school

Today's post is all things school related. Which probably makes you wonder, why the ram? Well, dear reader, the Washington High School mascot is the ram! As far as school spirit is concerned, we pretty much have a ton of it. Every Friday, game or no game, the majority of the school is decked out in purple and white. (much to my chagrin, the school colors are purple and white. If I were to pick one color in the spectrum to be my least favorite color, it would hands down be purple ... and "royal purple" to boot. On Fridays faculty and staff can wear jeans if they wear school colors ... I stick mostly to white with purple accents, sigh).

Let me just start this all off by saying that I absolutely love my job. It is so refreshing to be able to wake up every morning and positively love what you do, and look forward to going to school every day. I have an amazing group of students.

I'm teaching English 7/8 (seniors) and English 1/2 (freshmen and some upperclassmen who have to take the class over again). I have 4 sections of seniors and 1 of freshmen (my year didn't start out this way ... in a nutshell, we were way over projection and had to have extra sections added, so I had a freshmen section removed from my schedule, and I was given the extra senior section.)

For those of you who care (probably only Rachel and Maggie), this is what we're doing in my classes:
Freshmen:

• We're currently reading A Wrinkle in Time. Yes, you're probably thinking that this is like a 6th grade book, and you are SO right. But, as I will inform you later, Arizona is waaaay behind in education
• We'll be reading Romeo and Juliet later in the year ... and I'm guessing by the way things are going with Wrinkle, this will be more me reading, or us watching the Leonardo DiCaprio/Clare Danes version of the movie
• Our district works on performance based assessments (PBA's for short), where every freshman writes an expository essay. So our big focus is writing the good 'ol 5 paragraph essay. By no means are we there yet ... but we do an expository paragraph a week.
• We're doing basic grammar and usage (homonyms are a BIG issue ... they can never get the they're, there and their down straight).

Seniors:

• Our PBA for senior year is a literary analysis essay ... should be fun, it's my favorite!
• Currently we're in the throws of a short story unit. The focus senior year is on British literature, which greatly limits our short story possibilities, but this is what we're reading/going to read:
• "Lamb to the Slaughter" by Roald Dahl
• "Beware of the Dog" by Roald Dahl
• "Man from the South" by Roald Dahl (sense a pattern??)
• "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells
• "The Monkey's Paw" can't remember who it's buy
• and I'm going to try to get my hands on some Aldous Huxley short stories, we'll see how that goes
• I'm going to be the big rebel and have the kids read a novel this year (gasp! for some reason, the other 7/8 teacher is against reading novels ... for that matter, the whole district is...). I'm thinking we're going to read Animal Farm. When I informed my other 7/8 teacher this is what I planned to do, she looked at me with an apologetic look on her face and said, "you're just going to have to do SO much background on Communism with them..." and then sort of went "tisk, tisk." I have no problems giving background information, thank you very much.

We'll also either read Macbeth or Hamlet.Above are two picture of my classroom. This is my 7th hour Senior class. The top one is taken from the corner of the room where my desk is (you can see part of my desk at the bottom) and the bottom picture is from the doorway. I have a SmartBoard (the white thing on the far left hand side in the bottom picture). They're pretty cool ... it's like a fancy computer whiteboard that's hooked up to my computer and a projector. I can write on the board and then electronically erase it. As of right now, I'm missing the chip that makes it interactive, thus, my students call it my "DumbBoard."

I've made a really great friend at school. Her name is Shelby. She began teaching at WHS last year mid-year. She also teaches English 1/2. Every day we have lunch together. We pull our chairs outside and sit in the sun. This is a picture of me and Shelby (keep in mind it's the end of the day, and when I took a good picture, she took a bad one, and vice versa):We've started a school spirit club together called RamNation. It's been quite successful. Also, Shelby is LDS, which really helps. When I start to freak out about stuff, she helps to keep me grounded and helps me keep things in perspective.

I've also volunteered (ok, I get paid) to time the schools swim meets. It's been really fun to get back near the water. I have one student who is on the team (she's the captain actually) but over all, they're a really great group of kids.

Now, here is my rant about Arizona and Education: They're like 234u093840 years behind. I think we're like number 48 in school funding ... our kids get no money. It's really sad to me. Because I have some really great kids, but if they went to the high school I went to, they probably would just be average. We have a few AP classes, but not many ... and the AP tests are national tests, so they have to be able to hold their own. As far as like, say, British Literature is concerned, there is no sense of chronology. I remember starting with Beowulf, and progressed through the years. Not the case here. I haven't decided if it's the teachers who don't want to teach the "hard" stuff (because frankly, it takes creativity and energy to teach the "hard" stuff that the kids might groan at), or if it's the kids that can't handle. I'm sad to say that I think it's the former rather than the latter. I think my kids can handle it, it'll just take hard work on my part. I've talked with Kristie about the state of education in Arizona, and we are both in agreement that they're way behind. However, we're not 100% sure why. We don't know if it's an East Coast/West Coast thing, or a demographic thing, or any other number of things. The majority of my students are Mexican, and they're all quite good at English (their parents aren't, but that's a whole different story).

So, perhaps my job here in Arizona is to help reform their Education system ... haha, yeah, right. I'd love to think I could. Maybe one day ... any ideas??