rah rah sis boom bah

I got the award today. It was a PTSA award, not anything fancy or big, but it is fun to be the center of attention for a bit. Mom and sister came to the thing, and we had a good lunch. It was a minimum day, so the students got out early, and here I am, before three in the afternoon, with free time.

Most folks have left school by now, but I still have work to do. What am I doing here then? Well, it's work I don't want to do.

I'm still slogging through the 700+ poems my students turned in, and trying to work out some lessons for The House of the Scorpion.

I took Polski's advice, and have assigned a book and work as independent study to the girl whose mother didn't want her reading The House of the Scorpion. I've given her Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which I've taught in the past. It's a simply written book, and I've never used it for Honor students before, but I have quite a bit of material for it, and a person would be hard pressed to find something offensive about it.

I've talked to the girl one-on-one about how to go about doing her work, and I can see she's torn between doing what her mother says, and what everyone else in the class is doing. I think she'd just like to get through to the end of the year without incident.

This will be an interesting few weeks.