The book hasn’t been released yet, so if you’re looking to purchase a copy you can pre-order it through Amazon. However, the publisher has made the book freely available for preview so that it can be discussed at a handful of ed blogs (thanks to Bill at The Tempered Radical for that bit of info). Check out the publisher’s site for other blogs on the tour, or go directly to the book (the pdf file is hosted on Stenhouse’s servers).

I’ve read the first couple chapters, and so far I’m pretty interested and excited. Gallagher’s diagnosis of the problems in our schools (especially in my context of urban schooling) is spot on. The focus on high stakes tests is killing student curiosity.

Gallagher focuses specifically on reading and English instruction, but I think the argument could be extrapolated to all of the core subject areas – if for no other reason than a student’s lack of interest in reading is a severe handicap for any meaningful instruction in Social Studies. I can teach kids basic information through videos, songs, and interactive activities, but if they’re going to move beyond simple comprehension to any type of analysis or evaluation they need to read. There’s simply no way around it.

I haven’t been as impressed yet with the suggestions for action. I haven’t finished the entire book yet, so I’m not ready to pass judgement, but none of what I’ve read so far as struck me as “the right one.”

One reason being that I fear my administration is so short-sighted and fixed on HSPA scores that they’d be unwilling to experiment with more productive ideas. Even if the suggestions yielded better readers and more knowledge-able students down the road, if they don’t immediately raise HSPA scores they’ll be thrown out the window.

That, of course, gets back to the main idea of the book. Hmm…

Anyhow, I’d highly suggest you read through the book. There are some highly quote-able portions, and if nothing else it’s a soothing reminder that other people are going through the same problems.

Afterwards, you can partake in the discussion of Readicide at one of the blogs listed on Steinhouse’s site. For the next few days, the Tempered Radical is hosting a conversation about the book, and I plan on heading over there to check it out. You should too.

You know how finicky these filters can be. I was a tad frustrated earlier in the year when I noticed that CNN was blocked – streaming video is no good. For a while I was able to access Q1043 and stream the radio station, but that’s now been blocked.

Oddly enough, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are both available – but the actual flash movies in the pages are prevented from loading. /sigh.

All in the name of safety, though, right?

Today I came upon a new frustration. I was grading some papers in the library, and I read a take home test that a student had typed up. I noticed some weird formatting – a tell tale sign that something has been copied and pasted – so I went over to the computers to check it out.

When I typed in a phrase from the paper, the phrase appeared on a page from Example Essays. I tried to click through to see how much was plagiarized and bam! Blocked page.

I can see the point in blocking this type of page from students. But, as usual, I’m a bit curious as to the effectiveness.

In this case, the student could easily have accessed this page at home and plagiarized the information. While I, the teacher, am trying to grade papers at school during my prep, I am prevented from accessing the information necessary to know whether the student is cheating or not.

This wouldn’t be half as frustrating if teachers had override accounts so that they could bypass the filter altogether. Who are we trying to cage in, anyway? The students or the staff?

I’m not a huge fan of textbooks. Sure, it makes my life easier when I want to assign students something to read for homework – but I’m pretty convinced that they don’t contribute very much to student learning.

If I didn’t have a textbook to work with, I’d push a little harder to develop more of my own resources. I’m sure I’d do just fine and that my students might actually learn what I want them to learn – instead of skimming through the textbook and reading without comprehending much at all.

Nonetheless, we use textbooks. Our textbook – The Americans, by McDougal Litell – came with a resource pack. Included in this was a CD, titled “Easy Planner,” which contained an electronic copy of the resources included in the resource pack.

I moved in October, and I still haven’t quite unpacked everything. Those source books are still hidden away somewhere – because I never use them. I have, however, used the CD in the past, because there are a few resources that I like (primary documents, literature sources, etc).

Tomorrow, I planned on reading an excerpt from Burr, by Gore Vidal. The excerpt, which features Aaron Burr describing through a flashback his infamous duel with Alexander Hamilton, is in the resource book. I whipped out the electronic version (which I admittedly still had to dig through some unpacked boxes for) and navigated to where I thought the excerpt would be.

