Friday, December 12, 2008

road trip!

You know what's really exciting? Gas has dropped to a dollar sixty-seven, which is cheaper than it was back in college when I took that California road trip with Rachel Canada. I've calculated that it will be less than a hundred bucks each this winter when Naomi and I drive to New Orleans and back*.


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*Stopping in Grand Canyon, Albequerque, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Miss, Baton Rouge, and Las Cruces. And somewhere in Texas because, unfortunately, you can't avoid it.

omigod, they love to read!

We feel like we are actually teaching something at this here new school! At first it was just the brainy, intellectual types that would walk around with novels during nutrition and talk about plots during lunch*. Then, around the third round of literature circles, we noticed more and more students toting their books around with them outside of Humanities class. Once a day, you'd hear a kid discussing the story with a classmate. More than a few would be reading in the cafe before school began instead of goofing off.

On Monday, instead of assigning new lit groups, we decided to let each student pick one of the books they hadn't been assigned but wanted to read. I was surprised by how enthusiastic they were about their choices. Most kids were really eager to get their hands on a certain book their friends had read or they'd seen presented in class once or twice. Students I never thought of as "readers" were like, "Omigod, I NEED to read Fever, I've been DYING to read it." Or, "Please, please, please, can I read Westing Game?" I told them we weren't going to assign Desperoux on account of the movie coming out and potential cheaters, but there were two girls literally BEGGING to read it and swearing up and down that they weren't going to see the movie. (I gave it to them.)

There are these four boys who come to school early every day and sit on the couch right by the cafe door and basically torture each other until one of them gets too loud or too physical and is sent to sit in the office. They seem to not know what to do with free time. Yesterday, I walked into the cafe and saw this:



*I have to admit that as silly as Twilight looks, you've never seen eleven year olds carry around seven hundred page tomes as eagerly.