Two Weeks and Two Days...

[Stage Notes:: Friday Night, Sitting on the couch with a half graded stack of 6th grade homework, not paying attention to the movie]
[TV:: The Fellowship of the Ring]

Ladies and Gentlemen, two things are official at this moment. The first is that I am back after a short hiatus. We did not have internet at the house until last week so any form of an update was made rather difficult. Unfortunately, that means I became so backlogged in terms of what I needed/wanted to share, that I did not know where to start and so wrote nothing. I have come to the decision that the best place to start is in fact at the end because if I start at the beginning, we will never get to the present which means another eventual hiatus.

The second thing that is quite official is that I am, in fact, a teacher. Yup, if for some reason you have been out of the loop, I am a teacher. In the interest of confidentiality, I will never use the names of the students or even the name of the school. If you want to know that stuff, contact me directly and I can tell you. However, so you know when I am referring to it I shall either call it SPC or simply 'The Clave' (This one is not my own, it was passed on from a former ACEer that taught at 'the clave'.

All in all, I cannot believe how quickly the time is moving! It is hard to believe that by the end of next week, I will have been in the ACE program for nearly 3 months!! Think about that! The time in the classroom disappears so quickly. I am still working on getting everything covered that I want to and making sure that I can see where the students are at. I really do not remember teachers doing assessments anywhere near as often as I find myself needing to do. It really is quite intriguing to see what they are understanding and what they are not. As I am grading things, I am often astounded at how much trouble they are having with 'review' material. Unfortunately, this school as a whole does quite poorly in math on the standardized tests and they have made it quite clear that their goal is to get scores up. Every staff meeting it is talked about how poorly they are doing and that everyone needs to be teaching math stuff (vocab, logical reasoning, problem solving, etc.) None the less, I felt like a huge weight was being dropped directly on me to 'save the math program'. Perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration, but in my defense, when you have a week until the first time you will ever have your own students, the last thing that you want to hear is that the students score in the 20th percentile on math.

Oh well, it is what it is and I find it is creating some interesting scenarios in class. However, I will save those for the times when they come up. I really just wanted to say that I am still alive and have been in the class room for two weeks and two days. That is all for now, but at least the draught is more or less over with :)

Oh and just so you know, on Wednesday, we broke the all time record for heat in Atlanta at 104 degrees Fahrenheit......knock off that snickering, I can see you from here :-P