A Few Note at the End of the Third Quarter

I am very pleased with the way everything is going in my classes. My students really work hard for the most part and I have been able to provide them with challenging material. I'm looking forward to incorporating more TPRS and Video/Drama stuff next year, but my thematic units really work well with the students I am working with. I also want to really design my computer/career/study skills class to optimize the time I have with my students. I hope that Rocky is able to get Rosetta Stone up and running soon. Things will finally start to wind down a bit now, I believe. Monday is a staff development day and we are going to see Ron Clark at the Orleans in the morning. I'm looking forward to seeing him speak, but it is rumored that they paid him $40,000 for this one day engagement which seems way too much. I went to a really nice workshop called ELL 101: The Nuts & Bolts of Language Learning given by Connie MacFarland, an ELL specialist in the region. She was really dynamic and made the workshop a lot of fun. She reminded me how important music and laughter are in the classroom, especially the ELL classroom. She also talked a little bit about brain-based learning. One fact that really stuck in my mind was the notion that our brain likes 60% predictability and 40% novelty. Another thing she said is our brain needs a change of state every 20 minutes. That's another area I would like to know more about: brain-based learning. This summer I will try to read some books by David Souza and Eric Jensen to familiarize myself more with it, if I have the time. I have a pretty busy summer planned already, but it should be fun. I'm really looking forward to teaching a Virtual High School Class. I hope I get to teach Computer Applications, as that would go hand-in-hand with preparing my Computer class for next year.