Another day, another assembly.
This time it's a memorial. A major Pearson figure, Mr. Les Bubb, died at the end of last term. He'd been with the school for some 40 years before his 2016 retirement, so many of the students still remember him. We held a memorial ceremony in his honor, and several students and teachers spoke in his memory. It was very touching, even for those of us who never knew Mr. Bubb.
I spent the first class period conferencing with the longterm sub. We spent a little time going over our materials and making sure we were ready for the next few lessons, then I took a minute to down some instant coffee like my life depended on it. After: my first planned lesson in a while.
The grade 10 additional language class (students who don't natively speak English, that is) got divided between the two of us. She's teaching the novel and I'm teaching language, which is a pretty good tradeoff. The only downside is that the grade 10 course text is awful. Unadulterated, unabashed awful. There's no rhyme or reason to the progression of activities, and half of the material is under grade level. I'm sifting through it for relevant topics that I can work with, but I'm not using any of the book's material.
Today the students were working on the novel, so I didn't do much of anything, just looked through the course text for more material. It's sort of an uphill battle with this book in particular. After that I stuck around for a grade 11 class in the same room--Macbeth this time. The longterm sub has a really great control of the classroom, better than most teachers I've known here, and I'm glad I'm in the room with her.
At the end of the day, I went to another grade 9 class (the one that's catching up on the novel) and hung out with them for a while. School only meets for five classes on Wednesdays, so that was actually the end of the day. Very short!
When I got home I planned more. There's a few ongoing assessments I'm starting later in the week, so I didn't get a whole bunch of time to do exciting things. So this time, it's a fairly short recap!
See ya.
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