Responsibilities are scary.

What am I doing right now, you ask? I'm grading things! How strange. It is an odd feeling to know you have some control over a child's success (only some! They're the ones doing or not doing the work, after all...). Right now I'm grading the packets my classes have completed over the past few weeks for the novel they just read. It's a lot to go through, and I take about twice as long as my mentor teacher, although I take twice as long as him in anything we are grading, really. But that's just thanks to experience.

I also have to finish planning for a lesson on cyber bullying I'm giving tomorrow. This stuff is so serious and the kids know it, but it's hard to really know if they're prepared to fight against it. I did an activity today with my group where I split them based on the kind of shirt they were wearing, and then had them compete against each other in a trivia game. Only I made one group stand in the back and ignored them, or gave them 1 point for a correct answer, and gave the other group 500 points every time they got an answer right. About half way through the group in the back realized I was "bullying" them. And only at the end when we discussed how the activity made everyone feel did the praised group realize they could have stood up for the group in the back, and refused to play until the rules were fair. I guess you could say that happens a lot in real life too.

In other news, this weekend was full of music, food, and football, which was lovely, until the Patriots lost the Superbowl. Sigh.

But on Friday, Amanda came over and we saw Jack's Mannequin with Randi, which was great (minus the standing for hours and dancing girls in front of us).


Amanda and I proceeded to consume Thai food, JP Licks ice cream, brunch, free Burger King onion rings (what a brilliant idea, BK), and Pinkburry fro yo all in a 24 hour period. Yum yum yum. Life is good. And delicious.