It's time...

...clearly, to post something new.  My stats have seriously dropped over the past couple of days.  And I do this just for the numbers, you know.


First of all, a terrible song is in my head.  Are you ready for this?


"Head, shoulders knees and toes, knees and toes..."


Alright, so this year in school is NIGHT AND DAY compared to last year.  The kids are totally different.  The test scores are totally different.  The prior knowledge is totally different.  The attention span...is not that different.  The curiosity is totally different, but only because they're curious about waaaayyyy different things, believe me.


These past few days, or maybe a week, have been some of those where it makes me feel good to be a teacher.  I finally finished my presentation on nouns, and since I'm using a new software, the kids actually kind of liked it.  Who ever thought that 12-year-olds would like taking notes on parts of speech?!  I came up with some silly examples for them, though (think "fingernail polish...fingernail clippings...fingernails" as examples of things, and my personal fave, which I posted on facebook: "singular sounds like what? single! and how many is singular? one! because if you're SINGLE, you're only going out with ONE person! and who's that? YOURSELF!!").  And yesterday, they had lots of fun screaming out the differences between proper nouns and common nouns.  Seriously, we're talking LOUD.  I got complaints.  But I figure they learned it, and it was only ridiculously loud for about 5-10 minutes, so it's legit.


The kids wrote journals today based on things that happened in history on this date.  It was so cute.  They had all kinds of topics to choose from, so they got to write about something that interested them.  One kid called me her "super-awesome teacher" and said that I taught her that we should give everyone a chance and that we shouldn't have wars.  Now, I don't know that I agree with her choice of spreading those chances around to North Korea despite US and UN sanctions, but...I appreciate the effort.  And I'm sure the anti-violence lesson was one worth learning, whether I actually taught it or not.


Another kid wrote about how Heather Whitestone, the first deaf Miss America (I SO had a book about her when I was little), inspired people to do all kinds of things thought to be impossible, or at least difficult.  She quoted the verse in Philippians that says, "I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength."  She's the second child to have mentioned God in some way in my class -- another, when we were talking about singular nouns and saying ONE city, ONE freezer, ONE teacher, she said, "...and I just wanted to say that there is also only ONE God, and that's Jesus Christ."  And of course I know that legally, I can't say much about that, but I smiled and gave my normal, "Alright, very good, thank you."  But it was SO STINKIN' CUTE.  She's twelve.  They're all twelve.  At least, I pretend like they're all twelve so I don't have to figure out ages.  They're really ten to thirteen years of age.


I'm sorry, y'all, I feel like I'm rambling.  Am I rambling?  I was absolutely flatlining earlier, pretty much, and now that I've eaten food, it's like I got a second wind.  It's not good when your second wind comes past your bedtime.  I'll quit while I'm ahead (or at least par).


Good night, dear friends!