Friday, April 29, 2011

Day #135

I love my boss. When she's critical, it's constructive. When I tell her I don't get something she shows me how to do it. She worked with me for two weeks, planning lessons and co-teaching my class because she likes to do that with all her team-members; not only does it help us learn the Expeditionary Learning techniques we need to know at this charter school, but it helps us develop a stronger professional relationship. While she was teaching in my room she noticed my frustration at trying to teach editing with Word and an LCD projector and hand-written charts and the dry-erase board. A couple weeks later an ELMO document reader showed up in my room, so now I can edit paragraphs manually and show text and images and even three-dimensional objects without having to scan them into my PC or blow them up and print them out.

My school is awesome, my boss is great, and the kids drive me bonkers! Well, some of them. But this school year is ticking away quickly.

Here's a good indicator about the kind of school year I've had compared to the previous three years: April 28th was the first day I saw a student's blood. If you followed this blog when I was at Booker T. or at the March, blood was a routine part of my job. We are more than 2/3rds done this year and I just saw blood for the first time! And it wasn't blood from a fight, it was blood from stupid seventh grade boy horseplay! I was almost happy to see it, because I got to say "See, I told you you were going to put an eye out," after three boys tried to tackled another boy in my room and one ended up splitting his eyelid open on a metal screw in a chair. I've always wanted to use that "put an eye out" line.

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