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2001-10-01 - 5:33 p.m. Today was pretty good as far as Mondays go. The sophomores are typing up their imaginative stories and the seniors continued to work on "The Lady of Shalott." No problems whatsoever, even with seventh period. My secret favorite student was cracking me up today. I decided to show the seniors The Knight's Tale tomorrow. I am going to give a lecture on the hero's journey (Joseph Campbell stuff) and then ask them to choose one of the things we have read so far or seen so far to do a paper on...how well it conforms to the hero's journey. So I thought it would be fun to have that movie as part of it. I feel a little guilty, but I show maybe two movies a year so I guess it is not that bad. I DO need a break. This whole working only contract hours is not working out very well. I cheated and stayed until 4:20 today and the parking lot was nearly empty. I felt guilty. I am going to have to stay later tomorrow too. I have to to do my job right and if any other teachers hackle me I will explain as much. I feel bad about it though. I think that fifth period is my favorite period with the seniors. It is right after lunch so you would think that would be especially hectic but it isn't. Not surprisingly, it is also my smallest class. I had a good weekend...Justin came down and we got along all weekend and had fun. I feel really bad because he ended up doing all this work around my house for me. I wasn't feeling well and so he insisted on unpacking tons and tons of boxes, cleaned up the kitchen, and even offered to do my laundry. So I am that much closer to actually being settled in here. We also rented the movies Memento and The Knight's Tale. I enjoyed Memento in some ways but it wasn't as good as I thought from all the hype. I mean it was cool because it was different but I didn't love it. I also watched a lot of TV. I now have The Gameshow Network. That is a cool channel. I watched a bunch of old game shows. The funniest was watching Let's Make a Deal when they would win a car. Those new cars looked so lame to me but they were so excited. They were all, "And this car retails at $2,500!!!!" Justin and I cracked up over that. The cars they had on were mainly cars I had never heard of, but there was a Camaro on there. The woman decided to risk it and got this ugly camper instead. Justin was saying he bets she's sorry about that now. I was embarrassed for her because she was dressed up like Minnie Mouse. Last night I watched that new show Alias. I thought it was pretty good and might watch it again. I try not to watch many new shows because it seems like whenever I get into it they cancel it! But maybe that one will be a hit. I also watched The Practice and it wasn't as good as last week's episode. Okay, random side note. This other teacher was telling me about his research he did about getting kids to turn in their work. I was asking him to tell me more about it since we have low rates of turning in work in my classes. He gave me his syllabus. He is a Social Studies teacher. He commited the cardinal sin of it's; he used it as a possessive instead of a contraction of it and is. I, of course, am not going to tell him. But I felt embarrassed for him. Hopefully no one else will notice. I am pretty sure the kids won't. I am not Ms. Punctuation by any means, and probably make a million mistakes without realizing it. But that one glared at me. Other than that his syllabus and ideas were cool. The only problem is that I basically do the same thing already. I just don't lay it out the way he does but maybe I should try it. I had Subway for dinner and decided to SPLURGE and get cheese on it. Normally I try to avoid the cheese because without it it can be a low-fat sandwich, and I am hoping for a Jared-like miracle. After I splurged on the whole cheese issue I just let it all go and got the combo with the cookies. In case you were unaware, you can substitute two cookies for the chips in a combo meal. The Subway cookies are really delicious and so I always sub. for lame chips. Not that I don't like chips... The last I heard the strike might be pushed back to Oct. 15th, which would be BAD for me because it is more risky of lasting longer and into the next pay period. I am going to have to watch my money more carefully now. I think my next entry might be a list of links so that I can actually have a list of links on my page. I'm not sure how to make that work with Diaryland but maybe I can do it? Oh, one of the things I wanted the kids to do for "The Lady of Shalott" in their groups was to look up words for their particular part that they didn't understand. One group told me they only had one word so I asked them if they knew what "shallop" meant (knowing myself the meaning) since they hadn't looked it up. They looked it up after that and found it meant "An open boat." For some reason the word "shallop" struck them as funny and they kept saying they were going to go sail a shallop this weekend. I enjoyed their using new vocabulary words in everyday speech. HA. Another thing that has been interesting is that Cassandra and I started using that word "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!" from crazy/beautiful nonstop. I started using that with the kids without meaning to when they do something weird or ask me something strange (saying it that way) and they crack up every time. I am a nightmare.
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