Fall in full swing

Sunday afternoon: I am sitting in the living room of the dorm, typing away as the dorm boys run around the hallway after each other.  The slightly off-key notes of a piano waft up the stairwell from the girls' rec room downstairs, where one of the girls practices the same song that she plays every day.  I have no idea what the song is, but I know it very well by now.  In the kitchen to my left, the dorm parents are stocking the cupboards full of Goldfish, Oreos, and Sun Chips - the fruits of a recent Costco trip.  It's a typical afternoon in the dorm.  :)

It's been what, six weeks since I wrote last?  I am continually amazed at how quickly time can escape without notice.  These past weeks have been very rich and entertaining, not to mention educational.  As I mentioned in my last post, the first week of school for the middle schoolers involves a trip to LOC, a camp up in Michigan.  This week provided an excellent foundation for the year, and at the same time gave me a great avenue for getting to know the kids better.  We spent the three days climbing (and jumping off) dunes, canoeing (and being dumped out of canoes), walking across ropes suspended 30 feet in the air, singing songs about alligators and moose and bananas, and exploring the woods.  

The pictures in this post are from the LOC trip.  The one above is from a game we played where the students were asked to find a partner and come up with a unique frog call.  We then blindfolded everyone, mixed them up, and asked them to find their partner by using the frog call.  Hilarious.  

Above, you see one of my favorite shots from our afternoon on the beach of Lake Michigan.  It looks so mystical and ritualistic... and perhaps it is.  I'm not sure what they were up to.  

I took over 300 pictures at LOC, and you can see a few more of them in an album on Facebook; this link should work even if you don't have a Facebook account:  http://www.facebook.com/album.php?air=2008567&l=b894aid=113100487.

So let's see.  My classes are going pretty well so far.  We are reading To Kill a Mockingbird in seventh grade Language Arts, and we're just now reading about Tom Robinson's trial.  This group is pretty good about debating and getting into issues, so I am looking forward to some lively discussions.  In social studies, we are learning about the Industrial Revolution.  This class is a good challenge for me, because the textbook is rather strange and random, so I have to provide the overarching structure of the class myself.  I am familiar with everything we are studying, but I'm not experienced with putting it all together in a learning form.  (by the way, the picture above is a random shot I got when we were visiting the dunes... there isn't anything important about it, I just like how it looks like these students were washed ashore recently from a shipwreck.  In reality, I have no idea what they were doing.)

With the election nearing, I am also dedicating a day each week to the election in both seventh and eighth grade social studies.  We'll be talking about the candidates, the issues, and the swing states, culminating in an evening election day something-or-other.  I'm still working out the details.  :)  I asked the students to watch at least 30 minutes of Thursday's vice presidential election, though, and it was pretty interesting to have a discussion about the issues afterwards.  

(This picture was the beginning of an hour of canoeing/canoe tipping/river wading - more pictures on Facebook.)  In eighth grade language arts, we are reading Romeo and Juliet, and (spoiler alert) we're getting close to the death of the star-crossed lovers!  This bunch is pretty bright, and they seem to be digesting Shakespeare pretty well - although they grumble as we go.  :)  I am looking forward to a debate at the end of the play to determine who is ultimately responsible for the deaths, as the students have already been making connections about who is to blame and which characters are doing the right thing.  For example, was it selfish for Juliet to run off with Romeo?  At the end of Act III (right after Romeo is banished and Juliet decides to fake her death) I asked the students to write "Dear Abby" advice letters to Juliet about what she should do next, and while most of them advised her to follow her heart and go after Romeo, there were a few students who cautioned her and suggested that she marry Paris, which would be a more sensible choice and would take into consideration the wishes of her family.  After all, Juliet is only 13, and can you really be sure of your heart at this age?  

Romeo and Juliet ties in nicely with eighth grade social studies, where we are studying Shakespeare's biggest supporter: Elizabeth I.  The curriculum for this class makes use of a lot of primary documents, which adds a unique dynamic to the class.  We recently studied some of the sea explorations that took place during Elizabeth's time.  The students were given a prospectus sheet for each of the four expeditions - outlining the captain's experience and expectations, projected wins and foreseeable dangers.  They then had to invest money in one or more of these expeditions based on how successful they thought each trip would be.  Then we read accounts of each expedition and found out how much money they won or lost.  It was very interesting to watch the outcome!  Only one expedition - that of Sir Francis Drake - was really successful, and his earnings were 4700%!  The only other expedition that was successful gained 6%; the other two lost everything.  So the students got to learn about these expeditions from an investor's perspective.  

Classes take up a good chunk of my time, but I feel like they are just the tip of my life iceberg.  I'm the seventh grade advisor, which means I have them for homeroom and for one extra advisory period a week.  I am also in charge of a newsletter class once a week, and I'm pulling together the semi-regular middle school newsletter.  When we have home volleyball games, I am in charge of the scoreboard - very exciting stuff!  

I'm also enjoying living in the dorm and getting to know some of the students that way.  There are 41 kids in the middle school and eleven of them are in the dorm, most of whom are from South Korea.  They are really fun students - they have a good mixture of intelligence and goofiness.  We played lazar tag as a group last weekend, and I now have an idea of who to avoid becoming enemies with!  

Although I spend most of my time in buildings, I am coming to see that the Elgin area has a lot to offer outside!  The school sits right next to the Fox River (from which it got its name), and there is a great bike trail that runs the entire length of the river - 33 miles total.  I haven't done the entire thing yet, but maybe this spring... :)  We are also surrounded by forest preserves and prairies, and I have gone out seed picking a couple of times - once at a nearby prairie and once right on campus!  I didn't know seed picking was such an established art form, but I am becoming wise; there is a group of people who goes out three times a week to prairies in the area to collect seeds from local prairie plants, which they then spread around to other local prairies.  I am learning that this is an important aspect of prairie restoration.  

OK - in the next several hours I need to buy butter, look for an audio recording of To Kill a Mockingbird at the library, bake cookies (rewards for vocabulary/grammar bingo), plan out the next month of election study, figure out what I'm doing in my classes tomorrow (if not for the rest of the week), rearrange the desks in my classroom, wash dishes, and take out the trash.  I should probably get started on that.