Marking Time

Only ONE more day of Wednesday morning parking lot duty. I must say, I am just marking my time until school is out. In years past, I was one of those teachers who worked the students until the next-to-last day. That was when I had bigger, badder classes. This year's freshman crop is not as unpleasant as some. I am able to do more activities without them drinking the ice water in an ice-melting exercise. As a reward for them not rattling my cage, I do not plan to rattle theirs. In fact, I'm giving a quiz on Monday to determine the Favorite For A Day. It will be a quiz all about ME and my rules. The highest score wins a modest prize package, the right to choose a movie from my selection for the class to view, name on the board as "Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's Favorite Student", and a trip to the drinking fountain and bathroom. Yeah. It's kind of like earning the right to WORK in prison, but it gives them bragging rights for a day.

Seven days of school left. I am ready to check in my textbooks. We can fill the days with more hands-on thingies, like the straw towers and egg drop contest. I might tear a page out of Mabel's book and dabble in those funky airplanes her students used today. Only I won't be graphing the results. Or WILL I? Perhaps I could use it for the test I have to give when the smarties are gone on Incentive Day. "Create a data table and a graph, using measurements from the 'funky plane' activity that we did last Thursday." Yeah. That's the ticket. That kind of thing was on the End of Course exam that my Biology kids had to take. Not planes. Different biological experiments. Every kid had a different one. This is the new BIG DEAL in Missouri instead of MAP testing. End of Course testing. We'll see how that flies. Anyhoo, getting back to my theft of Mabel's ideas...if I really wanted to get fancy, I could make my kids measure approximately how far the plane flew by walking off the tiles at right angles, and calculating the hypotenuse for the distance. This could get really involved. Thanks for the idea, Mabel. I will put my own special touch on it and use it next year for an activity over several days. First, we will have to do research on Bernoulli's Principle, and find out why planes fly.

Sigh. The school year is almost over, you know.