Day 110: Valentine's Day

My first period decided earlier this week they’d like to have a Valentine’ s Day party.  I told them if they wanted to plan it, I’d give them time for it, but I wasn’t coordinating. So a student drew up a signup, passed it around, and kids signed up to bring food, and lo and behold, this morning we had a formidable smorgasbord of breakfast tacos, donuts, Cool Ranch Doritos, Chips Ahoy cookies, TWO types of Dr. Pepper, and one cute girl who made Valentines with candy in them a la second grade.  We had enough food for our little 16-student period and they vegged out listening to my Sinatra playlist before doing our shortened lesson.  I’m really rather impressed they pulled it off; I figured one kid might remember but then we’d have class anyway.  My other periods are going to be rather upset, but I told first period to keep it a secret; as experience shows, they’re really good at keeping secrets…

It's actually kind of odd day at the high school.  The mail room had a potluck for faculty and staff to bring goodies in for Valentine's Day, and our library offered cappuccinos and coke floats all day.  The library lobby was taken up with a giant heart-covered backdrop for kids to take pictures for a Spanish club fundraiser.  The poor freshman and sophomores are taking an all-morning English benchmark exam in the gym in preparation for the state tests, and the teachers have the day off teaching, first to proctor the 4-hour monster, then grade it.  Until lunchtime, literally half the school is locked in the gyms.  To add to the weirdness of the day, since half the school is in the gym, my entire hallway (which, besides me and a Spanish teacher, is entirely freshman and sophomore classes) is empty, and three different teams and clubs are out for tournaments and travel, so my largest class today was 16.  Looking forward to the weekend!  Happy Valentine's Day!  To wrap up our classes, we've spent five minutes watching the Disney short "Paperman" (ignore the Spanish...Disney does a good job of keeping its clips off Youtube so I had to get a little creative to find a version for my students).  Enjoy!