One week of first grade down . . . only several dozen more to go. So far, there's not much in the way of intellectual challenge: the sight words he is supposed to practice this week include I, can, we, like, see, the, go, to, have, a, play, white, orange, yellow, and green. This week's math review includes practicing counting objects to 10 (The Runner had him use strawberry frosted mini-wheats) and using words like more, fewer, less than, greater than. Needless to say, his major concern is not exactly the homework. It's more about how his friends are acting . . . he doesn't have any friends from last year in his current classroom.
We made a quick trip to Nashville over the weekend. I spent all day Saturday in the Brentwood Public Library, grading papers and figuring final grades for my summer session. The boys swam, went shopping, generally ran amok with their cousin DTE.
Speaking of grades, I had to give a "B" as the class grade to the student who'd been applying all that pressure. In his mind, he was going to be able to counteract the failing grade in Math with an "A" in his English class, and thereby stay in school for another semester. Today, after the posting of the grades, I got a series of panicked emails, the last of which said he just couldn't go on without understanding what he did wrong to fail out of college. I resisted the temptation to retort, "you want to know why you flunked out? It is because you FAILED the developmental/remedial math course THREE STRAIGHT TIMES!!"
I have meetings to attend all this week--was in meetings from 7:30 to 3:30 today. Classes start next Monday. At some point, I should probably get things like syllabuses together. I'm swamped.
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