Back in the saddle after the weekend, looking forward to Thanksgiving vacation, and then the mere 2 weeks of actual teaching after that, followed by a week of showing videos and playing jeopardy or something since grades are already in and kids aren't allowed to bring backpacks and nobody does any work. We had a meeting just to show new teachers how to waste that week by playing 7-up in class. Given that I have kids that can't write a simple declarative sentence without seven grammatical errors, it's kind of nauseating to think of using the week that way... I'm hoping at least to play some review games and maybe watch movies and write about them. I guess most of my time will be taken up getting everything ready for going off track, a process that sounds only vaguely less intimidating than prepping for a moon launch, but apparently is doable, given that hoards of incompetent LA teachers do it regularly.

Meetings meetings meetings. Last week, out of a 4 day week at school, I had a meeting immediately after classes 3 days in a row. The only meeting-free day was Friday. Consequently, I had to postpone a whole pile of detentions, tutoring, and other stuff until then, when nobody in their right mind actually wants to stay after school. Highly annoying. Tomorrow, I get to go to the king of all time-wasting meetings: my district pre-intern program 3.5 hour afterschool bullshit. I have to do this 5 Mondays in a row, until the end of the semester, so they can give me test prep (likely doled out by some district hack with a cal state dominguez hills degree in adult education) on taking the secondary social studies content exam. I think of all the things that I could use assistance on in the teaching realm, social studies content is not one of them. Frankly, I've only found about one of the formal professional development sessions to be at all useful so far.... most of them refuse to treat teachers like reasonable professionals- making us do stupid icebreakers and draw posters like we were at RA training for college or something. I think i'm going to bring something to read and sit quietly in the back tomorrow.

Honestly it's pretty difficult to teach when all your after-school time gets sucked up with administrative garbage, and you have zero time to stay after to talk to kids who've been absent, or who haven't turned in their homework, or who are there every day paying attention but still think that Islam is a place. Speaking of which, about time to start grading my Islam final projects- grades are due Wed. and I have a stack of portfolios to look at. I'll post some of the more entertaining snippets.

The viewing of "The Circle" I talked about below was an amazing success. I was pretty thrilled that the kids sat still to watch a movie in Farsi (Farsi!!!) with subtitles, but things went really well. The kids were absolutely appalled at the depictions of how women are treated in Iran, and many of them were really pissed that Bush doesn't do anything about it ( I certainly did little to quell that). In my honors class, we even got into cultural relativism- trying to see things from the eye of the Ayahtollah (if you'll permit me the lousy pun) and look at our marriage/divorce rates, abortions, babies out of wedlock, billboards for the Spearmint Rhino gentleman's clubs, sexual harassment, etc. seems from their POV. Best of all, 3 of the kids (of varying skill levels) all have borrowed the movie from me to finish watching at home.

Weekend was exceptionally nice.

by the way... election right now is too painful to talk about.

Going to try my first multimedia presentation tomorrow- and maybe I'm aiming a little high? The movie I rented is in Farsi with subtitles - The Circle, about the plight of Iranian women - but I was encouraged when one of my students watched it when I suggested it (she was writing about the role of women in Islamic society) and said she really liked it. Hopefully the rest of the class can at least abstain from raghead jokes so I don't have to throw too many of them out of class (As I found when we covered "Niger" in geography warmup, lowbrow racist humor is certainly their forte). Also coming up tomorrow is my first Parents' night. I hired/bribed one of the honors kids in my homeroom to translate for me, just hoping he shows up. Will attempt to explain to parents why their kids are failing (because, parents response to "He doesn't do his homework and is disrespectful in class" is often "he's lazy and disrespectful at home, too" well, shit.)

Howard Dean for prez- check this out: www.dean2004.blogspot.com (if I remembered any HTML I'd have this encoded for ya)

Spent the evening protesting commercial "Holiay Compression" by giving trick-or-treaters candy canes from the big display of Christmas candy available at Ralphs, which this afternoon took the place of all the Halloween candy that was there yesterday. And responding "Merry Christmas" to each "trick or treat". I think the local parents think i'm some sort of crank.