Out of the mouths of babes...

For two of my 8th grade math classes I have a "Daily Quiz" set up every morning to prep the students for what lies ahead in the hour. Most of the time I give them three easy-to-difficult math problems to work out. Sometimes, after (or before) a long weekend or a lazy day, I put up a non-math related inquiry, such as "What did you do over the weekend?" or "Ask Mr. V a question!" Here are a few responses:

(from Ask Mr. V a question!):

"Can I move seats?"
"Hi. Why are you tall?"
And then virtually every other question was "Why did you get a haircut?" because I had just cut my hair rather short.

(from What did you do over the weekend?):

"got beat up by brothers"

My favorite was a combination of the two:

Question for Mr. V: "Why do u call home alot?"
What did you do over the weekend: "My dad yelling at me."

Yesterday I went to Six Flags Magic Mountain! I worked all day at school, picked up a bunch of students and left for the rides. I went with an organization called Young Life, which is something like a Christian mentorship program.

It was FANTASTIC. For 25 bucks, we arrived at 5, ate all-you-can-eat hot dogs, potato salad, BBQ chicken, etc, for an hour, watched a funny skit, and then pretty much just walked onto every ride after that.

I had 5 little seventh graders following me around like a flock of baby chicks and we had a blast.

Unfortunately I still had to work today at 7:30 this morning and my voice is a whole octave lower than it was yesterday.

Signing off- Phil!

I had an interesting interaction today with one of the administrators at the junior high today. It made my day!

She asked me how everything was going for me (in my third week of taking over three math classes). I replied that everything is going great so far. And she said, "That's good. I heard you were kicking ass in there." haha, I suppose on paper that statement can be misconstrued, but I assure you it was a compliment on my teaching abilities, and not a reason to be arrested for assault.

Ok, ok. It has been a while, I know. I have officially taught for two weeks now, and I am doing my best :) Today a kid drew me a picture of Barney.

This job makes me SO tired. And I can't complain, I'm only teaching three classes. But still, I'm back to something like 6 hours of sleep each night which is no good.

In other news, I'm stepping up my photography skills. A lot. I want to put up a new website soon. I will start a new photo blog. I am shooting a wedding in one month.

ps. I teach at Santa Barbara Junior High School. Two 8th grade pre-algebra classes and one 8th grade regular algebra class. "8th grade PRE-algebra you say??" Yes, they all pretty much failed it the first time.