Back from Thanksgiving break and I realized that I isolated myself quite a bit because I have been feeling very negative, and I didn’t want that negativity to exude onto others.  At the same time, when someone says, “Oh, how are you?”  I didn’t want to lie and say “fine” or “great”.  So instead I hid myself away.

In reality, what I need to do is change my negativity and focus on being more positive, because the downers in this job?  They can gut me.

Positive things:  my tenth graders did really well focusing on Ethos, Pathos and Logos today.  I was pleased with the questions they were asking and how they tried to make sense of them.  I think that teaching the rhetorical triangle is harder for me to teach than anything else, up to and including poetry.

I decided to write essays with my second week Enrichment students.  I don’t know how well it will go, but I’m thinking that it will be a better experience than my first week with them.  It’s hard to be a ninth grader in a shop, knowing that you might actually be spending 3.5 more years in there.  It’s s forced moment of looking at your future, and I’m not sure that students are ready for it.

My AP seniors are writing timed essays related to All Quiet on the Western Front as I type this.  They are timed for 40 minutes, so we all know where they were then, but they have longer to write them down.  Only one student is missing today, so it should be easy to get her caught up.  The positive moment here is that I’m beginning to get caught up with where I want them to be.