What did I encounter? A wonderful message from McDougal Litell:

McDougal Litell was unable to obtain permission to display this document electronically. Please refer to your printed resource book.

Arg!!!

You mean I dug through boxes to find a CD that, ultimately, was useless to me? Thankfully I was able to locate the printed book after I dug through several other boxes. Otherwise I’d be looking through my complete copy of Burr and typing up the excerpt myself.

/sigh. Why bother with the electronic resources if it’s not going to be complete? Or is it just my luck that I picked the only resource in the package that wasn’t available electronically?

On a side note, the book is awesome. I wish I had time to get my students to read the whole thing. Burr, like all of Gore Vidal’s novels, does a great job of bringing historical characters and periods to life. Burr in particular gave me a new appreciation for some of the early characters in American history that previously seemed lifeless and empty.

The professor grew up in Poland while it was under Soviet influence. Since the subject matter was so relevant to his personal experience, anecdotes were inevitable. These stories always had a bit of an absurdly humorous bent to them.

The most memorable of these stories came in the form of a joke that he claimed was popular back in Poland. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of that claim, but it is a perfect illustration of the concept he was trying to explain: democratic centralism.

This was the practice adopted by Lenin in organizing Communist elements in Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Since the party was illegal (the Tsar didn’t like revolutionaries, I suppose), a process was needed to make decisions and take action without comrpomising security.

Democratic centralism calls for the party to be divided into a bunch of local cells. These groups get together regularly to democratically debate issues and to elect representatives to move up in the party hierarchy. They’re also more or less isolated from the other cells. As the local cells come to their conclusions, their opinions are passed up the hierarchy to the top.

Once the debate reaches the top, the party leader(s) come to a decision. That decision is passed back down to the local cells, and everyone is obliged to follow the party line. Infighting is dangerous when the Tsar’s police forces are trying to have you found and executed.

The name comes from the notion that the practice is essentially democratic – since people are voicing their opinions and passing them up the chain of command. However, it is ultimately centralist and autocratic, since the party leader(s) make the ultimate decision for all participants.

In explaining this concept, my professor told us a joke. Fair warning, it’s a tad crude.

Democratic centralism is like two guys standing at the bottom of a ladder. First, they argue and debate about something – that’s the democracy. Then one guy climbs the ladder and pisses on the other. That’s the centralism.

Sounds like a splendid practice, doesn’t it?

Democratic Centralism in Education

I’ve discussed this with colleagues before, but the topic flared up yesterday in my Small Learning Community Common Planning Period. The one other member of my cluster hadn’t shown up for the meeting, so I was left alone chatting with the women who orchestrates and coordinates these small learning communities.

She often asks for our input about various problems in the school – like low test scores. How can we improve them? What should we be doing?

As she explains it, our ideas are passed up the chain of command to her boss – one of the vice principals. Our common planning periods are supposed to be the fertile breeding ground for ideas, even though we often feel like they aren’t heard. Her advice was to keep saying them until someone (i.e. the higher ups) decided to listen.

In the course of this conversation, something she said struck me as odd. “I keep hearing the same ideas from a lot of people.”

If we’re all voicing the same ideas, why are they being ignored? She suggested that we just needed to keep saying the same thing until someone decided to listen. When is that going to happen?

At this point, I jumped tracks to the democratic centralism analogy. It seemed fitting for two reasons.

First, we were being asked for our input. In theory, these small learning communities were supposed to generate ideas from teachers that could be implemented to improve the school. We were being given a democratic voice and a stake in the school’s success.

Great in theory, except for the centralism part. It’s clear to everyone – and her comments make it even more clear – that our advice and suggestions aren’t taken seriously. If the administration wants to do something, they’ll do it. A chorus of voices apparently isn’t going to change that – especially a disjointed chorus that is filtered through multiple channels before it gets to the decision makers.

Second, we’re extremely disjointed and isolated. The faculty as a whole is pretty segregated into cliques, but the small learning communities are even more isolated. We meet in a sparsely furnished room, one group at a time (up to four people in a group) throughout the day. We never have a meeting of multiple clusters, there’s no formal way for us to communicate with each other, and there’s really been no attempt to bring any of the clusters into collaboration on the topics the administration wants us to solve.

