{"id":7,"date":"2006-02-17T02:04:27","date_gmt":"2006-02-17T10:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/teaching\/?p=7"},"modified":"2009-10-11T14:40:31","modified_gmt":"2009-10-11T22:40:31","slug":"beginning-winter-break","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/2006\/02\/beginning-winter-break\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginning Winter Break"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before vacation, do you ever take a look at what you expect your students to do and compare that to what you expect yourself to do? Do you ever do that after<\/em> the break? I suspect that most of us would find the expectations severly out of balance. Rarely do I finish everything I plan to during vacations. Of course, rarely do I assign homework during vacations.<\/p>\n

I thought it fitting to summarize my plans at the beginning of this week-long break I’m staring down the barrel of. As a bookend, I plan to revisit this on the night of Sunday, February 26 and see exactly what progress I made on all these striking ideas. What irony it would be if I couldn’t even reach that goal.<\/p>\n

During the current Winter Break, extending from February 18 to 26, I will:<\/h4>\n
    \n
  1. grade all 3 class sets of essays collected back in January;<\/li>\n
  2. begin to grade the interviews turned in by my seniors on 2\/10 and the loneliness\/setting papers handed over by my juniors on 2\/7 – this is to say that these writings will both be halfway read through;<\/li>\n
  3. read all blog entries from my students, leaving a comment with the appropriate scores mentioned, and work to evaluate the responses, ideally ending in a blog rubric that my students can use to guide their writing (I’m still not sure if I want to set such a restriction on the way they blog, favoring function over form in this case);<\/li>\n
  4. begin re-reading Siddhartha<\/em> and The Great Gatsby<\/em>, along with assorted other nonfiction pieces, in preparation for the return from break;<\/li>\n
  5. update the online grades so students know where their grade stands, in anticipation of the close of the fourth grade period on March 3;<\/li>\n
  6. make sure my student teacher knows what the expectations are for evaluating the schoolwide writing prompts, a set of essays based on an SAT-style writing prompt;<\/li>\n
  7. create a plan for editing the 2 collected pieces from all my English classes, thereby encouraging more attention to detail in future written pieces and possibly engaging in small grammar lessons;<\/li>\n
  8. record at least 2 complete songs;<\/li>\n
  9. write at least the first 3 paragraphs of a short story;<\/li>\n
  10. experiment with moving this blog to WordPress by attempting to create a template of this design<\/li>\n
  11. continue on with developing the “other” project (hey, I know what I mean);<\/li>\n
  12. run or play racquetball every other day;<\/li>\n
  13. write about my accomplishments on Sunday, February 26;<\/li>\n
  14. cure cancer.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That sounds like an awful lot, but now I have a list to remind me. If I can just do that last one, I’ll be really, really happy. As the kids left today, I told them all not to work on school work until Sunday night. I don’t think I can afford to wait that long, but I’ll also try to have a break somewhere inside this Winter Break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Before vacation, do you ever take a look at what you expect your students to do and compare that to what you expect yourself to do? Do you ever do that after the break? I suspect that most of us would find the expectations severly out of balance. Rarely do I finish everything I plan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1281,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/1281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}