a deficit because of a computer glitch.
- Students are definitely starting to show some personality. Kate has to let everyone know her opinion at all times, even if it isn't the most polite thing to say. Today a student tried to participate in a live class session with a baby crying in the background. Kate chimed in, "Wow, I'm glad I don't have kids." Nice. Amanda is very conscientious about her work and calls me often to go over her assignments for improvement. She's earning As. Jasmine just got out of the hospital but was afraid I'd be mad at her for falling a half week behind, so she had her mother email me with an apology. Jasmine is also an A student. Dustin, I swear, is trying to be The Ladies Man, straight out of the old SNL sketch. It wears thin when he's talking about romance and I'm trying to talk about Beowulf.
- Remember that Writers Read club I mentioned in the beginning of the blog? It restarted this afternoon. The talent is huge, but it is very difficult keeping the side conversations down. I would think that a club like this would have participants who would stop typing about ice cream and listen to their schoolmates. Sadly, they agreed that I should take away their chatting privileges when they can't be trusted to self-monitor.
- Speaking of self-monitoring, apparently this is a teaching term I didn't know but was assessed on in my last teacher observation. Thankfully, I'm somehow promoting it in my classroom without knowing exactly what it is in pedagogical terms. My new supervisor, unfortunately, has rubbed most of my teaching team the wrong way. She's told us we need to do things her way. This is after a month since she started handling our observations. Well, either (a) we already are and she hadn't noticed or (b) we tried it and found it didn't work for the majority of students we teach. I have less of a problem than most of my team seems to, mostly because I'm a big fan of Love and Logic as a teaching / discipline technique and my supervisor has been to several training sessions on it as well. Not sure.
Next week I'm assigning the first five-paragraph essay (aka the dreaded 1-3-1) to the class. I should keep a weekly running percentage of students who complete this essay. It's traditionally one of the assignments they skip. I don't mean to sound cynical, but skipped assignments are among my biggest challenges. When they can't be tracked down in person, they feel less accountable to me.
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