small school « chatter from the Library Monkey

sleeping through

June 26, 2008 at 1:04 am | In Baseball, Big Cats, Blogging, Blogosphere, Detroit Tigers, Nap, Sleep, Student Life, small school | No Comments

sleeping through

Didn’t nap today, so hopefully I wll be sleeping before midnight. I am on another field trip with the middle schoolers. shouldn’t be too bad since we have four+ chaperones for 20 kids. Plus they should be running all around and tired on the way home. Weather is suppose to be good so that is good.

The Tigers lose to the Cardinals…so the friends who root for them will come out of the coop. They say nothing until their team wins.

Next day

I am so glad we are on the brink of the last day.

Had an easy hard day today. Chaperoned a little field trip. It was one of those good ones where the kids are out of school, so those that go are not ones that have to, so the tend to be much better behaved. But it felt like a long day since it was so sunny.

One of the things that I really like is it reminds me that maybe the kids at my school are jerks. The jokes that I make in my school and get rude response from — got laughs from the other school. It reminds me of a story. I was talking to the math teacher. We were complaining about our kids and she said she was getting tired of the kids turning their head so they would have to acknowledge her when she drove by.

Looks like I am up late — The Tigers had a two+ hour rain d

time for bed, Tigers win woot woot

Gratitude (3)

I am grateful for good kids
I am grateful for grape juice
I am grateful for humus

pushups = 0 / 100
crunches = 600 / 700
squats = 700 / 700
bike = minutes

Spinning the wheels

April 20, 2008 at 10:44 pm | In Adirondacks, Baseball, Big Cats, Blogging, Blogosphere, Camping, Creative, Detroit Tigers, Education, The Big Cats, Weather, aches & pains, small school, volleyball | No Comments

Spinning the wheels

Finally got out on my bike. Quite surprised how easy it was.…hilly here and I thought that I might not be able to make it up some of the slopes. My knees are a bit tender, but okay.

Not sure how they will feel tomorrow and/or after volleyball tomorrow night.

I am really proud of myself, I didn’t think much about school at all. Good vacation. Of course after Monday I didn’t think about writing a scene for a musical either. I didn’t read much (but baseball forums). I wrote maybe a couple poems… I didn’t get sunburn, so all is well.

Great weather makes me lazy. I should plan on a little camping trip. Maybe in a couple weekends kayak out to an island…

The Tigerslost a second one in a row. Score was 5.3, but it didn’t seem that close…really. Cleveland lost again, but I guess I need to start paying more attention to Chicago. The Big Cats are 5.5 games back of them, the same distance to a wildcard berth. The irony is I did my green sock rally tiger (Titus Tiger) once and they scored. I should start it out every inning

time to shower and sleep

Gratitude (3)

I am grateful for a nice bike ride
I am grateful for forums to blabber on
I am grateful for being able to open the apartment windows this weekend

pushups = 80
crunches = 8000
squats = 0
bike = 25 minutes

Up and down

April 13, 2008 at 12:22 am | In Aquilino Lopez, Baseball, Blog Babble, Blogging, Clete Thomas, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, co-workers, small school | No Comments

Up and down

Tigers win, tigers lose. They are kind of depressing. Yesterday they played a great game

The Tigers are at the point where they need to win 10 in a row to make the team respectable. The more you lose in the beginning the more you need to win later.. About the only thing good is the Cleveland Indians are not doing so well either.

Monday and Tuesday the Big Cats will host the Indians, so it will be interesting to see how that pans out. Right now the Indians are playing fairly poorly against the Athletics.

The big bright spot of last night’s game was Aquilino Lopez — AquaMan. He came on to replace Dontrelle Willis, when Dontrelle injured himself in the first inning. AquaMan got the win. Another bright spot has been Clete Thomas who has been hitting better than most of the other Tigers combined.

Doesn’t look like the internet crazy has visited here yet, but that could be coming. Hip librarian checked in.

That reminds me of an idea I had.… my school is so isolated that when a class goes on a field trip, they are probably on a bus for an hour (one way). I was wondering how we could get the field trip to come to us, then I thought in a different direction. What if my school hosted a group. The things that could happen — visit to one or both of the the local Museums, walk in the nature trail that our Middle School school maintains (part of the curriculum is for the kids to create information about a nature walk), if they come in May the could see the high school play — which is about as bad as something can get.

We could have host homes, where the students visiting could spend the night at locals homes, or they could spend the night in the Gym. If they spent the night, they could go to another school. I think it is a really good idea, but who knows. I wasn’t sure how they took it at the middle school meeting.

I was thinking yesterday how the Union President asked me to be the Vice President, the thing that is kind of goofy about that —- is the fact the President is stepping down. That is I can’t figure out why the future president didn’t ask me to be VP, since I would be working with her.

Time to think about some sleep. This vacation has been pretty lazy already

Gratitude (3)

I am grateful for Clete Thomas
I am grateful for Spring here
I am grateful for being able to come up with good ideas

pushups = 80 / 100
crunches = 600 / 800
squats = 800 / 600
bike = 0 minutes

It is a staff, not a team

March 16, 2008 at 11:38 pm | In Baseball, Big Cats, Blog Babble, Blogging, Detroit Tigers, Drawings, Jason Grilli, archive.org, co-workers, small school, team | No Comments

It is a staff, not a team

I was just thinking about high school meetings we had on Friday and Thursday. They call them ‘team’ meetings, but we don’t have functioning teams at my school.

Well that is sort of not true. Our Elementary teachers are 90 percent a team, our Middle school is about 50 percent a team and our high school is only 30 percent. There numbers are not about participation, though that factors in, but in how the teachers approach everyday professionalism as a staff.

The priorities of teachers: 1) will it benefit me. 4) will it benefit my level (elementary, middle school & high school) and 5) how will it benefit the school note the value level is not 1,2,3… ‘how it will benefit me’ has a priority of 1,2,3. There isn’t a whole lot of how it will benefit students. In fact the staff meetings area most often about discipline and student improvement plans (sip), not === making the education of most of our kids better.

Some of the staff’s behavior is due to a self-fulfilling prophecy. They treat the new staff members kind of crappy and don’t respond to them as equals. Some of this might be because the senior staff thinks, ‘why bother, they will probably be gone in a couple years.’ And that is true, but I say much of the reason for the turn over (more than 14 percent each year) is because of the way the new people are treated.

I said something at the last HS staff meeting and it was met with a ‘talk down comment.’ I know they didn’t mean it as a ‘talk down comment,’ but that is what it was, because it was presented as what I said was out of naivety. I am not sure if it was about staff members describing our town as Mayberry RFD. This after kids threw fireworks off a bus and on a college campus.

I know we don’t have the problems other schools have but in my three years I have been threatened three times and my truck was vandalized once. And quite frankly we are not producing stellar project. We have small classes that graduate, about 10 percent drop out before they get to be a senior and those that go on to secondary education are likely to be in a low level community college. That isn’t bad or unusual from larger schools, but we do not have many kids who excel.

coooool, the Drive-By Truckers I am listening to on archive.org are doing a Bruce Springsteen song (”Adam Raised A Cain”)

Well played around too much, time for bed and the start of a four-day week.

The Tigers Lost two in a split session.… Jason Grilli has looked pretty bad in spring training.

Gratitude (3)

I am grateful for a Tiger Bulletin board to discuss the Tigers motown.com (I think I mentioned this one before)
I am grateful for a nice clean laundromat 14 miles away
I am grateful for updated GifFun