Somehow it's Friday already--and good news to report!

I've been praying for Friday all week, and finally my prayers have been answered! (God works in mysterious ways. He does not like to be rushed.)

I set my alarm for early this morning so I could do a bunch more prep for today, but I'm finding myself tempted to blow that off (somewhat--at least for a few minutes) to write here, even though my wrists are really hurting from revising my lesson plans for next week in preparation for my meeting with the mean master teacher, which she just postponed until Monday because of a migraine. By the way, I love that I just call her "the mean master teacher"--all in the spirit of anonymity of course--and that you all know who I'm talking about. (And, just so you all know who I'm talking about, when I say "you all" I mean those of you in my inner circle who are privy to my daily chronicles. You lucky bastards.

My tone in this blog interests me, if nobody else, as this is different writing than I've ever done.

Anyway, back to the good news--and not just that it's Friday.

I put in A LOT of work the past few days. (Thankfully the evil CAHSEE (California High School Exit Exam) was this week, which meant that I had a bunch of free time during the day when there was no class, and I used this wisely--well, if you consider it wise to do nothing but work.)

I feel like it paid off. For my 10th grade class, we started reading Black Boy, by Richard Wright, this week--a beautiful book, if you can make time to read it!--and I really hadn't thought through what I was going to have them *do* while they read it. If you think back to high school, you probably never just read a book. You had to make annoying charts and pictures and other stuff, and I needed to think of some of that to have them do. I don't believe in giving students purposeless things to do, so I wanted this to be useful for them in writing their essays at the end and to improve the quality of reading they're doing. So, first I sat down and came up with four possible essay topics that I think I will give them to choose from (nope--I'm not telling! Actually, maybe I will another time.) . Then I thought about the reading strategies that I had seen, and none seemed to really fit with the essays. I thought about what would be useful, and I came up with something I really like. Each night, they're keeping what I called a timeline, which is a chart that looks like this:

Age Incident Significance of the incident Most important quote(s) about incident


This has them looking for things that happen to Richard that have an impact on his life (which is really what this autobiography is about) while analyzing that impact using quotes from the text--which is what you do in an essay. I asked them in class yesterday why they thought I was having them do this, and they had all kinds of great answers, including that it would help them for an essay. I asked them what essay it would most help them write, which was really cool. I would've loved for my English teachers to have done this. (In fact, they may have, but who remembers high school anyway???)

Anyway, yesterday was the first day my nice master teacher observed my class, whihc I knew was important. She hadn't observed my class at all yet, and, because of negative things my other master teacher has said, I think she may have been concerned that the positive things I've been saying about how her class has been going may be less than true. Well, I put in a lot of work Wednesday night to make sure she saw a good class, and it went SO well. It was the first day we really got into talking about the book, and also the first day I've ever really led a discussion analyzing a text (other things I have done have been an intro to a book, a writing activity, analyzing a myth (totally different), and of course lots of classes in my other life on humane and envi ed. So, yesterday was SO fun. I had one student give me an incident from her timeline, and we went over it together as a class. Her "significance" wasn't as much about the importance of the incident but the reason leading up to the incident. When I asked other people for suggestions for the significance, one girl had a great answer and quote to go with it that really had us go deeper in our analysis. It's pretty dorky how exciting that was for me.

I think one strenth I have is (I think) I always praise students for participating, even if they say something that's not quite right--or totally wrong--and manage to never make anyone feel like they said something dumb. I hope I did that weel with the student who offered up her incident.

I also came up with an idea I love called "Words of Wisdom," which is a list of great things students said in their written homework responses, which I get to read (look at that--I said "get to" instead of "have to"!) but they do not. I think they really liked it--and my master teacher did too.

Other good news is that Luke made me dinner last night (and then forgot it at home--or at work, or in his imagination), and we got delicious Thai takeout that we ate by the fire, as I blew off work for a couple of hours. I'm so CRAZY!

Have more work to do before heading to school in a bit and then can celebrate the Gift that God calls The Weekend.