My Wednesday

Before the opening bell, I shared a copy of a Smithsonian article with our vocal music teacher. The author used a literary clue in the text of "The Phantom of the Opera" to discover a cache of early phonographic recordings buried in the actual opera house. (Under her direction our chorus had performed a number of Phantom tunes in the recent past and had journeyed to NYC to see the play.)

While bird-dogging some early morning students missing from class, the principal updated me on my request to provide in-school access to the member-only blog we have created for the Environmental Science class.

Returned an Inter Library Loan book to a DCMO colleague by courier.

I spent an hour in the morning drafting a series of proposals for a school-wide sculpture contest to be held in the library during the long and often dreary month of March; this to build on the positive reception of a recent mural project in our school.

I took an article about the Buddhist shrine, Scwedagon, to our Global Studies teacher. He reciprocated by handing me an article about an entirely cocaine-based economy in rural Columbia that he was going to discuss with his class.

The two MP3 recorders that I ordered for the library arrived in the morning UPS. I quick tested out the voice recording function as we plan to begin creating podcasts. I can hardly wait.

Midmorning the student teacher for the Economics class came down to share his plans for a Small Business project. Yesterday I had shared an article with him about the Iowa Electronic Markets, an ongoing experiment to compare markets with polls as indicators for elections. I handed-off the cocaine-based economy article to him, also.

At noon, middle-school students in Health class came down to brainstorm with me about short video ads they are scripting about tobacco abuse. We story-boarded a few and I gave them a quick hands-on demo of iMovie to show how we might manipulate their footage.

After asking permission, I shared a first hand rejected-for-reading situation at a colleague’s library with our HS English teacher who is having each of his students read and evaluate a “banned” book.

Our softball coach stopped me in the hallway to tell me that she had distributed photocopies of the New York Times article I gave her yesterday about ACL injuries. As she is also the Driver Education instructor, I shared some statistics I had read the other day about the significant decline in sixteen-year old drivers; especially in light of diminished school-run DE programs.

Our representative from Scholastic Books called to confirm our receipt of the planning kit for our April K-12 Book Fair.

I also received confirmation from the Superintendent to attend the NYS Historical Association Meeting on May 1st as a member of that organization’s Teacher Advisory Committee.

End of the day, I met with the Economics student-teacher offering to host a “Trade Fair” for his small business student projects and/or to convene a forum of local business professionals for a Q&A session. We will pursue the latter.