Every lesson I have ever taught .... has never been completely finished on time.
Usually that five minute bell rings and I'm already thinking, Okay, what am I going to sacrifice from my lesson plan today and use tomorrow? It makes day to day planning easier - I always have a "pick-up" point from the day before!
But today - things went just right. I watched the clock a LOT more. I was very explicit with students, letting them know exactly how much time they had to do an assignment (rather than my usual, "You have 5 minutes" but I really give them three because I know they can do it in that amount of time), and I made sure that the 5 minute bell marked our review time rather than the last ounces of instruction time.
Although the timing seemed to work out, my chosen texts were less ideal. Students were supposed to be analyzing some model texts of the genre they chose today in class. Yay for repetition - I had them take the same kind of notes I had them take on Tuesday, and even they remembered each of the elements I wanted them to pay attention to. I had chosen some of those models mostly because of organization and topic - I thought they captured that genre well, showed some variety, and talked about topics my students would be interested in or they would benefit from learning about.
Well, one of my cute, sweet, innocent 7th graders came up to me with a copy of one of the blog posts I had printed off and said, "Mrs. Brown, isn't this [pointing to the paper] a bad word?"
Oh. My. Gosh.
I looked down to see the f-bomb glaring me in the face. I snatched it from his hand and immediately confiscated the blog post copies from the other genre-blog groups.
Four students saw it. I apologized to each of them individually, and most of them just let it slide with a "It's okay, Mrs. Brown. I've heard worse," which didn't really make me feel that much better.
The post had been about bullying, giving tips for people to avoid cyberbullying. One of the tips had been to just go outside (rather than stay inside playing online games). Why the author felt she needed to place f-bomb emphasis on that particular tip, I will never know. The irony of it all is that it's anti-swearing week at the school. And I had missed the word because it fell directly on the printer line (so I couldn't see it clearly on the next page). What a fail!
I have to be much more careful about what I let them read in the future. That's probably the hardest part of this genre unit and informational text in general. I want them to read REAL stuff - real articles and blog posts and podcasts that are out there, but so many of those genres are inappropriate for students their age. So - if you have any ideas for examples/model texts for these genres, let me know! It's so much easier to turn to our class anthologies for stories - I know they're clean and that they're well written. But where can you go for clean, well-written informational texts?
And I need to be a much "close"er reader when it comes to what I give my students. To confess, I had printed off these articles this morning after doing what I thought was an adequate search for examples, and was more worried about the seating chart changes than about checking each word of the texts.
Oh, and I told my students I was high on DayQuil today (which was true! That stuff is nasty and really does a number on my brain function!). Note to all teachers: don't tell your students your high on anything. All they will hear is, "I'm high."
Hello, Hyperawareness of every word I say to my students. Looks like we're going to become fast friends.
It's all about perspective friend. This post can be evidence of the fact that you're still sick and not 100% yet, but it can also be evidence of two other things:
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2). The listen to you and can repeat what you've said (how else would they have realized you were high?)