America The Beautiful

America the Beautiful

My second year at hell a new person was introduced to my team. His name was Mr. Chirila (Pronounced Key-Real-Ah) no one ever knew how to say his name and constantly mispronounced it. The mispronunciations ranged from gorilla to chinchilla. He was part of a work program from Romania (Because again, my school couldn’t find anyone in the continental US who would work for their school). He looked extremely busy and mean when I first met him, but the more I got to know him the more I realized that he was extremely funny and sarcastic.

During one of the first faculty meetings of the year, Chirila decided to sit next to me. I was fine with this because we were becoming close friends. This turned out to be a disastrous mistake. During the meeting the administrators told us that they were going to have to ask a lot more of their teachers. They were going to need us to fill out three extra forms every benchmark, and turn in lesson plans in triplicate, and a plethora of other things. Each time they mentioned something new we were going to have to do Chirila would raise his hands above his head and clap while loudly saying, “I LOVE America!”

The more this happened, the more people kept turning to look at him, and the more the administrators would pause to stare. No one could figure out if he was being serious or sarcastic. He was being downright sarcastic and I found the whole thing highly amusing. However, I never sat next to him in a faculty meeting again.

Comments

Teaching Point of View with Video Games

I was looking for new ways to introduce point of view and I stumbled across a GREAT idea! Using video games! There are tons of video games in different points of view. Halo=First person point of view Mario 64= Second person point of view Tomb Raider=Third person limited point of view The Sims=Third person omniscient point of view A great video overview that I found:

1,000 Pens update

My 1,000 pens came in the mail! I thought I would show you guys what they look like! Want your own cheap box of 1,000 pens? Click Here To read that blog post On a side note I found an awesome recipe that I made tonight with Basil from my garden. I liked it so much I thought I would share it with you! Tomato, Mozzarella, Quinoa, and Basil Salad

Short Stories from a Middle School Teacher: Gold Stars

Gold Stars One of my favorite things to do my third year of teaching was team teach. The Civics and Economic teacher and I would put our classes together regularly so we could create cross curricular stations and activities for the kids. The arrangement worked out great because, even though there were more kids in the room, the kids were less willing to act up with two authority figures in the room. One day the Civics teacher’s side of the room was going downhill and fast, while my side of the room was behaving like angels. Finally, he called out, “Whoever is being good will get a gold star!” (Amazingly 8th graders coveted these stars like none other). The room got completely silent and without missing a beat one of the students on my side of the room said, “You mean like Hitler did to the Jewish people?” I suppressed my laughter and thought to myself, “Yes, finally they are retaining true things about WWII!” Then I thought to myself, “Too bad I don’t teach history.”

Escape Room The Game

Search This Blog