A Good Monday (and that's rather surprising)

I'm not a big fan of Mondays. I hate having my weekend end. It's so hard for me to get up, get the boy up, and pull it all together to get out of the house in a timely manner. But I do, week after week, because preparing for a sub is worse than facing any Monday! However, I rather enjoyed today.

It was November walk-about day--nice timing, princiPal--waiting to the last day of the month! (I guess it snuck up on her.) My princiPal, academic coach, fellow 4th grade teacher, and I visited 3 classrooms during our reading block. As much as I hate the game of trying to decide which quadrant each teacher was teaching in (if you don't understand "quadrant" then, please, go and kiss your princiPal tomorrow for not rushing headlong into the whole Rigor and Relevance rigamarole the way our district has)--long parenthetical pause there!--as I was saying, as much as I hate determining the quadrant, that's how much I love observing fellow teachers. I always learn something or find something that provokes admiration or horrorification. Today I admired the way one teacher was using a picture book to enhance student knowledge of hurricanes and tornadoes. She did a bang up job and landed in quadrant D! (Um, that's good, in fact, the best quadrant, for all that it sounds like an admirable bra cup size.) The other 2 teachers weren't quite up to a D level, but they weren't bad. Except one had a handmade division chart on the wall. She had labeled "divisor" and "dividend" incorrectly! (Shock! Gasp! Oooh!) Not good. And in a school where math practices are suddenly under intense scrutiny because of lousy scores, extremely NOT GOOD.

Okay, back to the day. I did a good job with the science lesson. Students were active and engaged and excited to learn about static electricity. Then my math lesson went even better. I wish I taught everything as well as I taught that lesson. I had energy (don't know from where!) and enthusiasm and perfect examples and they learned, finally, how to do a simple division problem. They finally saw the value of the Teacher-Approved Handy Dandy Division Device and used it! (You don't know about Teacher-Approved Handy Dandy Division Devices? Cut an index card to make two almost-squares. Give one almost-square to each student. Keep one for yourself and model using it. When beginning the division problem, cover up all of the dividend except the greatest digit with the T-A HDDD. Look at that first digit. Can you get a group of the divisor from that digit? How many groups of 3 can you get from 8? Using the T-A HDDD helps students keep their problem lined up and makes certain they put digit in the right place in the quotient. Try it--it works!)

Okay, that was my terrific day. Got to be nosy in others' classrooms-check! Got to teach a good science lesson-check! Got to teach a fantastic math lesson-check! Enjoyed myself and my students-check! Check! Check!

All days should be so good.