My blogs have been a bit down as of late. I’ll need to work on that this summer, because the title pretty much gives this away.

We’ll work backwards from today to last Fridayish with the disappointments:

  1. This one is professional. Our last project was writing position paper, and it’s an end of the year project that just hasn’t worked the way I wanted. Not enough time, no examples because I didn’t teach this last year, and a general grumbling from my students have made this hard. It’s come to a head today as students are reading some of their papers. The problem isn’t that the papers aren’t good. I’m surprised how much passion are in them and how they worked to find facts to back up their claims. The problem is our classroom is a slice of what our country is. We can’t just disagree, we have to bring the other person down, asking questions that are snippy or giving answers that are curt and borderline rude. We’ve stopped class a couple of times to redirect students, and for one class, I’m not sure if they’ll continue to read papers or not. Civil discourse is not that civil in our country, when corrected, my students are almost offended that they can’t continue to interrupt and be rude, just like they see on T.V.
  2. My daughter came home this weekend, and spent very little time with us. Now, as a parent, I want her to be independent, but yet, I want to her to know that it offends me when she tells us one thing, then texts, telling us she’s doing something else. She’s going to be a part from her boyfriend for a while with the coop, then he’s going somewhere and their time together will be slim. Yet, hold to your word and be respectful of your parents.
  3. Just the general rudeness that goes on in our hallway. We’ve tried and tried to instill a “you don’t have to be friends, but you need to be respectful” kind of attitude, but between the position papers, kids wanting their late work off our grading list RIGHT NOW even though it’s two weeks late being turned in, the reflection blogs I had kids write, it’s all a big drag.

So, we’ll just keep on keeping on, slap on a happy face, and just keep swimming the last three and a half days.

What else is there?