Thursday, October 11, 2007

Today is TRANSFORMATION DAY for HOMECOMING WEEK. I look forward to the means by which you creative types transform yourselves. (One senior is going as an emo kid, which I think is hilarious. Wikipedia has some interesting observations on the emo phenomenon, at least for the moment. More on Wikipedia at another date.)

Today is also another FIRE DRILL. It will be during third period this time, instead of second, and teachers are expected to tote a brightly colored poster with them so that their students can find them. Because I am a rebel and I utterly fail to see the point of fire drills every 25 days* I will be carrying a sleek black umbrella in lieu of poster. And due to the necessity of wandering through the soccer field for the fire drill, I will also be violating a thousand fashion laws by wearing Crocs today.

APees: Today, the Orson Welles classic version of Macbeth. It's so bad it's brilliant. Bring your play and your focus paper ideas and let the visual imagery wash over you like red tide.

Gifted English II: We are finishing our mini-unit on Biblical literature today and making a transition into Media Literacy. This is a cool mini-unit that fuses critical thinking, writing skills, and logic into one happy pile, and it's our second-to-last mini-unit before we start launching into Really Big Units. (It will also reduce my dependence on the hyphen.) What a great day! REMINDER: CMC is due Halloween. For some of you, that will be waaay past the date you finished reading it; for others, you will be scrambling. I suggest that the scramblers start cooking now.

*Note regarding fire drills: I am all about safety, and support every endeavor to ensure that you are not injured during your time at BHS. And there were two school fires in recent weeks (Citrus Elementary and Apopka High) that indicated a need for understanding the dangers of flammable things. I'm just frustrated by the persistent set of interruptions to instruction that we've seen in recent months. We have an inclement weather/fire drill every 25 days, by my calculations, and now I'm supposed to wait by my door until the building is empty and THEN find my students and there are all these new rules and regulations. In years past, it was pretty simple--if you smelled smoke, like when that kid tried to set fire to the trash can in the 300 building, you left that building. Simple. No one was ever hurt, and we all got out in a timely fashion. Now, in an era where fire alarms go off ALL THE TIME, we are supposed to practice in goose-stepping style. It reminds me of an episode of The Office, except that it's not funny. We spend a lot of time waiting on the soccer field until we get the all-clear that the danger is over, during which I chant, I am a team player, I am a team player. Actually, I'm not; I am a deeply bad person who wants to be good. So there.

Okay--rant over. And if someone wants to make me a brightly colored poster, then yay.