Like the underground party cells in Tsarist Russia, we’re isolated and we’re dictacted to by the higher command. Unlike the underground party cells in Tsarist Russia, we don’t need to be.

Insert Foot in Mouth

Somewhere around this point, I suggested that there was a better way to organize things. Instead of passing ideas up the chain of command – in the form of disjointed discussions and endless paperwork – there could be a public discussion between all of the clusters on a digital venue.

The advantages to this?

It engages more people in the discussion. My cluster has two members. We agree on a lot of things. More conversants leads to more disagreement – which can ultimately lead to more progress.

It makes the discussion public. At the moment, I only know about the other clusters through the chain of command. Am I being told everything? Are things subconciously being censored out or forgotten? How many people are really echoing the same ideas as us? Are there only a few of us, or is the entire faculty asking for the same thing?

I’d be far more engaged in the discussion if I knew that it was going to be publicly recorded – instead of possibly swept under a rug somewhere. This idea is empowering to teachers, as it makes it harder for the administration to simply ignore the suggestions that they don’t like. It breaks down the centralist barriers of the old system and at least paves the way for democratization.

As the conversation wound to an end, and the cluster coordinator seemed very doubtful of the possibility of such a public discussion, I stuck my foot in my mouth and volunteered to start the ball rolling. Oops.

Now I’ve got the unenvious position of trying to figure out how to do that. Hmm…

On a side note, my favorite part of the sparsely furnished room is that there is one computer. It’s an old Mac that has no power cable, no keyboard, no mouse, and no ethernet cable. It’s a nice paperweight, and at the moment it is 100% useless.

One last aside. For the time being, my official recommendation for improving student performance: Provide my classroom with enough operable desks. That would be nice.

Lesson plans done? Check.

Coffee’s ready? Check.

Cell phone alarm turned on for 5:55 AM? Check.

Looks like I’m ready to head back to school. I’m looking forward to getting back in the building and working – but vacation sure was nice. It really makes me yearn for those relaxed college days, when you could actually sleep in until the sun came up.

Winter Vacation Reading

In other news, I just finished reading The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz. The book tells the story of one of the turning points in the Iraq War – the rise of the insurgency in Sadr City. Specifically, Raddatz tells the tale of a platoon that gets cut off and pinned down in Sadr City and the messy rescue mission conducted by the rest of the division.

It’s a great book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I plan on using some excerpts from it in class to help students visualize and examine what war is like – there are some great descriptive scenes.

When I purchased the book, I’d read some other reviewers that compared it to Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and in this respect I was disappointed. Herr’s narrative of his adventure in Vietnam as a journalist is excellent. I think what disappointed me about The Long Road Home is that Raddatz wasn’t there – she learned of the story after the fact and reconstructed it from interviews and research. There’s something more compelling (although less accessible to high school students, I think) about Herr’s personal experiences in Dispatches.

Those are just some initial thoughts. It was a great book, even if it didn’t live up to some expectations. Later in the week, I plan on writing a more thorough review, highlighting some of the more cogent parts of the book – descriptive passages, the politics of war, the impact of 21st century technology on war, and some other points.

Quoting myself:

On a side note, I’m now curious how many strands there are in the NJCCCS for Social Studies. I think I’ll count that up over the weekend, and then laugh at the idea that we can accomplish that with 3 years of Social Studies courses. My bet is that you’ve got at most 2 to 3 days per strand, spread out over the three years.

I didn’t get to it that weekend, but I did get to it this morning. It turns out my guess was pretty accurate. Here’s a count of the number of CPI’s (Cumulative Progress Indicators) that are in the NJCCCS for Social Studies (including the enumerated lists of topics within certain CPI’s):

• Civics: 39 enumerated topics
• World History: 82 enumerated topics
• US and NJ History: 83 enumerated topics
• Economics: 19 enumerated topics
• Geography: 23 enumerated topics
• Total: 246 enumerated topics

In New Jersey, students are required to take three years of social studies courses – a total of approximately 540 school days (assuming all 180 school days in the year are productive, which is a logistical impossibility).

