Just another thursday

Today's weather has been crazier than a matinee seat at the mystery light show. The classroom I'm in has a glorious bank of windows facing north, and everytime I looked up from writing lesson plans, there would be a different type of weather show. It seemed to change every five minutes from rain to sun back to rain back to sun...man it was dizzying. I think it affected the kids as much as it affected me. I felt almost as silly and restless as the real children in the room.

I spent my first two weeks just watching what I call the "Early Adolescents Show". This is really my first time being in a mainstream classroom with kids at this grade level, and it's been very interesting. Kids this age are pretty different from high school kids. In some ways, they're very much still "kids" and in others ways, not. The immaturity mainly appears to me as a case of having the wigglies (no kid this age can sit still for very long, apparently), still having childhood interests, and having real uneven emotional reactions to normal things. One thing I am enjoying greatly is the demographics--Portland can be way too white for me sometimes, and I kind of enjoy being back in daily contact with African-American culture.

I'm starting to get a feel for the kids as individuals, they are no longer a mass of squirming giggly bodies anymore. I've learned most of the names, and am picking up little things about them. I definitely know who the trouble makers are now, although compared to their high school counterparts, they're pretty lightweight (merely annoying, not dangerous). Naturally a few of them are in my reading class. One is trying to convince me he's nothing but trouble, but I've already told him that I don't believe him and that he's not going to succeed in convince me otherwise. To further prove my point, he actually turned in his work early today, even though it's not due until next week. I can't think of a high school student on earth who would go there, not even my most motivated grade-junkies.

I've got some real characters in my reading group. I've got boys who are amazingly responsible, and boys who are hopelessly immature. I've got a student with a pathological attitude problem. I've got a student who is so addicted to talking that he will talk to himself if there's no one interested in participating in his conversations. I've got students who get in trouble every day. I've got perfectionists, truants, shy students, uppity back-talkers, and a kid who seems so lost and breaks my heart every day in small ways because I can't help but worry about his future even though I've only known him for 2 weeks.

Today everyone was kinda squirrely, no doubt in part because of the topsy-turvy weather, and in part because the following day (Friday) was a day off for the kids. Riding the bus home, I got to contemplate the vast difference between these guys and their counterparts just around the corner at the high school. I usually ride the bus home with the high school kids and they're so different.

People ask me all the time whether I'd rather be a high school teacher or a middle school teacher, and I honestly don't know. Because my main area of interest is ESL, it doesn't matter so much because the content is essentially the same no matter what age the kids are. What I've learned over the past couple of weeks is that I'm so adaptable that I can really get used to anything. I think I'm gonna take the advice of the woman over at Highland Park who told me that she flipflops between the two when she needs to mix it up a bit. I might just have to do the same thing-when I find myself getting "bored" with one authorization level, I'll just change to the other for awhile. That oughta keep things sufficiently interesting for awhile.

I've been really busy working on my unit plan/work sample for the past month, and haven't had much time or energy to think of or do much of anything else. Even if I did feel motivated to pull my head out of my unit plan, the weather pretty much assures that I won't be doing much. I'm borrowing "Reading Writing and Rising Up" from Caskey and that's full of good ideas.

One thing I'd also like to do is get some schooling on the ins and outs of mortgage financing because that's the one area I'm leery of in this quest for homeownership. I'm not worried about getting sold a crappy house, I've seen enough of those to know what to watch out for (ancient roofs, questionable elecrical schemes, water damage, improper repairs to name a few). No one's ever gonna be able to pull one over on me on that end. But when it comes to the financial side, that scares me a bit more because as far as I'm concerned, money is the devil's favorite plaything, it's all about manipulating numbers, one big shell game, really, and if there's one thing I can't trust it's people who know how to take numbers and use them against me like walking through landmines in a dark forest. You could say that I don't trust anything about the process.

It's the dark side of the moon and I'm feeling at a low ebb. I'm ready for winter to be over, and wondering where I'll be come summertime. Life is often full of surprises, and I wonder what's around the next bend. But then again I don't have time to wonder about it much at the present, I'm very much living in the moment right now. Time is