Bring On Those May Flowers!

I love May flowers.  My allergies don't, but my emotional state does.  This past Saturday I had the chance to walk a pretty good chunk of MSU's campus, and the flowering trees are gorgeous!  Here's a picture of one:

How can a pink, flowering tree not bring you happiness?  The magnolia's were magnificent, as well, and the flowering crab trees are starting to bud.  What a glorious time of year!

This weekend was a much needed tension reliever.  While English 9 went well this week and stayed on track despite having substitutes and flipped hours, English 11 was pure chaos.  It was a difficult week at best, but for the most part, my students stepped up and worked with it as best they could. I asked them not to blow off the MStep tests and do the best they could, and for the most part, that's exactly what they did.  I was very proud of them!  So here's where we've been, and how we go forward:

• English 9 - they finished To Kill a Mockingbird and took the test.  Now we are working on an analytical essay.  We will finish the essay - in class - by Tuesday, and then they get to watch the movie.  I'm going to have them concentrate on comparing and contrasting the book and the movie so that they can look at the choices the two mediums force their creators to take.  By Friday we'll be ready to head to the next unit:  poetry!  There is no vocabulary quiz this week since most of it will be about finishing off what we've already done.
• English 11 - they took the ELA portion of the M-Step test last week.  This week they have Math, Science, and Social Studies.  While the actual tests are not done with me, students will be pulled from my class from Tuesday through Friday to take them, and I definitely want them to continue to put in their best effort, so we'll just roll with it.  This is the last week for in-class reading for the Human Rights books, so any down time we have with partial hours will be devoted to reading; they need to have the book read by one week from today.  They will also be focusing on the 8-Stages of Genocide packet we did in class about a week ago, and apply it to their books in a 5-paragraph essay since they should be almost finished reading.  Finally, whenever I can, I'll do mini-lessons on juxtaposition and irony, as well as throw in some thematic movie clips, so we'll make the best of it.

So that's what's up.  We keep soldiering on, and eventually normality will return...right?  Have a great week!  Ciao!


Bring On Those May Flowers! by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.