Week 8: Short but Sweet

So this has been another short week (apparently I jinxed myself), with two snow days, two delays, and an early dismissal. This week was my first week with the new classroom set-up; instead of the usual seven separate long tables in rows which used to feel like a maze whenever I would try moving around the classroom, now I have three pods of two tables pushed together, angled in the classroom to (almost) resemble a horseshoe facing my desk, with my seventh table at the front the class pushed agains the board to serve as my materials table.

Everyone's reactions to the new classroom set-up have been pretty amusing, and for the most part positive. When the students arrived Monday morning they were stunned to see change as it appears it's been a very long time since the room has been changed. While there are some mixed reactions, I prefer this new set-up so far, it allows me to move around and interact with all of my students without feeling like I am cut off from others. So far it's also made grouping easier, so now I can have more group work and have easier student discussions without feeling like they are talking over each other.



While we weren't able to get a lot accomplished in the classroom so far this week because of our weather, we did get a chance to work together and accomplish one of the chapter fundraisers and get a sweet taste of summer in the process. A new fundraiser the FFA chapter tried out this year was a strawberry sale. The chapter already has a citrus sale in the fall, but they decided to try it out this year and I think it was a great success! We sold strawberries by the quart, half-flats (4 quarts) and full-flats (8 quarts), and while the strawberries had a long travel from Florida north to us, their taste could have fooled you. They were a hit and we spent our Friday unloading, sorting and checking on quality control while also enjoying the extra strawberries that weren't quite up to snuff to distribute to our customers. It was a really good thing we ordered extras too, because we had teachers calling or running down all day who had gotten a taste of some of them and wished they had bought some.

So its was a sweet day of bonding with the few students I had that day (it was the State Wrestling Event so we had multiple students wrestling and many more students absent to support the wrestlers).