Given 246 enumerated topics and a maximum of 540 school days, you’ve got a maximum of 2.19 school days to “cover” each enumerated topic.

Well, that sounds easy.

Introducing the NJCCCS

Let’s take a step back for a moment and consider what the NJCCCS are intended to be. Conceivably, these could be guidelines – suggestions for what could be considered “on topic” in a Social Studies classroom. In that case, you would feel free to pick and choose what to cover, what to focus on in depth, and what to ignore.

Here’s a selection of quotes from the pdf version of the NJCCCS (emphasis mine):

Educators and practitioners developed the standards to focus on the essential knowledge and skills that all students need to function effectively in American society. (F-1)

The CPIs include the essential core of social studies. Topics that are listed following the word “including” must be addressed in the local curriculum and taught. (F-2)

Pursuant to the statute, other historical events that represent the principles and ideals of United States citizens must be included. (F-2)

I’d say that clears up any confusion. The NJCCCS is intended to be the bare minimum of what students need. We can’t pick and choose – if anything, we need to include more.

Huh. The next time I run out of content to teach, I’ll keep that in mind.

Sending Mixed Signals

When I look at a list this long, I’m led to the inevitable conclusion: the state wants students to focus on content over concepts, retention over critical thinking. The demanded breadth of the curriculum invalidates any attempt at depth.

It seems strange, then, that the authors of the standards seem to be suggesting the opposite.

One of the objectives of social studies education, guided by these standards, is to, “Develop critical thinking skills which enable them to function as lifelong learners and to examine and evaluate issues of importance to all Americans” (NJCCCS, F-1). Critique and evaluation are time consuming activities – and it takes even longer to teach and encourage students to do these things.

“In order to assist students to reach this vision, school district programs must: [...] Promote the teaching of critical thinking but also include appropriate content knowledge; [...] Connect curriculum and instruction to assessment through the use of both traditional objective tests and performance assessments” (NJCCCS, F-1).

Looking at the amount of content mandated, I’d say that the reverse is necessary. The focus must be on content, and critical thinking needs to be an after-thought.

Furthermore, with 2.2 days to teach each topic, where is there time for performance assessments? In fact, where is there time for any kind of assessment?

The authors of the standards seem to be suggesting that social studies education should be focused on skill development and problem solving, and should be an introduction to the social studies rather than a complete survey of it. Yet the standards that they introduce make this impossible.

I think someone needs a lesson in backwards planning…

A Final Thought

With these preliminary findings on paper, I think I’ll let it sit for a bit. I need some time to reflect on these standards and their (un)usefulness before I continue this line if thinking.

Before I finish, though, there’s one last quote that I feel the need to deal with:

In addition, every board of education shall include instruction on the Holocaust and genocide in an appropriate place in the curriculum for all elementary and secondary students (N.J.S.A. 18A:35-28). (F-2)

Granted this is a matter of NJ state law – not simply the recommendations of the NJCCCS. Still, I find it strange that the Holocaust should be the only genocide mentioned by name. This gives the implication that the Holocaust is more important and should be taught first and foremost above other genocides.

That begs the question: are other genocides more relevant to today’s students, so much so that they should take the front seat – or at least a shotgun seat next to the Holocaust?

Consider the 1994 Rwandan genocide. I vaguely remember images from Rwanda on the news as a child. My students were just being born as the conflict raged through central Africa. Just two weeks ago, the UN court convicted an officer of crimes against humanity and the conflict threatens to flare up again in the neighboring country Congo.

Or what about the Darfur conflict? News from the region has calmed to a simmer, but it was not long ago that the murder of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions made front page news. Among other great resources is the book They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky, the memoir of three Lost Boys who escaped Sudan and came to the United States. I think it’s a story that our black boys would find far more relevant than the Diary of Anne Frank.

I don’t mean to belittle the Holocaust or the teaching of it. I only mean to suggest that if we are to address the topic of genocide in general, it might be wise to look at those that took place in our students’ lifetime and continue to occur today.

