Knock, Knock.

One of my kids reading a knock, knock joke book, and he wanted to share a joke with me today. It was hilarious, but not in the way you would think.

"Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"Jack."
"Jack, who?"
"Also included inside are 100s of other classic knock-knock jokes that will have you rolling on the floor laughing. Take a look inside to see!"

Yes, he was reading the teaser on the back cover, thinking it was a joke. Kids are fun.

 

 

Chills for Life.

The "cooties" of the 21st century are apparently called "chills." Today I got really annoyed with my students during an upbeat probability activity. They were working pretty well in groups, but they kept running back and forth during the stations to poke each other and yell, "Chills for life!" I let it go during the activity because everyone was doing the work they were supposed to be doing, but while I was going over something whole class, one of my kids got up and walked across the room to pass on the chills.

I kind of got mad, and my brilliant solution was to tell them that I didn't want to hear about chills in class ever again. In fact, I sacrificed myself and took the chills, and they'd all better stay away from me or else they'll catch it. The word didn't come up the rest of the day.

Watch out. I've got chills for life.

Welcome Back.

Had a very happy Thanksgiving back in California. There is a new countdown now for winter break.

The students took a Benchmark exam a couple weeks ago. It's a district-wide test on all the objectives that we were supposed to have done 1st quarter. I got the results back today, and my students actually performed worse after my instruction than they did coming off of summer vacation.

Welcome back, indeed.

A Little Hope.

Today during after school program in my classroom, eight of my students treated a staff member to a concert. They sang the Fifty Nifty song, 3s, 4s, 12s, and 9s. It was pretty cool, even though I was in a bad mood.

Then, Trey, who is one of my more troublesome students, gave me a little compliment.

"Mr. Lyu, I can do 60 multiplication problems in less than two minutes now. I could never have done that if it wasn't for those songs. It's all because of you, because no one else would have done that for us. It's all because of you. You're a good teacher."

That was nice... I'm glad he was in a good mood today, because he's normally not. Still, such a smart kid...

Thanksgiving in one day!

Who's the Principal?

A lot of people in the reform movement talk about incapable teachers and administrators who don't really know what they're doing. So, I wonder if we should just hire this guy because he's actually doing the work and learning.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/the-ghostwriter/

Maybe the cheaters have so much work that they have to outsource it.

Yeah, right...

I'm a Cheater.

As testing as it can be sometimes to have to work with a co-teacher that I don't agree with a lot of the time, I am extremely grateful because it lessens the load on me. I already find it difficult to teach half the day, and the couple of times where I needed to cover the whole day, I felt extremely incapable.

I came across this little article the other day, and it really makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of my TFA friends are struggling just as much or more than I do because they are getting thrown into elementary school classes and are being expected to actually teach for 6, 7 hours on their own. My hat is tipped to all of them because I couldn't do it.

So thank you, co-teacher. Thank you, buffer zone. And to all of the first year teachers who are really doing it all: you are so brave.

Charm City.

A couple of nights ago, there were helicopters with spotlights flying back and forth above our block. The street on both sides was also surrounded by cop cars, and a dozen officers were walking around outside our house.

I found out today that there have been five armed robberies on our block in the last week.

Welcome to Charm City!