Wednesday

Sometimes, when I think of all the things going on, and the little time I have to write them down to look back on later, I get all bummed out. When I look through my blog from a couple years ago, I LOVE being able to see in such detail what life was like then. It's so hard to find time to blog now, but it's still so important to me to keep track of these things. So two years from now and I can look back and remember all the stuff happening. Especially since this is our first year of marriage- I definitely want to remember this year.

In light of this, I'm going to start trying something new. I'm going to try to get on here for at least five minutes a day, just to give a run down of anything cool that happened, thoughts I had, whatever. It won't be pretty. It might not even be coherent. But at least it'll be there.

So today:

We took our kids on a field trip today to the Chula Vista Nature Center. Pretty cool place. The most exciting thing for almost all of us was seeing a bald eagle up close and personal. Those guys are huge. They also like to stare you down. I kept thinking of that bit Jeff Dunham (he's they comedian with the puppets, right?) does where one of his puppets says, "I keeeeeeeel you!" Anyway, the bald eagle was totally looking at us like, "I keeeeeeel you!" The kids also got to touch sting rays (after being assured the stingers were gone), and those rays seriously liked to splash some water all over us. Especially me, and my camera, and the kids laughed everytime a stingray passed me and purposely splashed the water on me.

We had a fast lunch back at school, while most of our kids went out together to walk to McDonald's. I scarfed down my cheeseburger so I could use my lunch time to finish grading my geometry class' homework. Bad news: most of them totally bombed the homework. I lamented to the others about the trials of kids coming in late, missing class all together, rushing through homework, blah, blah, blah. The kids at our school are just so ridiculously unmotivated, and it makes me want to lower my expectations of them just so they can at least sort of reach them. Luckily, I found this article today on a blog I read, and it helped remind me that the kids are perfectly capable of doing the things I want them to do. Whether they're being lazy or whatever is there problem, but I can't keep enabling their non-productivity.

That said, today's lessons seemed to go well. My Geometry kids were working on area and perimeter. I don't want them to know that area = length times width. I want them to know what area means, that their are squares invovled, and why you multiply length times width. The why was a big struggle for them, and I'm not sure how I could have made it any easier. I mean, I punched out 1 inch squares last night for them to use as models... I think they get the area-means-count-up-the-squares concept, but not why you can simply count the squares up and the squares across to figure it out. Big sigh. The Algebra kids were a bit better. We were learning adding and subtracting real numbers today, and I showed them exactly how negative numbers factor in to that. They seemed to get it after I drew a huge number line on the board.

When I got home from work, I immediately set to planning my lessons for tomorrow- my student teaching advisor comes to observe Geometry tomorrow, so I needed a stellar lesson. Chris went out on a man date with Ryan right after work... it's midnight, and he's just now getting home. Crazy college (kind of) kids.

Okay, husband's home. Finally. Time to go to bed and start it all over again tomorrow.