Gullible

7th graders are so easy to trick! And, they are really good at tricking each other.

We had a field trip last week to visit UNC's campus and give our students a glimpse into college life. The program UNC does is awesome and our students had a blast; however, they could only handle 50 students at a time. So that meant we had to take two groups. We split the team by gender. The boys went the first day and the girls went the second. One of the boys got the awesome idea to convince the girls that they got to go swimming while they were on UNC's campus. They had several girls so convinced that they brought their bathing suits with them the next day for their trip. Of course, they denied that they had been tricked and claimed that they did NOT bring a bathing suit with them...It's kind of like the old joke that there's a secret pool on top of the school.

I'm getting ready to get a BrightLink, which is a really fancy interactive whiteboard. It apparently projects right on my current whiteboard and with a special pen, I can write on it. This new technology blows my mind...like the Konect...how does it know what I'm doing?!?! Anyways....I digress. I am SUPER excited, because as you can see if you click on the link, the projector is mounted to the wall. That means I won't have to recalibrate my board numerous times a day. This year I've had to calibrate it a lot less because of my awesome tape system...I know exactly where my cart should be in order for me to be able to write well, but it's still annoying when a student or I bump into the cart and mess up my alignment. No more of that!! Again, I digress...back to my gullible 7th graders...They had to take out my current ActivBoard to prepare for the installation of my BrightLink. Well, the little technology elves came and took my board yesterday while we were all at the pep rally. The front of my room looks really bare without it now. My students didn't notice immediately, but right when I walked in I said, "Oh my gosh, yall....where is the ActivBoard?" They were so confused and could not figure out how it had just disappeared. I kept asking them who stole it. They said, "Mrs. Snyder, I don't think a middle schooler could carry that...but where did it go?" After a while, I finally told them that everything was okay and explained what was really going on.

Today, when my 2nd period came in, I just had my lesson projected on the white board. No one really noticed a difference except for the few I had talked to that morning. So, when I picked up a regular dry erase marker and started writing on the board, I could hear some whispered gasps. One boy raised his hand and said, "Um...do you know you are using a regular marker on the ActivBoard?" I said, "Yea my Activboard got stolen." I would of had them convinced, but the ones I had already talked to ruined the joke. And then they were all distracted and we had to have a conversation about what was going to happen and when.

Gullible and easily distracted...very easily distracted!

I cut 9 inches of my hair off last week. Stephen and I are going to Boone this weekend!! I'll try to get a good picture to share.