Each school has their own silly traditions that make life...interesting. Here's one that I wouldn't ming losing--on the first Friday of school, we have an opening assembly. Each department has to come up with a skit for the assembly. The first week of school is already stressful enough with having to come up with something. We have a 3-man department, and one of our department members splits schools and is only here every other day, which makes it even more difficult.
So...we did our best. We came up with a few ideas, and I spent an evening trying to figure out how to make the dang thing work. All for a one-minute skit. At least it's done, and I don't have to worry about it until next year!
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
1 down, 179 more to go
That first day back always wipes me out. I met my students today. All 223 of them. Actually, I've lost count because they keep on adding them to my classes.
Overall, things went pretty well. Here's my day, in summary:
good thing: My Sign II and III kids knew exactly what to do. They came in expecting to sign, and I didn't have to tell anyone to stop talking and sign.
bad thing: The bell rang 5 minutes early for first period. I don't mind having shorter classes, but I like to know about it first.
good thing: By the end of the day, I figured out that they were ringing ALL of the bells 5 minutes early, and had adjusted for it. Either that, or my clock is fast--which I doubt. Sometimes they have a hard time getting the bells timed correctly on weird days like today. I KNEW there was a reason we shouldn't have had an 8 period day.
good thing: All of my students came today.
bad thing: All of them showed up--even in the class that has 41 kids on the roster.
good thing: I didn't use my voice once during Sign I, but the students seemed (for the most part) to get what was going on.
good thing: I heard after school got out that I've scared some of my Sign I kids because I didn't use English. (I did have some pretty cool visuals though, and didn't leave them helpless.) Maybe my class with 41 students won't be a big on Wednesday...
good thing: A student in my Sign I class was able to communicate to me (in Sign!) that the "V" and "W" handshapes on my wall were in the wrong order. Sure enough, in my haste last week to get my room set up (after being threatened to be kicked out of the building in 20 minutes--I could rant on how lame it is to kick teachers out of a school building when you've cut three days from the preparation time before school starts, but I'll refrain), I had switched the letters "V" and "W" by mistake. Clever kid! Doesn't mean I've had time to climb up on a stool and fix it.
It's always interesting to see how students react to things on the first day. I've learned not to write off anyone as a flake, because I've been pleasantly surprised on a few occasions. However, the "Hermione Granger" students can be spotted on day one, and generally stay that way for the duration. Example: I'm frantically updating my school website with my disclosure statement after school, thinking that I will have enough time to get my website updated before the kids get home from school and try to access and print it. Hermione comes in my room about 5 minutes after the bell has rung to ask my why the 2007-2008 disclosure is still up, and not the current one. Bless her overachieving soul.
Overall, things went pretty well. Here's my day, in summary:
good thing: My Sign II and III kids knew exactly what to do. They came in expecting to sign, and I didn't have to tell anyone to stop talking and sign.
bad thing: The bell rang 5 minutes early for first period. I don't mind having shorter classes, but I like to know about it first.
good thing: By the end of the day, I figured out that they were ringing ALL of the bells 5 minutes early, and had adjusted for it. Either that, or my clock is fast--which I doubt. Sometimes they have a hard time getting the bells timed correctly on weird days like today. I KNEW there was a reason we shouldn't have had an 8 period day.
good thing: All of my students came today.
bad thing: All of them showed up--even in the class that has 41 kids on the roster.
good thing: I didn't use my voice once during Sign I, but the students seemed (for the most part) to get what was going on.
good thing: I heard after school got out that I've scared some of my Sign I kids because I didn't use English. (I did have some pretty cool visuals though, and didn't leave them helpless.) Maybe my class with 41 students won't be a big on Wednesday...
good thing: A student in my Sign I class was able to communicate to me (in Sign!) that the "V" and "W" handshapes on my wall were in the wrong order. Sure enough, in my haste last week to get my room set up (after being threatened to be kicked out of the building in 20 minutes--I could rant on how lame it is to kick teachers out of a school building when you've cut three days from the preparation time before school starts, but I'll refrain), I had switched the letters "V" and "W" by mistake. Clever kid! Doesn't mean I've had time to climb up on a stool and fix it.
It's always interesting to see how students react to things on the first day. I've learned not to write off anyone as a flake, because I've been pleasantly surprised on a few occasions. However, the "Hermione Granger" students can be spotted on day one, and generally stay that way for the duration. Example: I'm frantically updating my school website with my disclosure statement after school, thinking that I will have enough time to get my website updated before the kids get home from school and try to access and print it. Hermione comes in my room about 5 minutes after the bell has rung to ask my why the 2007-2008 disclosure is still up, and not the current one. Bless her overachieving soul.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Summer Projects
Owning a home is basically a life-time guarantee for having projects to work on for the rest of your life. And, if you ever get done with the projects at your house, don't worry--one of your kids will surely have a number of things they need done at their house. My dad falls into the second category, minus the no more projects left at his own place part. He's a pretty handy man, and we appreciate his knowledge and collection of power tools.
Here's what we decided to do when Dad came to visit. I don't have a proper "before" picture, but this is as close as you're going to get. Imagine the whole shower covered in the pink tiles, along with a sliding door that has about 20 years worth of crust in corners that never came completely clean. Notice the 1-inch tile on the floor, and the sad shape the grout is in. The whole thing needed to come out.
