Twas the week before vacation...

The 9th graders started a new story this week, "The Lady, or the Tiger." This is a difficult read, much like "A Christmas Memory," but the students are tackling the huge words, which is good. I gave them some time to work in their groups. They really like this sales promotion project. There is one group that worries me, but if they don't like their grade, they only have themselves to blame. We also did the Big Cola Debate. I had given each side some information I found on both Coke and Pepsi. The Coke side ended up winning because they were able to present most of their facts effectively. That was the Pepsi side's downfall. Some of the students could not present their evidence well.

The 8th graders started a new story too, "The Circuit," which is a story about a young boy's life and his migrant family's struggles. Everyone read, and I was surprised at the new students who volunteered to read. I also gave them a new spelling sheet and I didn't look at it closely enough because when one of the students asked me to explain the "schwa" sound...I had to make up something quick. After some research, I found that it's an unstressed vowel that sounds like "uh" most of the time, like in "cup, medium, about." UG! Linguistics...not my strongest subject.

I'm working with another sub this week and I've worked with him before and he's great. The other one last week was strange. The sub this week told me that she raised her voice to him last week, which doesn't surprise me. He also told me that she has an engineering degree, which explains everything. My experience with engineers is that they rely solely on their analysis of a problem. Students, especially children, are not subject to this scrutiny. Another thing that bugged me was whenever she was working with one student at the board, she turned her back on the rest of the class, and I know she wondered why they wouldn't settle down or listen to her. When I left last Friday, I didn't even tell her it was nice working with her because it wasn't.