Playing Catch Up

Sorry for the lack of postings recently. I have been fantastically swamped with finishing the year at Roseville and making preparations for my year at Lakeville South. (!!!)

I'll mention the most recent:

Yesterday was the last day for seniors. I survived the last hour with my Journalism class, though I did end up letting them leave a minute or two early to wander the halls. (Wander the halls, yeah right...) I had the seniors line up against one wall in a "panel" situation and the sophomores and juniors were to interview those students on the advice they have for students now and their futures. It wasn't as entertaining as I expected; I thought they would love talking about themselves, but I wasn't getting the kind of questioning I was used to from the previous press conferences.

Today was the first day with my Journalism students without the seniors... and of course, they said they wanted to do nothing, or rather, just watch movies until the end. I said nope, we're still in school, so we're still learning. I had the rest (sixteen of them--down from twenty nine, which is down from thirty four at the beginning of the trimester) vote on what they wanted to do for the rest of the trimester. Broadcast News won out, though we're spending the last two days focusing on "funny" news (tasteful articles from The Onion and some clips from The Daily Show). Anyway, today we watched a pretty dull film on Broadcast News Writing (yawn---there are fifteen of those buggers, and I had considered doing them until I almost fell over watching the ones on the ethics of Journalism... oy!) and they divided in half... I had them brainstorm in groups ideas for a newscast; they would vote on the top five and then have tomorrow to figure out how to "present" those... I let them make up fake headlines. Tomorrow we're going to brainstorm the basic facts of each story and they will "compete" for an audience.

One student asked, "Who is going to be the audience?" and when I said me... I had a less-then-desirable (that's lame kind of thing) response. So I said, "OK, I think it's time for a talk." And I scolded them about being rude, about needing to be polite, about playing school, about how we still have school right now, etc. I was surprised that it actually worked. These kids are really nice, and I completely get that they're restless and want to be done (can I blame them?) and want to enjoy the summer (I have already started reading for pleasure--aggressively-- again... I just read The Sparrow, which was quite interesting) but there are still days left...