Home for the Weekend

Fresh banana bread, and free laundry are good reasons to go home for the weekend. I am convinced of such things.

So is the ability to go to the bookstore (to the best of my knowledge, the nearest bookstore of any reasonable size in my current town-of-residence is about 100 miles away) - I picked up a collection of Poetry, a book about the teaching of reading (hopefully it'll be at least somewhat worthwhile), and "The Watchmen" by Alan Moore, which thus far is proving to be fantastic.

Papers to grade and lessons to plan, and I spend my time reading a comic book (err, "Graphic Novel").

Still, no regrets.

Also: Finally saw "The Dark Knight" last night. I think I missed the first 10 minutes or so, but it was still fantastic. I sat too close to the screen (it was an IMAX theatre), which meant that the part of the screen I was looking at was not always the part of the screen in focus, but it was still a pretty fabulous movie.

In teaching news, my Juniors' portfolios are starting off marvelously - right now they're working through their stories, getting things done. It's neat to see.

My freshmen will be starting their quarter-projects here pretty soon. Like, on Tuesday. I'm excited.

I've found that, in terms of methodology, my favorite thing to do is work with individual students, or small groups of students as they try to solve a problem with an indefinite/not-yet-defined answer. It lets me engage them fully in process, with the assumption, I guess, that if the process of figuring stuff out works the way it should (and all the steps check out), then the end-result, whatever it is, will be mostly valid.

This might be a shaky assumption, but it's held up so far in my very short teaching career.

I had an observation on Thursday (By my principal)... since I still have a job, I must be at least minimally competent, which is good news, y'know? Hopefully that means that my assumptions/beliefs about teaching (such as my unwavering faith in process) are not too far misplaced.

In other news: Guaranteeing a victory for your high school football team, on the radio, is far from classy behavior for a coach, from what I can tell. So is insisting that such a victory is somehow a cog in your vendetta against said other team.

In case you were wondering.

Now: back to Laundry, and "The Watchmen". I've got a Ray LaMontaigne album to listen to, followed by the new Ratatat album.

Life is assuredly good.