Blogs

This is a continuation of my journal from the 2001-2002 school year.  Please read the first "Bombs" post for my prefacing comments, and the previous "Bombs" posts to follow the thread of the journal.  Thanks! 

Tuesday, September 18, 2001

 Mindy came back from Rhode Island.  I don’t think the other students remembered her.  As I guessed, she and her family got trapped on the East Coast. What a day to return!  A bomb threat and half the students missing!  Fifth period I had only seven students. 

Open House is scheduled for tomorrow night.  With the political climate, the cold drizzly weather, and daily bomb threats, I don’t think the free hot dogs and burgers are going to tempt many parents.  I expect the attendance to be more abysmal than usual.  

We played a game to review the spelling words for a test tomorrow and then I had students read an article about “Show; Don’t Tell” in their assigned work groups.  Leave it to outspoken Lupe to ask, “How did you make these groups?  Like two smarts ones, two dumb ones and one sorta smart one?”  She asserted to the class she was one of the dumb ones, although clearly she’s perceptive.  She likes people to view her as odd.  She wears her backpack when she sits in her desk and won’t remove it no matter how much the others tease her.

I dashed off an email to our Bilingual Resource Teacher, asking if it would be possible to use the results of the California English Language Development Test (CELDT) to fill out our BPI’s.  One of the complaints of teachers is that their BPI scores now are completely subjective.  No doubt what one person considers a response “to open-ended prompts using a variety of vocabulary, sentence types and writing strategies (dialogue, suspense, humor)” another might consider Pabulum.  

Progress reports are coming and the technicians don’t even have the new version of our grading program operational on our network.