Bloggy Block Day

So in my school's modified block schedule, we have seven periods (1-7) and every teacher teaches five (5) of them. Now, the only so restraint on which periods are our prep periods is that nobody has preps 1 & 7. In other words, everybody either has to stay late enough to work Period 7, or come in early enough to work Period 1. I am in the latter group, so I'm off Period 7--but Period 7 is not considered my "prep" period. My prep period happens to be Period 5. My regular schedule is--work solid periods 1-4, then take a break, then work Period 6 after lunch, then relax and start planning for the next day. I covered this when I was genuflecting on how much I like my schedule this year during the first month of this ... campaign.

ANYWAY, on our modified block schedule, we see classes for 95 minutes instead of 52 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. On Tuesdays we meet with our Periods 1, 3, 5, & 7 ... and on Thursdays we meet with our Periods 2, 4, & 6. How does this break down for me? It's kind of a bizarre breakdown. On Tuesday, I start at 7:15 a.m .with Period 1, then work Period 3 (9:05-10:40) and then I'm DONE at 10:40 in the freaking morning! No more class. Sometimes there's some damn meeting scheduled in the afternoon, but the potential is there to go to the flipping beach. It's a possibility, just saying. I did go to a 12:45 yoga class one time. 

However, I'm finding that it's better not to relax too much during this bounty of time off, because it catches up to me fast the next day. On Wednesdays I have to be here at 8:15 for a staff meeting, then teach Periods 2 & 4 before lunch (9:05-10:40 and 10:55-12:30) AND THEN Period 6 after lunch (1:10-2:45). And then on Wednesdays, I meet with my BTSA mentor. I'm exhausted by the end of the day Wednesday, and I've typically got two days' worth of planning to do at that point. (Yeah, I'm usually living on the edge to that extent ... 

Damn, my wandering mind: I just took like 20-30 minutes to work on my new teacher facebook profile. (THE NEXT FOUR PARAGRAPHS ARE A TANGENT ON TEACHER FACEBOOK PROFILES) Amidst all the excitement over getting a mohawk (hi there) I posted a photo one of the students e-mailed me, and then I, waveringly, accepted a friend request from said student. But this felt like the crossing of an invisible boundary-line that perhaps I'm not supposed to have crossed. I mean, even here on this blog, I am posting stuff occasionally that I maybe ought to be more circumspect about putting out there, and I shrug my shoulders and tell myself it's fine, because nobody from Novato reads this--only folks from the MtBOS (that's Math Twitter Blogosphere, for all you people from Novato). 

I suppose the better rationale for shoulder-shrugging is that online privacy is probably a thing of the past--that people will find out stuff about you if they really want to find it out, and there's only so much you can do. So, this blog, is out here. And I was going to let the boundaries on facebook just cave in except, well, I ran into our school's Leadership teacher in the copy room today, and I see her as a facebook-friends-with-students guru, sort of. And I asked her, "Do you have a separate facebook account to be friends with students?" And she's like, "Yes!"

Now I had thought she'd just had one account like me, and so I was going to let the wall down and have just one account, and let the students into that account. But there's some stuff on there that ... I don't want them seeing. Nothing really bad, but just ... not their business. Not stuff I want to put out there right now. And you know what--I don't want to start a peer-to-peer relationship. So a teacher account, separate, is appropriate. That way I'm accepting their offer to share with me whatever they want to share with me, but I'm not foisting any of my personal stuff upon them--they don't need or want any of that.

Anyway ... I'm manically going back and forth between the two facebook accounts. Worrying about my self-image accounts for a disturbingly high percentage of all of my mental activity. Ugh. (END OF TANGENT)

The point of all this was to have been to reflect upon my practices, since I have some time to do so, for once. It always feels nice to ask myself what time it is, and have the answer be "noon" as it is right now--just knowing that other people are still at work, not on the road yet. It's always kind of a bummer losing the race home, and most of the time I do lose it. Even right now, I am considering how sweet it would be to get out of here before the lunch bell rings at 12:30. But I'm going to stay and grade. It's been decided. 

As for those practices ... Geometry went better than average, so I won't spend a lot of time talking about it. Instead, let's focus on Algebra, which was better-planned than it often is, but still kind of sucked. Part of it was that nothing particularly fun was planned, and part of THAT was because there was so damn much tedious crap planned. Slope and intercept and worksheets and quizzes, all jammed into a pacing plan that the students and me just are a bit behind on. Today I decided, mid-period, that there just wasn't time to give the quiz I had planned on giving. I'd been planning on giving it as a pop quiz, reasoning that my students don't study for quizzes anyway. But we ran out of time. I taught it half-decently, we plodded through it, we got a decent amount of work done, but we ran out of time.

So ... going off the pacing plan I've agreed upon with my colleagues ... a little bit of walking on the wild side. But on the other hand, the lesson was "plodding" because of not enough walking on the wild side. And I had some Plan-B-type material to use, and that was my biggest mistake, in retrospect--not interrupting things more often, changing directions more often. I started doing so at the end of the period, but by that time it was kind of too little, too late, and they just found it annoying. (I interrupted the notes I was giving to have them answer a "six-pack" of questions which they'll ultimately throw away, most likely) ... Frustrating stuff ... Slightly frustrating ... I guess. I could follow up on the six-pack so they don't throw it away ... We'll see! Enough of this blog post! Time to start grading! Well, meditate first, grade second. Here goes ...