Best Week Ever

The week that was the first week of school. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Read and enjoy.

Monday was the First Day of School. It should be a national holiday. Personally, I enjoy this day because it feels so good to get back to something you have done for a long time (in my case, eight years) that you haven’t done in a long time (I last taught in summer school, six or so weeks ago). I also like this day because after I spend about 15 or so minutes going through rules and procedures, I launch right into my first teaching lecture of the year and when I’m done, I even assign homework. I love the First Day of School.

Four days after the giddy excitement of the First Day of School came the nervous excitement of Parent Information Night (aka PIN nite). Imagine standing in a room, let’s say the library at school, and having the opportunity to talk for 15 minutes straight about yourself and your algebra program. I personally enjoy the rush and I try my best to entertain the audience while imparting relevant and important information regarding what their children will be learning in my algebra class this year. As I mentioned before, I do enjoy the rush, thank goodness PIN only happens once per year.

Last Friday evening, my Fantasy Football league held its annual draft. Being chosen with the number 2 pick overall, I picked Steven Jackson (over Shaun Alexander). My backfield rounds out with Rudi Johnson, Jamal Lewis, and Marshawn Lynch. My wideouts are Lee Evans, Larry Fitzgerald, Calvin Johnson, and Vincent Jackson, and my QBs are Jon Kitna and Philip Rivers. I traditionally finish one game out of the playoffs every year so I am hoping that this year will be my year to win it all.

Our softball team, the Gatos, got pounded into to slaughter rule submission Monday night. I made three errors in left field. Ouch. Bad game for me.

I got to drive a U-Haul from San Leandro to Sacramento yesterday. We (Ms Khan and most of her family) helped move her sister up to Sac-town. It’s pretty fun driving a big truck like that; a few times I caught myself going over the 70 mph speed limit and I had to slow my roll down. All in all, a 13+ hour day was actually pretty fun, but really hot (I do NOT miss living in the Sacramento Valley).

Last but not least, I had to say goodbye to my beloved Elmo Overhead Projector, as it burned it’s last replaceable light bulb during 4th period on Friday. I am so lucky that Ms Campbell had an extra overhead in her room that I could put to use, the only class that had to suffer my writing on the whiteboard was 5th period. So long Elmo; you served me well with distinction and honor these past 7 years.

So that was the week that was. Have a great rest of the weekend and I’ll see you on Tuesday.

It’s That Time of the Year Again

With summer about to be a fond memory, I would like to be about the 15th or so person to welcome you back to school! I hope you all had a relaxing and rejuvenating and fun summer vacation. My break was a bit on the short side, since I taught summer school, but Ms Khan and I managed to get away on a few short vacations to such exotic locales as Santa Cruz, Reno, South Lake Tahoe (twice), and Las Vegas. What fancy places did any of you (dear readers) go to this summer?

Well, I would love to write a whole lot of everything in this spot today but considering that this is the penultimate day before school begins (and I am not coming in tomorrow), I have to bail on this entry in order to get the rest of my work done for the big day. All I want to say, here and now, is that I am very much looking forward to working with you all and teaching you algebra this year. I have heard a lot about your class (most of it good, I promise) and I hope you are going to find this year in math (and, more importantly, in life) fun, educational, and interesting. I know I will endeavor to do so.

Have a good weekend and I’ll see you Monday! Late.

The Real Dog and Pony Show

Before I get this here missive going full-steam ahead, I want to issue a disclaimer before I unwittingly offend anyone on staff who happens to bring a four-legged furry friend to school on a consistent or inconsistent basis. The subject of this particular entry is not the Daisys, the Moccos, the Marges, the Lexys, or the Lacys of the La Entrada world. The above-mentioned title and following essay are not in ANY WAY about those dogs; I actually like those little critters. What follows is intended to be about the other furry, four-legged creatures that roam about campus NOT between the hours of 8 am and 3 pm.

So, are my intentions clear here, or what? Good. Now, read on.

For as long as I’ve been alive, I have been allergic to dogs (and cats and horses; frankly any animal with fur is on my allergy list). Whenever I am exposed to a dog in a confined space I get a serious asthma attack within about ten minutes of initial contact. In the past, my only antidote to the attack was to leave the area where the dog was located and within an hour or so, my breathing would return to normal. Why not use an inhaler, you ask? Well, for whatever reason, when I was a kid and first found out about my problem, my doctor never prescribed one and so I’ve learned to just deal with the situation as I have described it above. With the commercial availability of Claritin a few years ago came major relief for me. I could actually spend hours at a time in the presence of a dog and not suffer much at all. Of course, I would be a little congested when the pill wore off, but overall. things were looking up for me.