Ripping a shower out is a piece of cake when you have a roto-hammer at your disposal. (And a couple of people hauling buckets full of broken tile bits down two flights of stairs and out to the truck waiting in the garage.)
There goes the floor! Actually, it was a little more involved than it looks. There was some chicken wire mesh in places that made it kind of hard to yank everything out. When we filled up the truck with all of the remains and took it to the dump, the truck weighed in with an extra 1,020 pounds. (Side note: Did you know that if you go to the Weber County Transfer station on a Tuesday, you might want to pack a lunch to tide you over while you wait for the train? Good grief!! The train tracks run right in front of the transfer station. We sat there and waited a good 30 minutes for the train to slowly go forward, stop, back up, go forward, stop, back up, etc. We had the truck unloaded in less time than we sat there pondering the meaning of life watching the train go back and forth.)
Once the shower was all gone, there was the question of what to do with the drain. The pipe in the floor and the hole in the base we bought were in two different places. No problem! All you have to do is cut out the floor, make a few new holes in the floor joists to make room for the new pipes, and fit the thing up so it fits.
Here's the base, fitted into place. I was at Lowes when it was going in, so I missed all of the excitement there.
Up go the walls, the dura-crete and bam! Shower. (The "bam" part took the good portion of a day and then some.)
Here's Mom cutting tile on the nifty tile-cutter Dad has. This is an industrial-grade hunk of equipment, and made life much easier.
After all tile tile went up (but before the residue from the grout got wiped off), we had our shower. So nice!
And, as if one bathroom wasn't enough, Dad was gracious enough to help us tackle bathroom #2. I don't have as many pictures of this part, because quite frankly, I was too tired to pick up the camera. This bathroom had a tub but no shower. (Deep question of the day: Why would you go to the trouble of building a house and putting in a tub, without adding the extra 5 feet of copper pipe to make it a shower as well?) Problem solved now. After we put in the plumbing for the shower, we tiled it all the way to the ceiling, like the other bathroom.
I don't have any pictures yet of the finished, polished product because the bathrooms aren't finished, polished and sparkly clean yet. Give me another week on that one. I also have to make a disclaimer here. You don't see any pictures of me in these shots, because I was the one behind the camera. I did work though, and wasn't just sitting off on the porch eating bon-bons during the process. It's actually probably a good thing that I'm not in any of the pictures, because I was a sight to behold!
Many thanks to Dad and Mom for spending their week with us. I think it actually should count as two weeks, because there were an awful lot of late nights. Lowes would like to thank us for spending lots of money on multiple occasions that week.
Here's what we decided to do when Dad came to visit. I don't have a proper "before" picture, but this is as close as you're going to get. Imagine the whole shower covered in the pink tiles, along with a sliding door that has about 20 years worth of crust in corners that never came completely clean. Notice the 1-inch tile on the floor, and the sad shape the grout is in. The whole thing needed to come out.
Ripping a shower out is a piece of cake when you have a roto-hammer at your disposal. (And a couple of people hauling buckets full of broken tile bits down two flights of stairs and out to the truck waiting in the garage.)
There goes the floor! Actually, it was a little more involved than it looks. There was some chicken wire mesh in places that made it kind of hard to yank everything out. When we filled up the truck with all of the remains and took it to the dump, the truck weighed in with an extra 1,020 pounds. (Side note: Did you know that if you go to the Weber County Transfer station on a Tuesday, you might want to pack a lunch to tide you over while you wait for the train? Good grief!! The train tracks run right in front of the transfer station. We sat there and waited a good 30 minutes for the train to slowly go forward, stop, back up, go forward, stop, back up, etc. We had the truck unloaded in less time than we sat there pondering the meaning of life watching the train go back and forth.)
Once the shower was all gone, there was the question of what to do with the drain. The pipe in the floor and the hole in the base we bought were in two different places. No problem! All you have to do is cut out the floor, make a few new holes in the floor joists to make room for the new pipes, and fit the thing up so it fits.
Here's the base, fitted into place. I was at Lowes when it was going in, so I missed all of the excitement there.
Up go the walls, the dura-crete and bam! Shower. (The "bam" part took the good portion of a day and then some.)
Here's Mom cutting tile on the nifty tile-cutter Dad has. This is an industrial-grade hunk of equipment, and made life much easier.
After all tile tile went up (but before the residue from the grout got wiped off), we had our shower. So nice!
And, as if one bathroom wasn't enough, Dad was gracious enough to help us tackle bathroom #2. I don't have as many pictures of this part, because quite frankly, I was too tired to pick up the camera. This bathroom had a tub but no shower. (Deep question of the day: Why would you go to the trouble of building a house and putting in a tub, without adding the extra 5 feet of copper pipe to make it a shower as well?) Problem solved now. After we put in the plumbing for the shower, we tiled it all the way to the ceiling, like the other bathroom.I don't have any pictures yet of the finished, polished product because the bathrooms aren't finished, polished and sparkly clean yet. Give me another week on that one. I also have to make a disclaimer here. You don't see any pictures of me in these shots, because I was the one behind the camera. I did work though, and wasn't just sitting off on the porch eating bon-bons during the process. It's actually probably a good thing that I'm not in any of the pictures, because I was a sight to behold!
Many thanks to Dad and Mom for spending their week with us. I think it actually should count as two weeks, because there were an awful lot of late nights. Lowes would like to thank us for spending lots of money on multiple occasions that week.
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