When I first started fiddling with the ‘net, I tinkered with some websites on Geocities. Before there were hundreds of free web hosts, there was Geocities. It was slow, it didn’t offer you a lot of space, and it didn’t offer you a lot of functionality.

But it was free, no?

Yet what annoyed me the most was the advertising that Geocities implanted in any site that I built. It seemed wrong – like they had violated me and my creative process. I wanted to convey content to people, not be a platform for advertising.

But, how else was Geocities going to be free?

Is Advertising Appropriate on Education Sites?

What once was a pet peeve is now more of a professional dilemma. As an educator, am I being responsible if I allow advertisements to be displayed on my classroom websites – therefore exposing students to advertising?

Our students are subjected to a media blitz 24-7. Everywhere they turn, they see advertising and commercialization. With their brand name clothes, they’re practically walking billboards themselves.

It seems to me that in creating a safe, healthy learning environment for my students, I should also try to exclude as many commercial factors as possible. I would think it counterproductive to introduce classroom tools that contained advertising in them – and I would use ad-free alternatives if possible.

A number of educators were surprised when a free host – edublogs – started embedding advertising in their blogs. I first read about it at dy/dan, and a commenter pointed me to a post by Graham Wegner about the monetization of edublogs. There were others, and many of them seemed angry.

Edublogs chose a particularly insidious way to advertise. They chose random keywords throughout a post and attached a link to an advertiser. This helped blend the advertising into the post, giving the suggestion (especially to the unsavvy of the internet) that these links were added and endorsed by the author.

If I were an edublogs user, I’d be outraged too. I use my classroom blog to disemminate information to students – assignments and supplementary resources. I don’t include any ads, and I would think it inappropriate of me to do so. Even if a third party adds the advertising to my site, I would still feel responsible – and I’d probably start looking for another host.

At the moment, I don’t think I need to worry. I use wordpress.com for my classroom blogs, and I’ve never noticed any advertising. WordPress did announce a long time ago that they were experimenting with embedding ads into blogs, but I could never find an example (despite logging out of my account and navigating to the site through Google).

If you’re stuck with edublogs, I’d suggest you search for another free host. WordPress is one fine example. Blogger is also ok. It has the option of more functionality, but it’s not as nice in my opinion. You could also try pbwiki – it’s not a blog platform, but it could still be useful for students creating portfolios.

Are Ads Always Bad?

I would never think about including advertising on my official classroom site, but are ads always a bad thing?

For better or worse, a lot of media in the world operates on advertising. Newspapers and magazines make most (all?) of their profits from ads. TV and radio companies make money through commercials. Even movie producers are getting into the business of advertising, selling product placements spots in movies.

While some bloggers don’t like the idea of ads interfering with their content, blogs fit the mold for advertising-driven media. Bloggers are essentially writers publishing their own periodicals. No one would criticize a newspaper for including an ad – so why criticize a blogger?

That doesn’t mean all bloggers accept the practice. Ben at Tech Savvy Educator made a post last month titled, “Yes, Yes, I’ve Gone Commercial *sigh*” Like others, he seems to feel guilty about placing some ads on his site.

Although I find advertising on official classroom resources to be unacceptable, I don’t see anything wrong with monetizing a personal blog. You might have guessed that if you looked at my sidebar or footer.

Like every other blogger on the internet, I’ve invested time and money into this project. It is certainly rewarding in other ways – self-reflection, connecting with other educators, relaxation – but it seems silly not to recoup that investment of time and money when possible.

I’ve established for myself a simple rule: as long as the advertising does not interfere with the content, it is acceptable. Sleezy tricks like pop-up ads or flash ads that block the content area are a no no. Text ads that are randomly inserted into a post are horrible. AdSense ads, banners, or blocks on the perimeter of the screen are just fine.

Unlike Ben, I’ve had some minor success with advertising. Over the past year, I’ve worked on a series of blogs/sites – all of which have now been rolled into this one site. Between the three of them, I generated about $500. It’s not a lot of money – nor as much as I think I’m capable of earning through these projects – but it pays for the webhosting and affords me a little extra spending cash (some of which will surely find its way back into my classroom).

Which leads me to the topics of two future posts.

How to Make Money from Your Blog. No, it’s not a plan to make millions, nor will I ask you to turn your blog into a spam-fed machine. There are more efficient and reliable methods of generating revenue than using AdSense, and for the sake of other educators that want to make a few bucks on their personal blogs I feel obligated to share.

What Do I Do With All that Money? Another topic I picked up from Steve at Teach 42′s 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger is full disclosure. What do I promote for money, and what do I promote just cause I like it? What do I do with all that money – not that $500 is all that much. I agree with Steve that it’s important for the integity of myself and my site to be up front and open about my motives.I might get to that later in the week before I head back to school.

From Google’s page about jobs:

We offer our engineers “20-percent time” so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about. Google Suggest, AdSense for Content and Orkut are among the many products of this perk.

The concept is pretty simple. People work best when they’re working on things that they’re passionate about. Give a bunch of creative engineers 20% of their time to work on their pet projects, and you’ll eventually come up with some amazing products. It’s just one piece in the puzzle that is Google’s philosophy built on innovation and collaboration.

In recent times, there’s been some concern that the 20% time isn’t as free or productive as it once was. That, however, doesn’t concern us.

What does? The concept.

20% Time Applied in the Classroom

To wrap our minds around this, let’s take an example that most closely approximates life as a Google engineer: a computer programming course.

It’s been some time since I took AP Comp Sci in high school, but I still remember the routine. The instructor gave us a series of problems to solve, and we went about writing programs that solved them. Occasionally she’d do a short lecture about a technique or an efficiency algorithm, but for the most part it was sink-or-swim – simple problem solving.

A lot of my classmates sank. They lacked the motivation to really tackle the problems, so if the answer didn’t jump out at them they didn’t get a lot of work done. It could also be that they lacked the skills to conceptualize the problem in an effective way.

In retrospect, this reminds me a lot of some of my current students.

Anyhow, how do we integrate 20% time into this classroom? Simple. Every student comes up with his or her own problem and devotes one day per week to working on it.

For example, a student interested in gaming could set about creating a computer game. It’s a great authentic assessment and hopefully the student is self-motivated enough to tackle the problems instead of avoiding them.

Or, the student could be required to contribute to an open source project. What better way to demonstrate your programming skills – and to learn how to work as a piece of a collaborative project – than to contribute to the development of Open Office, an Apache Project, or one of the thousands of smaller open source projects on Sourceforge.

Using 20% Time in Other Disciplines

I’d say it’s pretty simple to apply this concept in a course like C++ Programming – what we call “academies” in our school. These courses focus on professional skills, and there are pretty direct applications.

Programming students could contribute to an open source project. Web design students could create free-to-use web templates. Graphic design students could create images and contribute to the Open Clipart Library. Photography students could create libraries of royalty-free images on Stock.XCHNG.

What about your “regular” classes, though? That’s where you need to be creative.

This seems to be a great way to incorporate real project based learning – authentic tasks with meaningful products – into core classes. However, that means that you need to come up with (or, better yet, have your students come up with) meaningful products for them to work on.

A Social Studies student might create a blog to discuss the news and/or politics. Instead of a research paper, the student might create a small website to organize and disseminate information about an approved topic. The student could campaign online for a political candidate.

An English student could take a variety of paths. If the student is into the creative side of language arts, work on a novel or a poetry anthology. If the student likes to read, create a collection of book reviews (and publish them on the web, so people can read them).

Science and math, you’re on your own.

How Is This Different from PBL?

You might be thinking, “How is this different from project-based learning in general?”

Well, in large part it isn’t. It’s not something radically different – just a different approach to thinking about and integrating PBL.

“Project” is a fuzzy term. To some people, it’s an assignment that you hand out on November 1 and collect on November 30. To some people, it’s a poster that you slap together and hang on a wall. Or, it could be a research paper.

In most cases, these projects have circumcribed topics. Although there can be options, the scope is narrowed and closed around a piece of the curriculum. A project about Rome, a project about Shakespeare, a project about fractions.

Whatever it is, you are trying to teach, reinforce, and assess a particular aspect of your curriculum – which is where it falls apart. Sure, it provides your students with alternative methods of expressing themselves and demonstrating their learning, but they’re still working on your agenda.

20% time is a about giving your students the freedom to explore what they want to. Instead of a project about Rome or Greece, the student does a project about Social Studies. Instead of something on Shakespeare or Twain, the project is about Language Arts.

Now I’m not here to tell you that this works. I haven’t tried it. But the concept intrigues me, and if I can work out some practical guidelines I might try it next year. Or, I might pilot it at the end of the year with my (thankfully small) honors class, and see how it goes.

5:40 AM : Alarm clock rings. Set it for 6:00 AM.

5:55 AM : Cell Phone alarm rings. Turn cell phone to vibrate.

6:00 AM : Alarm clock rings again. Roll out of bed.

6:05 AM : Sit down on the couch to eat some cereal and drink some OJ. Mmm… vitamins.

6:10 AM : Pull up the quilt, lean my head back, and doze for a few more minutes.

6:20 AM : Eugh. Time to get ready. Clothes on, teeth brushed, face shaved (more often than not).

6:30 AM : Out the door! Fill up the travel coffee cup, grab a snack for lunch, throw on a jacket, and out in the cold.

7:05 AM : Pull in the parking lot. Time to start a new school day.

I used to include a shower in there, but in October I experimented with showering the night before. It doesn’t do wonders for my hair in the morning, but it allows that 10 minutes of dozing on the couch.

Good trade in my opinion.

Ahh, but for the next two weeks this routine will be somewhat different. I’ve got an idea what tomorrow might look like.

5:40 AM : Zzz…

5:55 AM : Zzz…

6:00 AM : Zzz…

6:05 AM : Zzz…

6:10 AM : Zzz…

6:20 AM : Zzz…

6:30 AM : Zzz…

7:05 AM : Zzz…

8:00 AM : “Hey, look. The sun’s out!” And time to make some coffee…

I woke up this morning, anticipating the slim possibility of a wintry, slushy, snowy mess. There’d been a lot of talk yesterday about a storm coming across Pennsylvania and slamming into central and northern New Jersey.

I stumbled out of bed at 6:00 as usual. I smelled the coffee brewing, thank god for timers, and went to look out the window.

Hmm… no snow. No ice. No rain. In fact, nothing at all. Guess there will be school today, huh?

I double checked the situation with Weather.com and News12.com – just in case there was a blizzard raging twenty miles north of me at school. No such luck.

I went about getting ready and left for school as usual.

Why is the Parking Lot So Empty?

I pulled into the parking lot at 7:05 and I thought, “Why is this place so empty?”

It’s typically pretty sparse around that time, since the first class doesn’t start until 8:00. However, there are usually a handful of cars around – the early security guard, a secretary, and a couple of other early rising teachers.

Today, there was one other car in the parking lot. I shut off my car, gathered my belongings, and prepared to go inside. I was supposed to fill out some paperwork this morning – warning notices – so I was determined to get to work, even if everyone else wanted to show up late.

As I started heading towards the building, someone climbed out of the other solitary car.

“You know school’s closed today?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, they closed school.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No. Didn’t you get a phone call?”

“No…”

Over the next few minutes, this teacher convinced me that school had indeed been canceled. At first, I was a bit leary and thought it was a joke. I didn’t recognize the teacher – he lives on the first floor and I live on the fourth, so we rarely (or never?) cross paths.

However we tried the front door, and then somebody else drove by and said they had just gotten a call from the snow chain that school was closed. Oh well.

And so, I climbed back in my car, I sipped my coffee, and I hit the road again. I tried calling the main office, to no avail, and although there was some nagging doubt in my mind I was pretty convinced that school was closed. When I got home, News 12 and the school’s website both confirmed it.

I suppose this would be a good reason to have a nifty new phone with internet access. Doh.

If things had gone according to plan, I’d be sitting in my room right now. The students would be taking a test to wrap up a topic before we headed on break. We’d probably be listening to some Jimi Hendrix or Bob Marley.

Instead, I’m at home, writing this post, thinking only one thing. “Where’s my phone call?”