Food for thought

Throughout this week of highs and lows, a number of rhetorical questions have come to mind.

1. How do I motivate a group of students who start counting the days until they are finished with school when they are in the seventh grade?

2. Why am I using a daily activity that I can't teach wholely in my classroom? My kids struggle with six trait writing because they aren't taught to write a paragraph or organize their thoughts. Can I just drop it if it's more of an actual burden than a useful tool?

3. Do kids ever get the point that their interruption takes their own time away?? 

4. How do I change attitudes without changing culture?

5. Does individual attention count if I ask the child to sit down ten times a day? (That's, like, 5 minutes of asking=5 minutes of attention!)

6.  No, a simple word but hard to understand....

This week has been a long week leading up to the end of the first quarter. Yep, as of today, I have made it through one fourth of the school year. It's official. You can't get rid of me now.  Though I am feeling a little pessimistic about the upcoming days with the changes I am making in my classroom, I am hoping to change the attitudes in my classroom that are negative towards the importance of what they are learning.  I recently thought about my philosophy of teaching and if I could apply it to these kids. It is interesting to think, that while my philosophy of teaching was written with the English/public school in mind, much of it is applicable to the culture I am immersed in.  My goal is to teach every student to be a problem solver and know how to  be productive in the society they live in.  The culture and it's contradictory ideologies that I teach in is no different than any other culture.  In order contribute to the colony, one has to know basic operational skills, social skills and communication skills, written and oral.  The complexity of joining the outside world of computers to run the chicken and the hog barns with the simplicity of traditions, unchanged since the 1500's puts an interesting perspective of what is and is not accepted. 
Speaking of techology, how is it that two of my students can give me play by play details of the world series from the previous night when they haven't read the newspaper yet?  I admit that I have been watching as much as I can just so that I can keep up with their plethora of knowledge about the previous night's game.   Rhetoric seems to be the theme tonight. Now for something non rhetoric. I am off to get in my jammies and do absolutely nothing except something that doesn't require a lot of brain thought such as watching a lifetime movie and facebooking? (Am I allowed to use facebooking as a verb??) Wierd teacher thought.....