Old and Pale

I won $5 at school this week for beating students in a game of corn hole at our fundraiser kick off.

I found another Superstars worksheet for my students and some how between 9am and 3pm lost the answer key. I tried to do it myself. Then, I remembered I had an answer key on my computer, which only made me realize how dumb I am...seeing as how all the ones I had done were wrong. Fail.

I've been in bed by 8:30 2 out of the 5 nights this week.

I told my kids this week and I didn't have a cell phone until I was 16 and had my license. They looked at me completely shocked and said, "Oh my gosh...are you serious?!?"

I had about a million and one things to do after school Thursday. In an attempt to get them all done and help work the gate for the games, I was running through the school. When one of my students saw me running, his response was, "Whoa! You can still run? I didn't think you could still work out at your age."

I have my students make collages about themselves at the beginning of each year. It helps me get to know them and gives me something to cover up one of the large blank walls in my classroom for the whole year. I always make one of myself for them as an example. One of my students today, (who was of course on task and not aimlessly staring at the wall because my students are always on task...cough cough) asked me why I was so dark in my picture. I told him it was taken in the summer after I had spent a lot of time outside and on the beach so I was really tan. He said, "How could you be that dark and be so pale now?" Instead of being offended that he called me "so pale," I explained how I loose my tan in the winter when I can't be outside all the time. His response was, (and this is a direct quote) "But, I thought once you went black, you never go back!" I really don't know if he was serious or not, which just made it funnier!

In review: I've been called old and pale this week...thank you 7th graders for the self esteem boost!

To review the top missed concepts on a test we took this week, my PLC and I came up with an activity that surprisingly ended up going really well. We have been put under a lot of pressure lately that I won't get into now because I'm moving past it and don't need this blog post to turn into a vent session. Needless to say this was our effort to (once again) show that we know what we're doing in the classroom and are good at what we do. I put my students in heterogeneous groups based on their test scores (aka a student who scored high with a student who scored low) and had them work on a problem set. The problems were posted around the room on chart paper. So, when students had their solutions, they put them on a post-it note and posted it to the appropriate chart. Then, everyone got to view other groups' solutions. At the end, to help me clean off the chart paper for the next class and to get them to reflect a little more, each student had to take 2 post-it notes off and rank them using a rubric. We really thought it wasn't going to go well as we tried to plan and think through all of the logistics, but it ended up going really well. It took a lot of planning in a short amount of time (we came up with the plan on Tuesday and had our assessment data to make the groups on Wednesday), but overall everyone seemed to enjoy it. Now let's hope that the higher ups agree and move on from putting the pressure on us...

Stephen and I are trying out Only Burger tonight. They have a restaurant in Durham as well as a food truck that is one of the top visited food trucks in the country. I'm not a huge fan of food trucks...I just don't see how they can be sanitary, but I'm willing to try the restaurant. I hear it's going to be the best burger I've ever had. I'll let you know...