Teaching, Grad School, Thanksgiving update

I am feeling very excited about the culmination of our 1st real semester in grad school! I don't feel like the summer semester counted too much as it was really short. I am enjoying learning so much... and never being bored. Haha.

Teaching has been fine... except that I am never actually teaching. My principal has placed me (and the other 2 competent teachers at our school) on multiple committees which means we are never in our classrooms! We are either at the district for trainings or we are writing for our California Distinguished School award. We finished the rough draft and are now going to peel it apart, connect ideas, etc. We are also recruiting one of my students' parents who teaches at our feeder middle school to edit for us.

Funny classroom story for the week: One student was absent and I had another student give her the words for her spelling test. My kids are awesome at spelling... so it's almost a joke. About 25 of the 31 have an A+ in spelling. Anyway, I had a boy give her the test... and he took a peek at the upcoming test's bonus words. These words are selected by me... just randomly from whatever we learned throughout the week. Anyway, he told the rest of the class in private... thinking I'm never going to find out. Turns out I have ONE honest kid who emailed me with this information. I never busted anyone... just simply changed my bonus words to INTEGRITY, HONESTY, UNACCEPTABLE, CHEATING. Too bad I had a sub yesterday. I would have loved to have seen their faces. :)

For Thanksgiving, I am driving up to N. Cal with my parents and Elliot. During this nice 12 hour trip, I plan to bring my laptop and do some serious revisions to my lit. review.

I am close to being done with the conversions of videos for Gary's class and I worked very hard on the SL project for Bill's class... that I am looking forward to presenting on Monday. I need to work for Margaret's class and design my ARP plan and clean up my lit. review this weekend/through Thanksgiving.

I'm also looking forward to watching The Comedian! :)