You know how sometimes you have a week where absolutely nothing seems to be going your way? I'm going on a month of that feeling.
My mom passed away in late August and everything seemed to be going alright immediately after that. I took a day off from my internship before discovering that I was going to go stir crazy if I just sat in my room letting myself be sad the entire time. So I went back to interning and the first week was fine.
Then I started getting sick. At first it was bronchitis. Then it was some sort of cold that manifested into congestion so bad that I couldn't hear because my head was so stuffed up.
Just as I was getting over the sick part, I ended up in the hospital emergency room with extreme stomach pain caused by my accidentally aggravating an ulcer by eating spicy food. I was in enough pain that I thought the problem was my appendix. Turns out, I'm just too stressed. Quelle surprise.
And because that wasn't enough, my boyfriend broke up with me. That I'm getting over rather well thanks to the sagely words of Miranda Lambert. I have simply fixed my make up and moved on.
But just because the universe can't leave well enough alone, I was just informed (late yesterday evening) that I have to re-take a course that is required for my teaching certification because I had to pass with a B- or better. I'd like you to note that my professor gave me a C+. On top of that course, I was told this morning that I must also retake ANOTHER course where my final grade was not satisfactory for certification. Of course, nobody at UNH bothered to mention this requirement to me while I was an undergraduate.
Ah, well. C'est la vie, non?
As far as my class is concerned, things are going well. We've finished with King Arthur (but boy, I could spend AGES on that topic) and are moving on to The Canterbury Tales. I'm mixing up this unit in that I'll also be providing essay-writing instruction because they've finally been assigned an actual essay to write. I plan on modeling Penny Kittle's conference techniques because, having seen those in the past, I think that with the group I've got (two very high performing students, two low performing students, and four average students) this method would be the most beneficial.
I gave them a handout on MLA style and one with advice on how to make an essay truly readable. I got both from the UNH Connors Writing Center for free off their website. Definitely an awesome resource for any teacher who may be trying to teach the dreaded formal essay to their students. I've got rough drafts from most of them right now that I'm going to look over and see what I can use to teach a few mini-lessons on grammar and style. Today, I'll be putting all of the drafts up on the projector screen (with names missing, of course) to do a group conference and critique.
Now, that critique shouldn't take our entire class period (today is an odd block day so the kids have all their odd period classes for 100 minutes instead of the standard 50 and tomorrow they'll have only their even period classes). Toward the end of the class, I'm going to introduce them to The Canterbury Tales via "The Prologue" and give them each their assigned character. Each student will have one character from the tales and, in addition to the class readings of "The Prologue" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale", will have to read their character's tale. After they've done this, they'll do a short project (it should only take a couple of days) where they'll create a "Fakebook" profile of the character they've been assigned using information they've gathered through the readings.
I'm slightly worried about assigning the essay (a long-term project) and the profile (much shorter term) at the same time, but I think they can handle it.
PM
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