19 June 2008, Thursday

Another miserable beginning to the day. Something is really wrong when I wake up and the thing I’m looking forward to the most is going back to bed. It has been that way the last two days. I’m not even thinking about running as being enjoyable. It still is, but I’m so exhausted when I wake up in the morning its just “when can I get back to bed?”

Yesterday evening running was the highlight of the day. I tried mapping out a new route but managed to get lost. Perhaps I should just stick with my downtown route? Anyway, it ended up ok because I eventually found my way back to North Ave. (one of the first streets of my downtown run) and then to the Georgia Tech football stadium. For some reason, the gate was open so I jogged in and decided to do stadiums. As I was running I was just waiting for some security guard to come yell at me but they never came so I just made my way from field level to press box across one side of the field and back.

It was another late night. I got in bed at midnight and then realized that I hadn’t printed my independent assessment. Of course when I go to print the computer lab is full because the print/copy center closes at 11:45 even though TFA knows full well most people are working well beyond that point. The guided notes worked pretty well in class today though. Granted, it gave me a reason to kick a girl out of class, though it was more she chose to leave. I made it very clear that I expected students to be taking notes on the guided notes sheet and its very clear what needs to be written down. She was ignore my talk and refused to take notes so I told her if she needed to take notes and she refused. So I told her if she wasn’t taking notes, she wasn’t learning and didn’t need to be here. After receiving a blank stare, I said she could either take notes or she could leave and she responded “I’ll leave.”

I think one thing that helped was I was walking around the class as I was talking rather than just writing on the board. The hard part is that the students have literacy problems so if I don’t write it on they board they can’t write it down. The class behavior got better as the class went along. Eventually some of the students were correcting others about their behavior. At the end, I had two of the students who mastered the concept working with small groups and it had several benefits – academically and otherwise.

Our CMA gave us another lecture about how, as a group, our rough drafts need to be a lot better. Stark contrast to her telling us yesterday we needed to get sleep.