I can't be the only one who still has to think hard for a second while looking at the little arrow that denotes "greater than or less than" in math to remember which way it's supposed to point. The way I still remember it is that the greedy alligator eats the bigger number (the open part of the arrow faces the bigger number). I figure if that's what stuck in my head almost forty years ago, that must be a good mnemonic. So that's still how I explain it to the first graders.
One of my duties in the lunchroom is serving the elementary kids from our well-stocked salad bar. Some of the students were really surprised that I didn't remember exactly what they like on their salads. As if my brain is still in its prime and can keep the individual salad combinations of 28 kids on file over three months of summer. Give me a couple of weeks, though, and I'll have "Andrea=lettuce+cheese+ranch dressing+ham bits" taking up valuable space in my memory again.
I spent almost an hour trying to set up four Zoom meetings for the semester. This should have taken me about ten minutes, but every time I set the time parameters and saved them, the ending time would inexplicably change to the same as the beginning time. Over and over. It was so frustrating. I kept changing things in settings and re-scheduling the meetings until eventually it worked. Why did it finally start working? No idea, but at least I got it done. And that's pretty much my technology experience in a nutshell.
We have a couple of very spirited teachers, bless them, who always come up with a theme for the beginning of school and decorate accordingly. This year's theme is Hollywood, mostly because that was the prom theme last year so we already had a lot of props and decorations for it.
They laid out a long length of red paper on the path leading to the cafeteria where all the kids go in the morning so they could "walk the red carpet," gave them all VIP bracelets and star-shaped sunglasses, and had the staff act as the adoring crowds lining the red carpet and being all excited to see them.
Most of the kids loved it. A few did not. I get off the bus with the kids, so my role in this was actually to reassure our one new first-grader that this was not as scary as it looked. She sort of believed me. At least she actually went into the school, which didn't look like a given when she first saw the scene outside the cafeteria.
The first day is so tiring. Everyone in my house went to bed early last night. Let's hope they'll be well-rested and ready to go for the second day.
6 comments:
I absolutely agree with all of this Kristin. Those first few weeks of school are so exhausting while you establish routines with a new group of little people, even within the same small school. The dynamics have changed and you are starting all over with the younger members of the class who may have been the big kids in their previous class. In Australia we also have the heat of summer to contend with, and the heat always seems to ramp up to extreme heat just when the children go back to school. Kathy :)
January is the start of our school year- same season, different month.
It was in the low to mid-90s (F) all week, and that definitely makes it more miserable for me, outside at recess, running between buildings, etc. I'm sure it's even hotter for you.
My children begin school next week and Chao lei at least, does not seem as excited as years past. Jun will face her first formal schooling in pre-school, which is not the same as her previous day care. Now I wonder what I will do all day.
I hope the start of school went smoother than it did for my kids. On day five I got a call from my daughter’s school because of an assignment she did. It was a really neat poem from the perspective of somebody’s journey through a mental health crisis. But, it got flagged in the monitoring system. The good news is she got an A on the assignment. The bad news is is that about half the kids got called down because their assignments got flagged with certain phrases also. I think they’re going to have to redo their monitoring system. I just got a notice that next week in her personal health class they’re going to tackle the topic of suicide with teens. So I’m wondering how many phone calls I’m going to get next week for her assignments.
And apparently, I was the only parent that the guidance counselor called that had any idea as to what the poem was and what the assignment was.
I'm assuming that's an electronic monitoring system that runs all submitted assignments through a program? Yeah, we don't have anything like that, but it does sound like it would cause a lot of headaches. And suicide education in the second week of school sounds . . . heavy. I presume they're doing it then to expose those kids who are feeling really stressed out/depressed about school right out the gate to information and resources that might help them, but it's a lot to deal with so soon into the year. I hope things settle down for you and your daughter.
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