ECMOA for the week of March 24-28, 2008

It's what you've all been waiting for. . . a brand new, extra shiny edition of English Class Moments of Awesomeness. Enjoy!

Okay, it snowed today. On the Friday before Spring Break we had snow. As if the students weren’t already hyper and unfocused. Plus our administration insists on waiting to do our required monthly fire drill at the last possible moment, we are scheduled to have a fire drill today. In the snow. Ah, enough complaining, it’s almost Spring Break!

By the way, I'm experimenting with color. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Honors English II

Moment 1:
The students had an assignment where they selected a quote from the novel the read, draw a picture to go with the quote and write a rationale of why they thought the quote was important. A conversation arose about corn.

Student 1: “Corn doesn’t grow on trees, Student 2!”
Student 3: “Student 4 (a student with a lot of artistic ability) draw a corn stalk, so Student 1 can see what it looks like.”
Student 5: “Haven’t you ever been to a corn maze?”
Student 1: “Yes, but I don’t pay attention to what it looks like.”

Moment 2:
Ms. Lee (my student teacher) explained to the students that she was grading on effort, not artistic skill, and she emphasized her point by drawing a horse on the white board. It was a very “interesting” horse. It had horseshoes which she later turned into ice skates. Then she drew an iced over pond.

Later in the day, one of my TAs commented on the drawing.
TA: “I think it looks nice.”
Lee: “TA’s getting an A.”
Havig: “TA’s a T.A.” (TAs are graded Pass/Fail)
Lee: “TA’s getting a P.”

Moment 3:
Student 1: “Sitting for 24 hours a day is not good for you.”
Lee: “So it’s good that you have 5 minutes to wander around.” (Refering to the 5 minute passing period between classes.”
Student 1: “We’re all going to be fat.”

Moment 4:
Student 1: “I like that saying, ‘vengeance will be had.’”
Student 2: (looking around the room) “Where does it say that?”
Student 1: “Nowhere. In my mind.”

Moment 5:
“If I could read, then that might be cool.”
Student in response to Lee’s suggestion for him to wallpaper his room with the torn out pages of his destroyed copy of House Made of Dawn.

Moment 6:
“This is what I’m going to learn today.”
Student after Lee used a marker to erase the non-erasing dry erase marker off of the white board.

Moment 7:
Some kids had a question about Hitler, and Lee asked what I thought. She relayed my answer to the group of kids.

Lee: “Well Hitler is blah blah blah…”
Havig: “There is not ‘Hitler is’ anything because Hitler is dead.”
Lee: “But he lives in my heart.”
This statement earned Lee two more crazy points. I will explain that at another time.

Moment 8:
Over the course of the semester, Lee has been collecting a list of creatively spelled words from student assignments. Today, we had the students create definitions for the words. One student was complaining about the task.

“Can we move Complaining Student to isolation because he’s sucking the fun out of it?”

The class then voted to move him.

Check back later for more vintage ECMOA.

In fact, stay tuned for a Jell-O themed edition of ECMOA…coming soon…