bad, bad blogger

I've decided I'm a terrible blogger. I never feel like I have anything to say and then I never have the motivation to write when I do. But here are a couple of stories from my first three weeks of school. Just so you know, am back at the same school and I have two Science 8 classes and one Science 9. Although teaching sci 8 again, the government implemented a new curriculum this year, so I have to develop everything myself and the teacher resources that correspond with the textbook are on back order. And I haven't taught sci 9 before BUT a colleague gave me a CD with the ENTIRE course on it (his notes, worksheets, tests). It's awesome. I love computers. But back to the stories:

1. "Is kryptonite real?" - an actual question I was asked in the first week of school. First, I clarified that she was, indeed, asking about the bane of Superman's existence, and sure enough, she was. Then I told her that no, kryptonite is NOT real. She replied, "You mean, they make stuff up?" At this point, I am crying on the inside about the future of our society and ask her if she means that comic book writers make up the things they write about. "Yeah, they make stuff up?" she says again. Apparently flying men in tights are a normal occurrence in her world. So I assured her not to believe everything she sees and changed the subject back to lab safety. On a side note, there IS an element (number 36) on the periodic table name Krypton, but it is a noble gas, NOT a green glowing rock that is the remnant of some distant planet.

2. Busting a skipper - Do you know how satisfying it is to catch a skipper? I do. This past week, I had a student missing from my class. It was the last block of the day and it was a miserable day outside. Raining buckets. This comes into play later. I had a suspicion that he was not supposed to be missing, checked his attendance for the day, and sure enough, he had been at school for all his other classes. We happened to be having a quiz that day, which he knew about, and missed. Now I had a logical consequence (see those uni-ma-versity edu-ma-cation words?) to apply. Did not write quiz + no good reason to be missing = no mark on said quiz. So that afternoon, I phoned home about 5 minutes after class ended, and his mom picks up. Perfect. Long story short, he had no ground to stand on and neither did his mother. It was a somewhat frustrating conversation, but I can't really get into that here. Apparently rain is an ok reason to come home from school if your mom thinks you have phys ed in the last block of the day. Ugh.

So, hopefully I will start being a little more regular about blogging. We'll see.