4th Hour, Day Four

English 11 is Quiztown again. Boring.

To destroy my boredom, I volunteered myself to lead the vocab section. Yeesh. It wasn't quite flop sweat time, but I was pretty darn near to it. I had the same problem that I had with the ninth graders last week: I don't have any authority when Schultz is in the room, and the talking children were quieted by Schultz instead of me. I thought that I did ok, considering that the kids don't know me hardly at all and I don't know any of their names. I do like standing in front of a full of people though.

Schultz said that I did good too, which is good.

3rd Hour, Day Four

At lunch I overheard some of the teachers talking about contract negotiations and pay raise stuff. I guess the pay raises don't even match the rise of inflation. Yeesh. If that doesn't make a person want to jump into teaching, I don't know what will.

Instead of working on the previously discussed discussion on Death of a Salesman, I sat in with Liz, another English teacher who seems to teach mostly electives. I went along to part of her TV production class, where she said that she doesn't actually 'teach' everyday. Students work on their stuff and come to her with questions, so we should have lots of time to talk about teaching and stuff. Liz is the teacher that tells me not to go into teaching, so I think that her advice is the most valuable that I can get from anyone at Jefferson. She began to tell me exactly why I shouldn't go into teaching when one of her students came to ask her a question and we forgot all about it. Darn. I guess I'll have to spend another 3rd hour with her to find out.

I spent the second half of 3rd hour doing lunch duty with Mr. Johnson. Mrs. Schultz said, "I would rather clean the dirty toilet seats with my tongue than do lunchroom duty," so I knew that I couldn't pass it up.

It wasn't that bad really. I actually kind of liked it. It seemed like it was just another chance to interact with people and tell the kids what to do. I do see Schultz's point of view though. Someone that has their master's degree probably doesn't deserve to be put in charge of dirty trays and empty milk cartons.

2nd Hour, Day Four

We were back watching that Lord of the Flies thing during 2nd Hour. The auditorium is much colder than it was on Friday, so the smell isn't anything to worry about anymore, but that's not to say that the 12th graders don't still stink. Some of them are better than they were on Friday, but one player in particular, a super frat-boy-style jerk is really bad. And the ninth graders love him. They prove it by finding him and all of the other accused characters not guilty, which is pretty rediculous.

When we got back to the room, Schultz had a few choice words to say about the 12th graders that put on the presentation and wasted two days of class time. It makes me wonder if she is going to say anything to this other teacher and if a teacher has anyway of expressing unhappiness with the performance of a peer.

1st Hour, Day Four

I began the day by doing some clerical stuff for Schultz. She needed some stuff copied, some stuff written on the board and some other stuff handed out. Student assistant type stuff.

The 11th graders are taking a one-way trip to Quiztown today, so I had a bit of down time while they took their three quizzes. I managed to finish Death of a Salesman, and wow is that a depressing piece of work. Sometimes I just don't want to make room in my life for the depressing things in fiction when real life is sucky enough as it is.

I asked Schultz about leading a discussion tomorrow or Wednesday, and she said that we'd talk about it during prep, so that's something to look forward to!