Now that you know all about my history with animal-related asthma, I just want to point out that while I have nothing against dogs, I could just as easily spend my life avoiding them and be a-okay. In fact, when I am out in public, and this I swear happens to me every time, dogs seem to be able to sense my allergies and subsequent avoidance of them, and they flock to me like I am wearing a suit made out of marinated steaks.

This little routine even happens to me when I am at school on the weekends, nights, and during the summer. If you’ve ever been on campus during school hours, you will notice that we are a relatively dog-friendly campus. But things are just ridiculous on the weekends and at night during the school year. There are easily 15 to 20 dogs a day roaming around this place, with and without their owner nearby. Just a few weeks ago, when I first started working for the year in my classroom, around 5 pm-ish, this dog ran right up to my classroom and started barking at me. This woman, I assume she was the owner, who was up the hall, asked me if I was a teacher, explained to me that the dog is just territorial and was guarding it’s turf. Well, lady, I hate to tell you, but this is actually MY turf, thank you very much.

There is also this GIGANTIC brown poodle that gallops around this place like a dinosaur did during the jurassic period. I swear this “horsie dog” (my pet name for this thing) literally gallops across the blacktop and has a not-so-nice temperament when relating to other dogs.

But the best was a few years ago when I was working in my room and I heard the familar sounds of the jingle jangle of dogs roaming through the halls and for whatever reason I got up out of my chair and walked to my classroom door just in time to see a dog drinking from our school water faucet that the owner was holding in the on position for the dog. I mean, doesn’t the vision of a dog lapping water from a water fountain seem appetizing to you as a thirsty, water drinking human? Incredulously, I stood there, loudly cleared my throat to get her attention, and I watched as the embarrased pet owner quickly and quietly left. I couldn’t believe it either.

At least to everyone’s credit who uses this school as their personal doggie park, there aren’t a lot of noticable dog-bombs unpicked-up around campus. But then again, I don’t get out onto the large expanse of green grass we have here all that often, either.

Gotta love the dog and pony show.

Back To School, 2006 Edition

Well, well, well, whadya know. Can you believe that school is in session already? If you’ve been reading my blog so far this past August, you would know that I’ve been working towards this moment for the past three (or so) weeks. But if you are just hopping on for the first time with this particular entry, then hey, I can’t believe that school has already started.

We started yesterday morning and, I have to say, after having taught 10 periods so far this year, that I really do enjoy working with these students. It is day 2 and we’ve already had our first homework assignment and homework quiz. We’ve also heard two lectures about order of operations and exponential notation so far also. Very cool stuff indeed.

And the best part is that it’s Friday and tomorrow is the weekend. It’s funny how weekends don’t mean so much when you aren’t working; except that you get to hang out with your working friends. The ironic thing about this weekend (and pretty much every weekend from now until the end of the school year) is that I will log just as many hours as I did during the week. Oh well, it’s the life of a public school teacher.

Remember how I mentioned earlier that I had already taught ten periods of class this year? Well, the bell signaling the end of my prep period is about to ring and I need to get ready to put the eleventh and twelfth periods in the book as taught classes in about two minutes. Adios.

You Can’t Relive The Past

Two years ago, I was assigned to be on the Renaissance committee at school. The main function of the comittee was to promote and nurture scholastic and community achievement amongst the students at our school. There are various rewards and perks available to the kids for being recognized by the committee (as a result of their own actions on campus, both scholastically and socially).

My particular function on this committee was to be the public broadcasting unit for the group. I was given the task each month (or so) to create a video that would then be shown to the entire school during the scheduled televised bulletin time.

I decided to use fandango-esque brown paper bag type puppets to tell the stories that tied directly into the character trait of that month. I suppose in future postings, if I figure it out even, I could try to upload the videos I did here, but for now, I am going to post a few pictures that I used in one of my movies.

The trait of the month was community service and I sent my fandango puppet out to the health fair that our school’s PE Department was hosting to get a sense of what was going down in our community and how so many people from a variety of different walks of life got involved.

The two-fold reason for this post today is to see whether I could figure out how to post pictures here and to revisit the memory of making these movies for the past two years. The first year I did this project everything was new and exciting and I knew nothing about anything and I learned what I needed to learn in order to get something decent in at the deadline. Something changed about the process during the second year, though. While the end product was technically superior, it wasn’t nearly as fun and exciting to create. I guess you can’t relive the past.

