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This is a continuation of my journal from the 9/11 school year.  Please see my previous posts to read the beginning and my prefacing comments.

Monday, September 17

September 16^th is not a day most of the country notes, but Mexico’s Independence Day is usually celebrated at our school with banda dancing in the quad and students decked out in red, white, and green.  However, because of the Attack on America, our school’s special events were canceled.  Some of the students still wore Mexico’s colors and carried Mexican flags.  Because American flags are starting to wave everywhere, a few students showed up with American flags.  Apparently there was a skirmish when an American-flag toting student shoved his flag at the face of a Mexican-flag toting student.  This is one small example of what Tom Brokaw said about how our lives would never be the same again.  

And what’s become of my sixth-period student Mindy who flew back to Rhode Island to visit her sick grandparent?  She was supposed to be back last week.  I wonder if the problem with her grandparent detained the family. Are they now snarled in the backed up airport traffic? 

This last week we received our Benchmark Performance Indicators (BPI’s) for our limited English proficient (LEP) students.  The forms come from their previous language arts teachers and we have to fill one out for each of our LEP students.  In my English-only classes, the LEP students usually make up about one-fourth to one-third of the class.  This year’s distribution is really wacky.  I have only one LEP student in second period, whereas fifth period is over one-half LEP students!

Receiving the BPI’s reminded me of the two very low level LEP students I noticed earlier.  When I checked, I discovered one had been recommended to a SDAIE (Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English) class, known to most as Sheltered English.  The other had been recommended to an Advanced English Language Development class.  Neither had been recommended for the regular freshmen English classes I teach. 

How these types of mistakes are made, I have no idea.  The poor kids.  Little Ivan has been seated right up front, staring at me wide-eyed for the last four weeks.  I knew that he was in over his head, but never got all the dots in place to fix the error until now.  I’ve turned in his name to the Bilingual Resource Teacher.  Even with the current information, it will be interesting to see how fast his schedule is changed. 

Happy Monday – The King of Oxymora

Sometimes I feel like an overpriced baby-sitter.  With the number of disruptions, I don’t know how I’m supposed to teach or my students to learn.  Today English teachers were given the task of checking students’ I. D.’s and sending students who never received badges to the Mello Center foyer.  This took four or five students from each class.  The oral component of the California English Language Development Test, which is part of the puzzle in the redesignation of students, continued on a pull-out basis.  Taking another student here and there out of class. 

Then we had the bomb threat.  Someone called it in, like a pizza order, so in the middle of fourth period we evacuated the entire school to the field.  Last year when we had a bomb scare, it was boiling hot and we spent the majority of the day on the field.  This time, somehow, the powers that be let us go about ten minutes into the lunch period.  School resumed after lunch. 

However, someone also had scrawled on the gym wall outside the main entrance: Die Bomb on Tuesday 18, 2001 12:30 p.m. Fucker’s.  So tomorrow we’re having school, but with a schedule that allows us to be evacuated to the field at the critical time.  If this journal stops here, I guess everyone will know why.