Law of Gravity

I'm not great at detecting lies, but sometimes the kiddos are obvious. Today's #ThrowbackThursday post is from February 22, 2008 , but I remember it well.  Today I covered a 7th grade world history class. I needed a silent room. I was not getting it. So, I warned them: "I will take down the names of those who continue to talk." This only works when I cover some teachers. This was one of them. They fought me on it for a moment. I stared down the few whose names were going to be on my list. Then one of the girls (the talkers were all girls in this group) told me to write down her name. "I'm Amanda," she said. She offered up her name way too easily. I was suspicious. I checked the seating chart. Sure enough, Amanda sat in that seat. But she did not look like an Amanda. She did not feel like an Amanda. I was sure I was being lied to. Twenty minutes later (I had gotten my silence, so I didn't need to make my list) two other students were exchanging words...

It's time for a dive back into the way-back files. This post originally appeared December 8, 2009 .  12th grade AP English. They were working on some essay or other (I didn't have a lot of details, but they were AP kids and could be trusted to do their work without me having to prompt them). They were half working, half talking about random stuff. One student started talking about coffee. He asked what people put in it. One of the girls mentioned cream and sugar. The boy said that no, that's what kids put in it. Adults put old in it. That's not a typo. He said "old". He continued with this reasoning. He said that coffee makes kids old. One girl complained that she drank coffee, but she wasn't old. The boy said that she might be 17, but the coffee made her older. So, I asked what about older adults who did not drink coffee. He said that they just age normally, not extra aged because of the old in coffee. It made only a smidgen of sense. Of course that was t...

Our school year has come to a close. This is very early for us. But in a case of "if you can't beat them, join them", the school district has adjusted the school year to be more in line with much of the rest of the country. Next week I'll have any stories from the last week of school (assuming I work any), with Friday serving as my annual year end stats post . Then it'll be on to the "summer schedule" until and unless I get any summer school assignments. (In the past this has been fairly light, but last summer I kept pretty busy. We'll see what this summer holds.) So, to close out the year (and because last week's classes were way too boring to write about), it's time for the annual presentation of the graduation daydream. Just to give this a little perspective this year, this was the year that niece graduated. When I first posted this , she had just finished the first grade. (Yikes, I'm old.) And I mentioned the entering kindergartners w...