Break!

I'm on Thanksgiving vacation.

The last time I posted was towards the end of summer vacation. In fact, the last time I did much of anything beside teach/drive/sleep/eat (sometimes) was towards the end of summer vacation. A combination of situations have combined forces to coalesce into what has become one of the busiest years yet. Being a 2nd year teacher is easier in some respects - it's certainly not as scary as last year, prolly because of the perspective and other BTSA-esque things that I've gained since last year. However, the expectations have certainly increased. It's almost like people expect me to know what I'm doing now that I managed to "survive" the first year. Um, about that...

My students this year seem like they have more issues than my students last year. This could be because I'm teaching 4 periods of sophomores, or it could be because this particular crop of students has managed to get themselves into a plethora of ridiculous situations. So far two of my sophomores have gotten suspended so many times since the beginning of the year (one has a penchant for stealing iPods and then getting caught selling them, the other thought it would be a great idea to tell the campus police officer that he had no business telling him not to watch a fight that was in progress and then hit the officer...this after being suspended 3 times for cutting in the lunch line, cussing out another teacher...in the final report he claimed that he was "tired of being singled out by teachers and administrators). Two are pregnant...that I know of. Each period has a group of students whose parents are going through what seem to be horrendous divorces. And it's an IEP extravaganza this year: one period has 12 IEPs, while the others have no less than 7 IEPs each. My one period of juniors are grand, though. They're 1st period (U.S. history), and because the AP U.S. history class also runs 1st period and the majority of the AP students are female, my class has 22 guys and 9 girls. It was a trying dynamic at the beginning of the year, but now that the guys are (mostly) done competing for the girls, it's settled down into an entertaining, pleasant, relatively motivated class. The problem is that I'm ignorant about U.S. history pre-Cold War era. Didn't even take a U.S. history class in college...managed to AP test out of it, and the only thing I remember from the AP class in high school is, wait, NOTHING.

But so far I love it. Aaron Burr was a real asshole. And whenever I see Gary Beausy on Celebrity Rehab I can't help but to think of John C. Calhoun and his lustrous locks.