Law of Gravity

I'm slowly getting up to speed in this middle school English class. During the first full week (the first week of school was just Thursday and Friday), one of the major things I worked on was establishing some sort of routine. I don't have a lot of resources. There weren't many supplies left in the room from last year. (I've been slowly acquiring things. I learned who the keeper of the dry erase markers and paper clips is. So, I've gotten a few necessary supplies thus far.) The one thing the room did have is a working projector. And the teacher in there from last year left behind his laptop. Well, it's the school's laptop, but he didn't return it, so I commandeered it. But the laptop was buggy. There was some antiviral software that needed to be renewed, and getting logged in was a trial. I got help from the technology person, and things seemed to be working. The first couple days the computer asked for a restart a few times. I suppose since the computer...

The girl was sort of watching a video. Her computer sat on a nearby desk. She leaned over, watched something, paused the video, and then sketched something on her paper. Upon closer examination, I saw the video was instructions for how to draw a gun. And that's what she was drawing on her paper. I moved on. The boy was watching an episode of Ellen . I caught a glimpse of the show topic. I moved on. A second boy was watching a basketball game. Me: "What should you be doing right now...?" Seventh grade English. Their end of year projects were to create a slide presentation (as a group) and a "creative component" (as individuals) on a topic about protest and activism. The first girl's topic was Black Lives Matter. The first boy was watching an interview with the Parkland survivors. Other topics included #MeToo, women's rights, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and human trafficking. Clearly the second boy had been goofing off. Having computers in class for resear...

Integrated math 1 for eighth graders (read: advanced eighth grade math). They had a test. The whole district is adopting a new textbook that has an online component. When I covered that co-taught class a couple weeks back , one of the days the class was logging into the website for the first time. So, I wasn't unfamiliar with what the kiddos were doing. But new programs mean glitches... The whole class logged in and got started on their test. Then one boy raised his hand. There was no test for him to access. He explained that he had switched classes, so he was still enrolled online in the teacher's second period class. He logged into that, but there was no test there. I don't have access to the teacher's view, so there wasn't a lot I could do... It took me longer than it should have to remember that I could email the teacher. (I mean, seriously, I email teachers all the time about the crazy that goes on in class . Why it took that long for it to occur to me that I c...