Snowy Saturday

I woke up this morning, pulled open the shades, and blurrily saw (I hadn't yet put my glasses on) wet, baby snowflakes! Beautiful.

Dan is in Michigan at a development conference at Calvin College. He's been gone since Thursday, and I barely missed him this time. I know that sounds bad, but it's not meant to. It only reflects how busy I am with school and how leaving your wife for three weeks during an extremely stressful time of life may lead to a lack of missing in the future. I'm looking forward to seeing him tonight though.

I have again spent most of this Saturday doing school work. I start a new unit in Advanced Composition and a new unit in AP on Monday. In AP we're going to be reading Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I'm reading for the first time. It's harder to teach a novel I've never read before, especially a novel by Faulkner.

I find that now that I'm a teacher, whenever I read anything (National Geographic, Atlantic Monthly, the back of the cereal box), I automatically start thinking: How can I use this in the classroom? This thought process has led to some interesting discoveries, but it also makes it difficult to ever read SOLELY for enjoyment. I'm not complaining. I'm just sharing what's happening in the ole brain.

This week I asked for a student to be permantely removed from one of my classes. He had a 0%, had been kicked out of class several times, and had an extremely disrespectful attitude towards me and his classmates. Two students in other classes dropped out (I guess these are two students who do this every semester). Another of my students is being recommended for expulsion. This makes me sad. Of course, these students are a very small percentage of the whole, but it still saddens me. What are they going to do with their lives? On a positive note, I set up an extra credit assignment for my AP class that involves reading and responding to essays by people such as Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver, and one student is reading Wendell this weekend for his first time! Yippie!