Time

I can't believe how fast this year is going. It's already November, and we turn in our Masters porfolios on May 1st. 6 more months. Crazy.

Also on the subject of time, there is not enough time in the school day. Also, I feel like a lot of our time is poorly organized due to various assemblies, music lessons for some kids, MG (mentally gifted) for an hour and a half on wednesday mornings, Fleisher Art Memorial on Thursdays and Fridays for an hour and a half in the morning, in addition to an hour in the library, two prep periods of Art, one each of computer, PE, and music throughout the week.

The kids are always leaving class for one reason or another - when do we have time to teach them? We get half the review for the math test in and then a handful of them have to leave. I really appreciate all of the extracurricular and non-academic stuff that M School offers, it is a wonderful school in that way, but its frustrating when you're trying to do group work or teach something new and you keep losing your kids! I end up taking a group out in the hall to re-teach the stuff they've missed.

I had a great science lesson planned for yesterday afternoon about streams and water speed and erosion. I had the stream tables all set up and had rummaged through the FOSS land and water kit to get everything I needed. The kids had been building up to this with other investigations on the properties of soil components (gravel, sand, clay, potting soil), how those components react when they're in water, etc.

But, by the time we got back from the unannounced 2:00pm assembly, it was 2:45, and they start packing up at 2:05 to go home. 20 minutes is not enough time to do that big investigation, so they didn't even get science yesterday.