Tina Fey ( Ms. Norbury) in Mean Girls : "...I was joking. You know, sometimes older people can be funny too..."
Student: " my grandma likes to take off her wig when she's drunk"
Ms Norbury: " well your grandma and I have something in common."

Everytime I try to make a joke in class, it seems like no one gets it. They don't understand dry humor. I don't know what they're used to.

But I'm not there to be funny :)

Well, it's goin' ok. I could write about all the little things I do...but that would be boring. Discipline is getting easier once they figured out I give detention and call parents. Last night was 'Meet The Teacher'. I expected maybe a handful to come...since this is highschool...but about 25 showed up. So 40% of my students had parents come...thats AWESOME. It's good to know that the majority of my students are coming from families where the parents give a damn. There are a lot of little things I'm getting used to. For instance, I graded a stack of homework and realized I still have no gradebook, nor do I know how to enter the grades on the website where parents have access. Modifying for dyslexics, G/T, ADD, limited proficiency English...that's all been challengeing too.

I was at work for 13 hours yesterday, but I didn't notice until I actually looked at the clock. It feels really good to know I'm doing important things.

One of my biggest arguments in my last year of college was " but I don't want work to be my life! I want it to end at 5 so I don't have to think about it...come home and spend my vast amounts of money and hang out with my friends and family" Well...I still don't think my job should be my life. Yet as of now, it kind of is...I am constantly thinking about what I need to do to make these kids excited about learning French. I feel a MORAL OBLIGATION to make them succeed...in everything. I don't know where the hell that came from!!!

But yesterday, a family of one my students came up and started spouting off all these words that I had taught the student. The student was taking the class notes home and teaching the family. HOW COOL IS THAT?! I had little siblings singing " ou est Thumpkin?" that I had taught to 3rd period. I know I'm not teaching rocket science, but seriously, that warms the cockles of my little heart...that a group of 20 kids ask me to sing "sympathique" by pink martini after hearing a recording of it during the bell-ringer. This is just...so awesome.

But there are parts of the day where, like Mikey, I just space out for awhile. I wish I had a towel zen machine to watch ( see his blog ). I have the copier, but that gets old. During lunch duty, I watch the bulldozers outside while kids eat square pizza and drink milk out of paper cartons, and think about where I'd like to travel. Walking around the halls one day, I saw a little trail of blood. It was probably a kid with a nosebleed, but I bet if you had never been to my school, you might think otherwise. ( No dead teachers yet. )

So I'm going to try to write less and less about le travail. In other news, I spent the night in Garland on Monday and saw my grandpa, aunt, and little cousin. I hadn't seen my grandpa in a long time, and he's getting really feeble. I forget sometimes about mortality. He told me that all his friends from college have died for the most part.

I can't imagine my college friends dying. You guys aren't allowed to. :)