It was a hard day to wake up to. It was cloudy and a little rainy, but nothing I haven't seen in New Hampshire recently. Went to work at noticed something weird. The secretary wasn't there this morning who I usually exchange a quick wave with. Kept walking and a teacher said "you made it!" Kept walking and I arrived at my classroom. Apparently last night it had rained a LOT and it was taking people 1-2 hours to get to school, when normally it would take them 10. Peoples' basements had flooded and some teachers weren't even at school yet. This is when I was also informed that a math teacher was not going to be here, which meant Mr. Sperling and I had to absorb her 7th grade honors class first block, which is our regular 7th grade class. At first I was worried, until I realized there were only four kids from our normal morning class at school. The four kids we had got to grab a computer and do some fraction work. While they were on the computer and I went around keeping them focused and on task, Mr Sperling was teaching the Honors class the exponent rules. (Something I need to brush up on before I start giving advice. Ha!) Then our normal 7th grade advanced class came in and started going over some homework on quadratics and discriminants. The managed to lucky skip out on my lesson on derivatives, but that won't be for long. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to challenge their minds with some calculus.
Then we had our class of 19 8th graders come in, but this time I was the only one in the classroom. This for me was probably the most intimidating situation I've been in since coming here. Mr. Sperling had to go and teach a 6th grade class due the the missing faculty and I was left with 19 energetic, to say the least, kids. Fortunately, I apparently have managed to gain enough respect from the kids to calm them down and get them working on their cartoon projects. Many of them have shown amazing progress on the projects, while others are still searching the web aimlessly for pictures. I hope they start working a bit harder or they will be in some serious trouble when due dates start coming.
After class I came to the conclusion that my basement must be flooded. It has flooded before and everyone else's is flooding, so I decided to drive home real quick during our planning block and check on the situation. Sure enough there was water all over the basement floor. I quickly dried the floors and laid down more towels in case more rain came. Crisis averted. I went back to school calm and collected, which was a nice change of pace. Mr. Sperling and I went out again to grab a bite to eat and we had an interesting conversation. For some reason we started talking about the future of this school and how he wants the school to have a better system of communication. It's hard to describe on paper, but what I am talking about is similar, if not identical, to Proctor's NTA system. This is a Notice To Advisor, used to communicate to the parents, the advisor and the student themselves about their success or struggles. For instance, if little Johnny got a 100% on his last English test, then the teacher would write a quick email saying that he is doing very well in class. This email would be sent to Johnny, his advisor, and his parents. This system can also be used for negative things such as; Johnny was misbehaved during math class today and he has been a distraction to other students. He also hasn't been fully completing his homework. His next assignment is a big one and I hope he can change things around. With this new system in place it could encourage kids to do better in school and also reward them publicly, which most kids love, when they do exceptionally well.
The day got a lot quieter and less hectic after lunch when we heard the storms were over. Teachers were all in and everything at LFCDS was back to normal. The 8th grade class came in and learned more about the quadratic formula and also the importance of the discriminant. After Mr Sperling and I sat down for a bit and attempted at making a "red test" also known as a problem set at Proctor. It was difficult to come up with what we were looking for and ended up getting distracted a bunch. We will most likely finish it tomorrow, no rush really. Tomorrow we will also talk about me teaching a couple classes next week. Should be an interesting prep day tomorrow. I ended up walking outside with my jaw dropping to the ground. It was warm, somewhat sunny and all the rain pools had disappeared
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