Thirty Five to Go (More or Less)

One week down. It was a good week, probably the best start I have had in a while. Even though I could not get into my room when I wanted to so I could start setting up, and even though the construction at school still is not finished, I think we had a great start.

I am loving the paint color in my room. Thanks to Heather, Craig, Chris, and Jackson for helping me get it painted. Mitch (my boa) is happily settled in, and Gary was only too glad to help load the car with his stuff. Goliath (my little lizard) died towards the end of last year, so we are one pet down in my class. I still have a few things left to move in, like my plants and some window coverings. But overall, it looks great. Every once in a while it catches me by surprise how nice it looks. Behr Fresh Pine and Old Vine look quite nice if I say so myself!

I put dark brown burlap on the bulletin boards, and bought some new borders. Earthy stuff. The result is that the room has a very calming effect, in spite of the red cabinets. Add to that, the music I am using thanks to Quantum Learning over the summer, and we are off to a good start. Now if I could just get my music moved to my school computer so I don't have to bring my laptop every day. I burned a couple CD's with the music I chose to use in my classroom and it won't play or transfer. Hmmm. I burned it as an audio file. This weekend I will try a data file.

Gotta give a shout out to a former student teacher of mine, Jim, too for his contribution to the start of the year. Thanks for the awesome rec on software to rip DVD clips to use in PPT presentation for the classroom. I am having way to much fun with it and now need to begin to catalog all the clips I plan to use. Examples: Run Silent, Run Deep the scene when some bolts start to leak or pop because the sub has gone too deep. Red October, the scene where they are looking for the Russian sub and the audio guy reports that he hears singing???, many clips from Apollo 13, clips from Harry Potter with Hermione politely waving her hand in class and Seamus blowing himself up for class procedues and lab safety. The list goes on and on.

I also managed to stay yesterday afternoon and get all the spiral notebooks graded so I did not have to drag them home. They would have just visited here and would have never been productive if I had done that. So I am pleased that I got some grading done in a timely manner for a change. That is probably my biggest downfall. I put grading papers up there with folding laundry and cleaning the house. An evil necessity.

So, I sit here happily blogging away, while the wash machine sits idle. I guess I had better get it going. Maybe we can do something fun tomorrow!