tough week

this week at school has been a challenging one for sure. what with senator burr's visit (complete with an hour-long rehearsal on how to file into and sit in the gym), online yearbook ordering links messing up, fundraiser assemblies, student council speeches, and half-days... the weekend cannot return fast enough for me. teaching is a hard job, but it's especially difficult when all of the learning time is taken up with non-learning. my second unit, on medieval literature, was literally cut in half by losing a week of instructional time. this was made even shorter by the fact that the students do not seem to have a clear understanding of what plagiarism entails.
and yes, i did request permission to link to this page!

so rather than failing 85% of my students who didn't seem to understand what paraphrasing means (no, changing every fifth word to another word you found in a thesaurus does not equal paraphrasing.) i decided to make it a "teachable moment" and do a mini-unit on plagiarism. yay... this is my favorite thing to talk about! (not.)

changing my plans meant that i stayed at school for an extra SEVERAL hours last night and didn't actually leave until 6:30ish. andrew went out to get dinner so we could cook together (something we used to do that has fallen by the wayside with our big move), and while on his way home was involved in a pretty major accident. he is fine, but the tank... may have more damage than we'd originally thought. the other 3 cars in the accident were pretty much totaled, and 3 of the people involved were taken to hospitals, while one lady was even cut out of her car using the "jaws of life". andrew has pictures, but they're on his phone, so who knows if they'll make it on here.

there are two redemptive qualities to this week, however:

1. we made an awesome dinner last night, complete with salmon covered in a crab bechamel (fancy word, huh?) sauce that i made from scratch, wild rice, and oven-baked asparagus. yummy! we even popped open a bottle of our honeymoon champaign. why? because we could... and because it needs to be drunk soon.

2. today is a half-day. that means that classes are 45, rather than 90 minutes long, and that if i work it right, i can sneak home early. technically the second half of the day is for either staff training or grading (since interims go out wednesday of next week), but i figure staying late all the time and getting my grading done on my own time can be substituted for sitting around here all afternoon. usually i'm quite good about not disappearing on workdays and actually working, but i think i need a break.

anyone doing anything fun this weekend that we can join in on??