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Another week's come by. Some bad, some good. I introduced my floating station into the routine. The first couple days, the long transits between a few classes got me and I missed the bell a couple times. After I started assigning jobs to the kids, things began running more smoothly and I think I got better at moving from class to class each day. Thursday night, there was the Title 1 Parent meeting we had to go to. Of course, they were like, oh, it'll be less than an hour. It was an hour and forty-five minutes. But! Then they made it worth it yesterday by giving everyone who went a pack of scantrons! One thing I'm not getting used to is my folder system. Got a whole bunch of folders for organization and the kids who have jobs to use. Each class has one for taking stuff in and one for passing stuff out. Well, that's all fine, but they're a ton of 'em and they're huge. I keep 'em in the drawers so kids will be able to get to 'em during the day, but I seem to keep forgetting to take 'em home. Used 'em three times and twice I left 'em. The first time they stayed in their drawer. The second time I took 'em home. Then yesterday, I took 'em out of the drawers when I moved my station back to its resting place in my first period classroom, but left 'em sitting in my seventh period classroom. So those quizzes and homeworks I was gonna grade this weekend...uh... Oh well. I think I'll get a separate satchel to carry 'em to and from home in, they all barely fit in the bags I use for everything else. I know I still have tons of kinks to iron out, but a method I integrate into my classroom to get kids to teach each other seems to be off to a good start even after my baby steps of implementation. Engagement and understanding seem to be way up from previous years throughout a larger sampling of students. If I can get it together, I'm hoping this will be a good year. I know I thought that at the very beginning last year and things subsequently deteriorated. I'm changing my whole mindset, as I've said before, and I think it's having an overall positive effect. On Thursday, I had a kid who just wouldn't respond to questions. I coaxed him a little bit with some encouraging words and got him to make a little bit of an effort and respond. That felt good. Yesterday felt good as a whole. I had one kid (freshman, first period) just off the chain obnoxious and disruptive. I'm also not wasting any time setting up conferences. Ideas of progressive discipline are also out the window. Certain things just require me to drag your parents up here to have a talk and the sooner the better. I call the parents to set up the conference, so there's the phone call. Acting quicker and bigger is my objective. I'm trying to see if I can remember other things from the week. Anyway, Mary Beth and I went over to Paul and Shawna's last night. The Skeleton of Cadava was playing and it was one of the best fucking movies ever. That skeleton stole the show (and that's no mean feat as it was a pretty stellar show already), but when he walked it was like the best fucking thing ever. I won't describe. You must see. In contrast, about the worst movie ever was put on: Croczilla. It was an exercise in whether the words "crocodile" and "euro" could compromise 50% of a movie's dialog. It was a rousing success in that regard. I think the painful vocabulary repetition may have been a fault of bad translation from the Chinese; however, that aside it was a pretty annoying movie anyway. We played this game Mary Beth and I got Paul for his birthday: Telestrations. The first round was the best. It started off with the word "flamingo" (people alternate in the chain drawing the word and guessing the word from the picture) and ended up with "quarterback." The link was lost between me and Mary Beth. It got to me as "swan." I was drawing and, while you could tell my picture was a bird, in no way could you tell it was a swan. So I tried to add the cover of Filth to clarify. My teeth didn't look like much of anything so I added the cover of Greed, I figured the dollar sign would be more recognizable and the two together would clear it up. Well, Mary Beth didn't get the Swans references and she ended up with the phrase "bird bank." After a few rounds and a picture with a quarter going into a bird's back, you get the word I previously mentioned. There were other rounds, and while it's much funnier having experienced it than reading about it, that round had everyone cracking the fuck up when the chain was unveiled. Okay, so now.