We are having a bout with an ice storm — temps below 30, heck below 25 most of the time — and we had rain yesterday, so most of the school districts, including mine, shut down.
I always get irritated at the news reports — they always find some “damn yankee”, who criticizes the area for shutting down. I’ve been down here 20 years, and I have been very thankful every time we’ve shut down. My district is very conservative about shutting down — quite a few districts shut down yesterday but we didn’t. I was a bit concerned, but we got through the day, and apparently got every student home safely.
We have had some other times when I thought we should have shut down, but we didn’t. There are some major concerns when you are a district as big as we are: quite a few of our students will not be supervised and worse yet, a bunch of them did not get lunch today. The supervision doesn’t matter with my kids, since I do high school, but it is a problem for the younger kids.
I hate the timing, but it will work out for me. We start finals on Tuesday. I was a bit worried that I would not be able to fill all three days with review, but two days will be just fine.
When I went into school yesterday I did two out of the three things that would make it easier for me stay if we couldn’t have gotten home. One was to leave my contacts at home and wear glasses. The other was to make sure I had enough insulin on me, and to carry an extra meal — a tuna salad package.
The glasses thing was funny. It really bothered my ELI students more than anything. One group thought it might I was tired. The others just wanted to know. However, it did give me problems, as I have good far vision with my glasses but absolutely no near vision, and the Algebra students needed to do some graphing. I ended up leaving them to do the graphing on their own.
When I review, I like to make sure that I work each review problem for the students and that they have recorded how to do it. I’m sure that my students won’t study, but you never know. I work very hard to make sure I do my part.
I have to relate something funny — at least to me. They moved about 25 students out of my classes, as they were over crowded, and gave them to another teacher — the AP Calculus teacher who is VERY good at what she does.
She came to me yesterday upset because she says the students don’t like her, and like me better and tell her that all the time. I already knew this, because they tell me that when they see me. However, I don’t think it’s personal on either side. These were students who were all working for me, and were my best students. I think if they had had her first, and had come to me, they would still feel the same way. I also am not sure that there is anything that she can do differently to change things.