One week down!

I lived through the first week of teaching 8th grade math! I have devoted all of my reading hours to Saxon 87 Math. I have to ponder every word and phrase that the book offers so that I can go in and relay all the pertinent information to the eleven students. I'm sure some of them are far better at math than I am, however; that is to my advantage because they can learn the new concepts easily. Actually, the great need they have is the language portion of math. While some of them are very good at the mechanics they are lacking in language skills.
The vocabulary totally baffles them. I found that they were all aware of the word "consecutive" but at a loss as to what it means. Consequently, I spend a great amount of my teaching time helping them understand the language. When time to take the tests at the end of the year comes around I'm hoping that the scores will reflect the efforts that they have made to learn the language.
The basic question each and every lesson is,"When are we ever going to use this stuff?" I have my answer ready, " When you get to be my age, someone might ask you to teach them what a subtrahend is and what a minuend is and what is the commutative property of addition and if you pay attention now, you may be able to explain it to them!"
My Literature and Grammar class is such a pleasure! I'm sure that I know more than they do and I thoroughly enjoy sharing my knowledge with them. Teaching them about genres, plot, theme, and all those things is fun. My goal is to internalize all the math concepts so that I can be secure in that area also. The thing is, when am I ever going to use this stuff??

Shoot Out Update.

I,m sure you remember the shoot-out at the Kroger Shopping Center? Well, not much has transpired since then. The shootee Hummer dude is still in the hospital, the ex-cop is still free to go out and look for other four way stops to invade and the law is still investigating!

The wheels of justice and all that stuff, ya'know? The wife of the person that was shot says the J-Town police don't return her calls and she has heard very little from them and she is mad as hops. The J-Town police or the authority that speaks for them, said they return all of her calls and just talked to her recently and explained to her that they are working diligently trying to figure out who is at fault here. These things take time. It seems that the ex-cop, after the shooting, ran over and turned off the motor of the Hummer so that no one would get hurt (What a nice guy!) and he also took numerous pictures of the "crime" scene. I wonder if he took a picture of the Nat'l City Bank that he shot. Maybe his wife is into scrap booking.

The J-Town authorities think he took the pictures because of his past training as an officer of the law. This is a real cliff hanger! Watch this site for further activity on this case. Be patient, it might take awhile.