We’re evaluating expressions. Plug x = 7 into 5x – 3 and see what comes out the other end, that sort of thing. Instruction has the tendency here to get really rote really fast. Needless to say, worksheets abound for this unit.
So instead we spent some time in the Half Plus Seven function, for which no Wikipedia entry exists, and which therefore deserves a quick explanation:
I made good today. I took until one a.m. last night to scaffold Algebra 1 and it was magnificent — the sort of lesson that goes from easy to load-bearingly difficult in perfectly incremental steps, the sort you know will make ignorance cower even before you teach it.
But still, one a.m.
So as promised over in cc#1 I woke up an hour earlier than usual and hit my coffee shop up for some leisure time before the sun was up. During an hour I’d have ordinarily spent sleeping, I read some, I blogged a bit on another forum, I e-mailed some friends who were getting just a little too used to my non-presence. Replying to Lori’s comment in cc#2 was the closest I came to anything work-related.
And I don’t know how to quantify all the variables that go into A Good Day, but from my first period straight through, you couldn’t have brought me down with a whale harpoon. I’m maybe crashing a bit right now but I know I’ve got to try all this again. Please categorize my recommendation of this schedule as: high.
Last call for drinks at CoffeeCat. Since 17h00 — from immediately after our staff meeting on — I have been a slowly spreading bomb. My blast radius has expanded inches on the hour; ungraded tests and lesson outlines now taunt gravity at the edge of my table. Last call for drinks and I realize I’ve spent my entire day — 8h00 until 00h30 the next day — in the service of my 80% contract.
I used to love this season a lot more. I carried wounds out of college — fleshy, red stripes — inflicted by the dozen-or-so final exams I took each year. It was refreshing, then, even thrilling in some unfortunately sadistic sense, to be the one doling out the pain.
I was finally the one being begged for small granulated clues to exam content, rather than the one wheedling the same clues from some lame bohemian TA. Their anxiety, their whimpered pleas for a study guide, repaired me and, in the same regrettable sense as before, made me stronger. At one point I tallied all the final exams I’d taken in my life and then determined a five-year teaching stint would be enough to mend.
