When one thinks of 8th grade, it is often associated with hormonally-challenged, impossible to control young adolescents, and indeed I have found this to be the case in several classrooms. Add learning, or especially behavioral disabilities to the mix and… well, I’ll leave it to the imagination. There is one school where I just refused […]
Not so bad after all / Quiz show Read More »
Any family who sees themselves as dysfunctional needs to watch the movie Little Miss Sunshine. The Hoover clan gives new definition to the term. At the head of the household, we have the motivational speaker (played by Greg Kinnear) who is himself a total loser. The frazzled, chain smoking mother (Toni Collette) whose idea of
Spread Some Sunshine Read More »
Well, I really have to get to bed as I will be working at a middle school tomorrow and they start over an hour earlier than their elementary counterparts. 8th grade special ed- so I am sure to have something to write tomorrow. As for today, I was in a multiage room, 4th and 5th
You think you know where I’m going with this, but it’s actually not a complaint. A lot of places have their own smell. I’ve driven through towns in Georgia that smell like peaches. Gary, Indiana smells like what I can only descibe as “burning rubber french fries” – a term I invented as a kid, and I haven’t
From time to time, I will be talking about what it’s like to live in various places throughout the midwest because I have a lot of experience in that area. We’ve lived in central Illinois, northern Illinois, and various suburbs of Chicago. We also lived in Lincoln, Nebraska and rural Ohio. Of all these, I love
Ohio VS. Illinois – weather Read More »
Returning to the genre of superhero franchise movies, one of the most successful series of movies in the last decade has been the three Spider-Man films. I believe that what has made these films so special is that they each retain the same core cast: Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), and
The Amazing Spider-Man Read More »
WOW…. that is all I can say about the final singer on American Idol tonight (and I know that I am going off on another tangent here). When a 17 year old hopeful performs one of the most difficult songs from any era as if it were made for him then it deserves some acknowledgment.
This will be a shorter post this time around I think. Today I worked in a second grade classroom. This is stretching my comfort zone a bit, but toward the end of the year they are becoming more like third-graders as they grow. Unlike yesterday I was the sole adult in this room, which is
One of the easiest types of jobs a substitute can take is a job that has a student teacher. Typically, the student teacher does all the teaching while the sub just helps as needed. I have even encountered positions in the past where the teacher leaves a special instruction on the website that says “bring
Yet another snow day is upon us… that makes #6 for us this year, and it’s now officially time to start making them up in the summer. Which I guess is good news for me, because the kids now have at least 1 extra day to attend school in the summer, near the time when
