10/27

My favorite thing to do in the morning is resist responding to political ravings from a full-time and more-important-than-me co-worker.  Lucky me, I got to do that today.

I love my Theory kids, and they like me too.  Otherwise, they wouldn't yell (without hesitation), "Who talks like that?!?!" after hearing me say something like, "Some points of confusion were..."  When, in response, I told them that my peers also make fun of me for how I talk, they laughed uproariously at my decision to use the word "peer."  There is always some snickering when I use big/uncommon words (they learned "penultimate" today), but today was the most dramatic.  It was all very funny.

During the next marking period I will approach this GM composition idea from a different angle.  I played most of them today and had to BS my way through many that completely didn't follow the guidelines that I gave.

We had some visitors at the MS today; actors and authors from a recent movie about bullying.  The leading lady played a girl who was 13-16, but she is actually 21.  I heard that there was a pretty lady close to my age visiting (the boys were freaking out about her), so I went to visit her in the cafeteria.  She really looked 14 though, so I just felt too weird trying to strike up a conversation with her in school, and didn't.

Oh, right, this is a blog about pedagogy, not date-ology.  The real take-away from this is that all of the students were very distracted by the event, but there seems to be great potential for anti-bullying benefit from all that went on.

10/26 - Uh...which way is up?

The HS had a topsy-turvy schedule today, and Mrs. D was gone.  Due to this, I began at the MS and during the third class the sub went to the HS for Choir and Theory, and then I joined for the HS remediation period (Theory kids come back for this by default).

I'm trying this two-day lesson in GM for which the students compose a 5-measure melody.  I give them guidelines and specific notes to choose from for each measure, and this turned out to be very difficult.  Tomorrow I intend to play all of them, which shall be interesting.

All of the Theory quizzes are finished now.  Mr. High-and-Mighty (though he's been better lately) did extremely well and everyone else did extremely not well.  Going over it tomorrow will be tons of fun.