Day 107--Running on empty

I've got to have less depressing titles. Empty awesomeness. I am running on empty awesomeness--it's the best kind of empty (and the least substantial kind of awesomeness).

I just wasn't particularly well-prepared for school today, and didn't have the energy to be more prepared, and don't have the energy to get more prepared for tomorrow. My brain is well into the vacation that starts Friday--we are off for the week of Feb. 17-21 ... And I just ... I'm obsessed with that vacation happening. I need it to happen. Actually, maybe I can cheer myself up--and make my life better--by planning some of that vacation right now. I mean, sleeping gets boring after the first couple of hours.

So in Algebra 1, we went back to the packets, and this time I let some students do less work than the other Algebra 1 students had done the previous day. There was just a lack of seriousness that kind of permeated the room, though, which I am responsible for. I haven't looked at the problems they need to do hard enough--I don't know well enough what I need to be teaching. We are supposed to start factoring trinomials with x^2 coefficients other than 1 on this Friday's test, and we haven't even started with that yet--we just spent all today as a practice today for situations like when the coefficient IS 1 ...

The homework gets to be a real problem when energy is down like this. I don't assign it with enough forethought and then it becomes very difficult to even follow through with grading it. If I didn't assign it with forethought, how am I going to grade it? And if I have reached this point, then ...

Aside: I have a great deal of problem looking at myself. I love distraction and avoiding the issue. This is a serious problem ...

Anyway: Back to work ... Just cleaned up a little around the room. Had some inspirational thoughts about the last class. The middle class today, Geometry, was kind of disastrous ... had some fun with them and then ... got to the material ... and my not-ready-to-present-anything nature just took over ... I just froze ... felt their impatience ... and gave up instantly. It was ... I'm kind of ... speechless. I feel as if some days I've got it and some days I don't, and today I didn't. That's sort of a disempowering way of talking about it and it's more than a little b.s., and I need to look at that. Anyway, I sensed that they weren't following me, and so I stopped lecturing and told them to do some work on their own (which many of them do not know how to do--or aren't motivated to do) ...

I went around the room helping people for a little bit. Keep in mind these were 95-minute block periods today ... so I am realizing that whatever they might or might not be getting done, we have 30 minutes left! So I try to reclaim the stage as if to teach some more, and they grow extremely quiet. They can turn on and off their behavior at the drop of a hat, but the engagement with the topic ... we just aren't having it together. They were waiting for me to maybe say something, and I had nothing to say. God, this is too dysfunctional. I'm cringing. Cringe Theorem.

But Period Six. Period Six is where my heart has to go. Period Six is the struggling students who have learned nothing from me this year in a Pre-Algebra class that they ought to have fun with. Period Six I sort of innovated today ... I had them in stations; I re-seated them using the seating chart drawn up by my newly-minted student captains. I have the organization thing on overload. I divided the class into boys and girls, and the two team captains then picked two subcaptains ... each of whom picked a team. So there are four teams, each with its own captain, competing for bonus points and such, and two students "overseeing" the process which meant, for much of today, walking around the room docking certain students points for failing to behave.

We had four stations today: we had one where they worked on Key Curriculum packets ... one where they worked with me on homework from this Jacobs Algebra textbook (which I need to stop using because I am tired of making copies), and two different games stations ... one for Ultimate Tic Tac Toe and one for coordinate plane battleship.

I had some definite frustration during the period, some times where I thought about how horrible a review I would get if someone walked in on this class at any moment. But ... the students DID rotate from station to station when I asked them to, and the captains did execute some part of their leadership roles, even if this was limited almost to passing out papers.

There are lots of accountability checks that need to be implemented now to make it work. And I feel like maybe I ought to implement them before I go home (although it is 6:45 and I am in my classroom, in large part because of my above-noted propensity to get distracted--from 3:15-4:45 I just sat here like a vegetable staring at the screen and reading any sports column. I read about the starting lineup of the Portland TrailBlazers and how LaMarcus Aldridge takes an extraordinary number of midrange jumpers. Anything to avoid my life, my problems, my work, my career, my livelihood, and my purpose).