So I Lied and I’m Running Out of Excuses

I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten a sandwich from the Plantation deli on Alameda but if you haven’t, let me be the first to recommend trying one. I mean, a sandwich is a sandwich, but there is just that intangible something going on about these things. Plus, the ladies there are very nice and I prefer to spend my money at a place where I actually like the people (not like the people at Eric’s up the street who could never really be bothered to get my order close to correct, even though I was a weekly customer for years). So, if you are ever hungry and you are driving/walking/biking/crawling by Plantation some time in the near future and you are hankering for some good eats, cruise on in and try it out.

So, why the heck am I talking about sandwiches today and where is this all going? No, I’m not hungry but I am trying to make a connection to yesterday’s post where I exclaimed to all the world (more likely the none of you that are reading this column so far) that I was planning on starting work on my curriculum yesterday. And to make things worse, I have been at school for approximately five hours today and I still haven’t broken that seal yet today, either.

Here’s why and a list of things I have done instead of the dreaded curricular-based activities:

1. Transferred materials from an old (newly destroyed via the broken zipper) teacher bag into a new one. The jury is still out on the new one; the price was right (it was free, thanks to Johnny) but it still needs to be battle tested.
2. Threw out useless papers and refiled useful papers from the bag in example one.
3. Tutored two kids (Ana in algebra and Monique in geometry)
4. Worked out at 24 hour in San Carlos. Half hour on the treadmill, 300 assorted crunches, and approximately 20 minutes on various weight machines.
5. Sushi dinner at Ariake’s. I had a half order of terriaki chicken and rice.
6. Worked out again at 24 hour, in our regular Sunnyvale locale this time. It felt like we were cheating on the gym in SC yesterday. The only thing SC has over the ‘Vale is the extremely cold water in the water fountains.
7. Shopped for teacher classroom supplies at Target and Office Depot. Fehmeen and I are the kind of teachers that buy what we need from our own pockets. That’s just the way we are.
8. Put away all the random, remaining junk on my student desks in my room.
9. Because I teach eighth graders and realizing that most of those kids are relatively tall to every other student on campus, I attempted to raise eleven of my shortest desks. After an hour of work, my makita power tool and I were successful in elevating seven out of the eleven. I was getting tired, sweaty, annoyed, frustrated, and sore so I stopped before I threw something out the window or before I said one of the illustrious words that you shouldn’t say while on a public school campus. Let me just tell you, some of those bolts were on way too tightly. I suppose I will give it one more shot before school starts, but if the results are the same (no results), I will be satisfied with that.

And here we are now. All those accomplishments and nothing done in terms of actual algebra lesson work. After I hit the publish button on this entry, I suppose I could (and most likely should) get to work on the curriculum, but seeing as how it is Friday afternoon, I will probably opt to not work on that stuff.

Aren’t you excited about checking in tomorrow (or the next day) to find out if I actually did do anything? Yeah, that’s what I figured too, but still try to stop by. Hopefully by then I will have found a more concrete direction to take this column.

Have a nice weekend. Late.

I’m Back…So Now What?

“I’m back…So now what?”

This is the sentiment I am wrestling with at this moment. Yes, I suppose the concept can apply to the writing of this post (because, to be quite honest with you, this missive is about nothing at all right now), but it also applies to what is going on in my classroom right now, approximately two weeks before the start of the school year.

We (Mrs. Picetti, formerly Ms Khan, and I) have been back at school for about a week prepping our classrooms. After our honeymoon in Kauai, we entered a deep state of extreme lethargy and laziness for about a week. Once we pulled ourselves out of those doldrums, we decided to slowly start making appearances at school, doing an hour or two, here and there, until we are now at the point where we are dedicating a large part of our day in our respective classrooms working.

Now, the easy part of this transition period is over. My classroom is about 95% set up and the only thing that is really left to do is put pencil to planner and dig deep into to curriculum planning. That can be both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, planning and lesson writing is fun and can be a huge creative undertaking that is extremely rewarding, but, on the other hand, the hard part is where the heck do you start? I have been putting this task for the entire summer. I even went so far as to lugging all my lessons and paperwork home for the summer where it sat, undisturbed and un-worked-on, in the storage space in my garage.

So, that brings me back to the central question of the day: I’m back…so now what? Well, I suppose I should just bite the bullet, roll up my proverbial sleeves, break out the old trusty number two pencil and red felt tip pen and start planning my second year of teaching algebra one to eighth graders.

(Pause for reflection)

(More pausing, less reflecting)

Come on, who am I kidding. Forget this planning stuff. I can always start on that tomorrow.

I’m going to lunch.