I'd Rather Be Planting!

I enjoyed gardening so much last summer that I got an early start this year. In February, I bought supplies to start seeds so that I could plant seedlings as soon as the last frost passed. Some of my seedlings were doing well, so I put them outside for hours at a time to toughen them up before planting them.  They didn't like outside so much, and all wilted. I think I tried exposing them too soon. So I started more seeds, and I finally have some tomato plants that got big enough to be transplanted to bigger pots. I've put them outside one time, and most of them are still OK. I'll keep trying it occasionally until they get bigger and I'm sure they'll be OK in the ground. I'll start a little earlier next year and be more patient. I want produce early next year.

Spinach, carrots and green peas in late April

Spinach, carrots, peas and lettuce yesterday

I made peas in the garden!

I started planting in my front yard garden in March and have already enjoyed arugula, lettuce, spinach, peas, and cilantro. I made some salsa with the cilantro. I'm so excited about growing things in my yard that I plan to dig up a plot on the other side of our front porch. Matt is in favor of having less lawn to mow.

I've also started planting in the community garden out at the farm. Corn, green beans, and purple hull peas are already making good progress. And we've got several other things planted out there and room for a little more.

And I've got a bit of container gardening going. I've got about 15 little pots of herbs started. And some of the tomatoes I've got started as seedlings will go in one of those upside-down hanging tomato planters. I'm looking forward to fresh produce this summer. But I love planting things just to watch them grow.

Spring Semester Complete!

I just turned in grades for my class, so I am officially done for the semester.  I tried some new things and some of them worked.  I still wasn't satisfied with their overall progress, and despite my generous grading, only a third passed again this semester.  I asked my students what worked and didn't work this semester. Overwhelmingly, they thought I should have given more homework. So since only a third are going to pass whether I'm hard or easy on them and since students have told me they want more homework, I'm going to push my students harder in the future.  At least the third who pass will be well prepared.

And now that the semester is over, I have a bad cold.  This time Matt gave me the cold instead of the other way around. He had an allergy cough for a few weeks that turned into a cold cough a few days ago.  I wish he had kept it to himself.  It went from throat tickle to full blown chest congestion in less than 36 hours. I'm feeling a little better today than I felt yesterday, but better is still really bad.

I've started some gardening and will have pictures soon.  Matt will teach summer school in June.  I've got all sorts of ideas for teaching in the fall and a whole summer to make plans.

A New Semester, A Fresh Start

By the end of the first month of the fall semester, I knew things were not going as well as I wanted them to, and they never improved significantly.  So I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of research to make the spring semester better.

First, I went in to the room with incredibly low expectations. I'm naturally a pessimist, so I'm not sure why I got my hopes up last semester. I used to feel pressure to be an optimist--though it's hard to change your inclinations--until someone pointed out that being a pessimist means you are more often pleasantly surprised when things go well. I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised this semester.  

Second, I'm starting small and easy and working my way to more complexity. Instead of starting with finding subjects and verbs as I did last semester, we started with separating subjects and predicates. They did reasonably well with that in class. I'm hoping that knowing which half of the sentence the simple, single word subject is will help them find it. It felt like small metaphorical stabs at my heart every time someone chose the next-to-last word of the sentence as the subject, double stabs if the word was "the." We may not cover everything I want to cover as thoroughly as I want to cover it this semester, but they will write complete sentences with subjects and verbs that agree.

Third, I'm structuring things to give less choice in classroom procedures and more choice in their writing. I put them in assigned seating. One person complained that it felt like kindergarten, and I later heard from another teacher that they thought I didn't like them because of the seating chart.  Oh well. When a short young woman walks into a classroom of 12 men (I've got only one female student), I'm in support of demonstrations of power to establish who is in charge. So the seating chart was my "big stick" that will allow me to "walk softly" in the future. In addition to being a power play and messing with my students' heads (of which I'm in favor as I previously mentioned), the seating chart will help me take attendance more quickly and will also keep them from choosing to sit by friends who may tempt them to talk. However, I want to stress that writing is about choices. You choose what to say, what not to say, how to say it with sentence rhythms and word choices. So I'm they're doing a portfolio for the first half of the semester. I and their classmates are giving them feedback on the daily writing they're doing. They will pick three papers to talk to me about when we meet for conferences, and they will turn those three in for me to grade over spring break. In addition, I'm scaling back my grammar grading for the first half of the semester so that they will focus on what they're saying more than commas. I'll set a couple of basic things that I'll always grade for, writing in complete sentences, for example. Then they will tell me what other grammar concern they focused on when editing each paper, and I will grade only for that additional thing. We'll see how it goes.