lunchbyteblog

well, school starts back tomorrow with a string of teacher workdays before the kids come back on august 25th.  this summer, like all the previous summers, has sped by and tomorrow i will begin my 16th year in the teaching profession.  the start of school is always an exciting time.  there will be much to do- meetings to attend, getting the classroom ready, solving scheduling problems, working on the school improvement plan, talking with other teachers about the upcoming year, the list goes on. i am dead-set on blogging more this year.  there are always lots of things to talk about and to share.  i am going to try to not be overwhelmed by the idea of writing more and would love some reader input from time to time. so as we ramp up the year, i'll be doing my best to try and put some thoughts and ideas down here.  i'm sure there will be plenty to write about.  it is school, after all.

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well, it has obviously been a while since i have posted here. thought i might get back at it. lots of things have happened since my last blog. i have lots to cover but first, let me get at what has been happening the last few days. last week we had a group from ASCD here at our school. this group was here to film our school and our students as an example of a school trying to emphasize problem based learning. here at the newton school, our students are required to complete health-science projects. the group from ASCD wanted to film the process that our students go through when working on these problems. an example of a health-science project (so called because we are a health-science high school): Water and how it is essential to life. from here, students can relate it to climate change, disease, food production, water pollution, etc... the students get to work within the topic and relate the topic to things that they might find interesting. they have to have a driving questi...

well- i said that i was going to talk about some of the changes that are happening at our school and i guess one of the biggest ones is that we are going to have a new principal. we aren't really happy about the whole state of affairs but it's the way things have fallen. we are trying to make the best of it and are in the middle of a principal search right now. let me tell you the story of how this came about. back in the summer, the state of nc (in all the infinite wisdom of government bureacracy) decided to end the practice of what has been deemed 'double dipping.' this practice describes hwo the state was letting retirees from schools come back and teach and earn both their retirement and a salary. the process came about because there was a teacher shortage in nc a few years back and the legislature figured that this would allow them to work their way around the shortage. many, many, people took advantage of the 'loophole' and continued to work in a job...

ok- lots of things have happened here at our school while i was not blogging and i thought that maybe i could get back at this blogging thing a little more. i have lots of things to talk about but i should probably start with the events that are going on today and then work my way backwards. several posts about all the craziness happening around here are to follow but let's focus on today for now. today my school is being visited by a team of people from other schools for our school wide peer observation. this is something that we do at least once a year and it is part of how we gauge how we are doing with regards to many of the things that we have stressed as part of our school improvement plan. it is based on the idea of rounds that doctors do. if you want to know how you are doing, you can't be afraid to ask others to come and look at you. that's what this is all about. so today, there will be 14 or 15 people from other schools wandering around our rooms and our la...

Some days it all just seems rather funny to me. The school that I teach at has been in existence now for going on five years but no one seems to know that we are around. Just today, I was finishing up 5th period lab time (which we have in our great hall/cafe)with the students when the room began filling up with Child Nutrition staff from across our county. As the students were leaving and I was cleaning up, one of the ladies motioned me over and asked me, "Is there a school here?" I told them "yes" and proceeded to tell the assembled ladies about our program. After I was finished they all said what a great idea we had and how neat our school was. I agreed. I do think that we have a great school and other people "in the know" must think so also. We received the Innovator award from the New Schools Project of NC this summer. That means we were recognized out of all the New Schools Project schools in NC as the people exemplifying what the New Schools ...

well, school has been back for a week now and it is time for some first week reflections. so in no particular order, here we go... #1. our classroom doors now have locks. wow. a nice concept. we went all of last year with no locks on our doors. only a few things were stolen. this year might be even better. maybe nothing will be stolen and maybe we won't have to even use the locks. #2. not content with just one classroom, i have now taken over another classroom and our cafeteria! the rest of the school and the surrounding city block are next. #3. our garden is producing too much okra. #4. it will take me at least a year to get used to the fact that one of my female colleagues got married. it's not that i don't believe her, it's just that i may never remember to call her by her new last name. #5. hey, we still have jobs! all snarkiness aside, it has been a great start to a new year at the school. things are running more smoothly than ever and we have anot...