Day Two

Today was a media center day for the ninth graders. I covered the expectations that our media center lady asked teachers to cover, and we got books. Some students browsed, and others used the catalogue to browse topics that interested them. It typically took a while, and I'll be asking students to get books on their own time in the future, or worst-case, they can get a pass during silent reading time. Today they also did spelling, and Daily Oral Language (aka "grammar") was pushed back to tomorrow, since I didn't fit it into first hour and decided not to mess with it for the subsequent hours.

I hit my stride with second hour. I felt comfortable joking with them during attendance, and it was a good day in terms of building rapport. I know it can be a sacrifice of some classroom teacher power to joke and build rapport, but I'm a proponent of giving the students about 30% of the power: it lets them like school, and it's good for discussion.

Sixth hour American Lit was a bit of a slow start. I had to contextualize John Edward's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," so I had to talk about American History, which turned out to be a lot of new information for them. Once we got all that out of the way, we could get into the good old fire and brimstone of the speech. I got on my "pulpit" and slammed my fist to add emphasis. I was able to coax one and only one kid into getting up there and doing the same, but the speech eventually got some laughter (some of it nervous laughter, of course), and I felt they were getting into it as we read along.

Tomorrow, we'll be doing "object biographies," which is my fancy phrase for show and tell. It'll be a good chance for me to get to know more of the kids, and for the ninth graders, it'll be a gateway into our discussion of storytelling, our first unit.

-Matt