The New School Year

Well, it's the beginning of my second year of teaching. Here's my newest experience.

My personal crusade

If you're interested in the documentary, you can watch it online at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

I guess now I'm all...set

Honest to goodness, this is all my original and solo work to construct this baby. I'm pretty proud (and sore--I might secretly be 82 years old). The next step will be to paint it. That is, unless of course, I can figure out how to work palm trees into a western... I'll think on that.

Can I force them to wear blinders and earplugs in public?

The first forensics tournament is officially under my belt. I got up at a quarter to five, and I have somehow managed to stay awake all the way until now at about 8:45 p.m. I must have developed super teacher powers...or insomnia...or both. Yeah, probably both. Unless insomnia IS a super teacher power...

They never cease to amaze me

Well, first of all, I have to say that surviving my first semester as a teacher has been something of which I am particularly proud. Now that I am a couple weeks into my second, everything seems much easier (although, it's still difficult). Our high school is on a modified block schedule, which means that I have all of my students every day for 90 minutes. After a semester is over, it is as though they had an entire year's worth of a class. (and it feels like it, too) This is what I found on my whiteboard after the last day of school before Christmas:
In case you can't read it, it says, "We Love you Ms Miller. We will miss you, have fun with your new Kids" Now, ignoring the obvious capitalization and punctuation flaws, which still make me cringe after I spent a large amount of time explaining those rules, that's really sweet. It made me smile, and I was glad I had my camera with me.

Okay, here's my official new interesting occurrence of the year: