Day 27: Debating the Hump

Today, we (me and, I'm pretty sure, every other teacher in the school) woke up feeling like it was actually Friday, when it was only Wednesday.  Hump Day.  I wished my kids "Happy Hump Day", and they looked at me like I was nuts.  They had never heard the term before.  I tried to draw a diagram on the board of a little hill to try to explain what it meant, and they had the nerve - the nerve! - to argue with me. They felt that Monday was the biggest "hump" to get through, and the rest of the week was a downhill slope to the weekend.  As a teacher, Monday is actually pretty easy; my kids are so unresponsive that I don't try to throw anything too hard at them - I learned that the second week when they all flunked my quiz.  When we filled out the PSAT sheets (no one knew what that stood for, by the way), a kid jokingly said his birth year wasn't on there - he was born in 1986.  I informed him that as I made the 80s by about five minutes, I doubted he did.  To check, I asked him the name of the yellow Power Ranger. He failed to answer "Trini", and so we moved on.  Silly sophomores.

I have a lucky free night before my kiddos take their last test of the six weeks and I have to grade 135 tests overnight to get grades in on time.  To celebrate, my hubster and I started by watching Family Guy, followed by the first presidential debate.  I'm on a time crunch tomorrow and my kids must test instead of watching debate highlights.  I would hope they would notice important things like how Mitt has the red tie and Barack has the blue tie.  That may be a media state standard somewhere, right?  I'll figure out a way to work it in.

In other news, an Associated Press article in my local paper today printed this phrase "Among the people who study this sort of thing".  How can I possibly ask my students to write academically if a national news oragnization doesn't??