Back to the grind

Today was a long, hard day. It was my first "regular" day in a while, and it was just hard to get into the swing of things. The morning went fine - I'm really feeling my English 2 classes right now. I played that Johnny Cash song "Folsom Prison Blues" that I had blogged about earlier, and the kids were able to pick out the theme of the song and compare it with a passage from Douglass in which he looks out at the Chesapeake and all the boats depressingly remind him that he's a slave. The kids did well with it, and it was fun to be in the room as I exposed them to country music. But the afternoon Junior classes were full of meetings about essays, while I had them working on small group discussions as I walked around to students about their big essay. It is grueling, especially with classes nearing 40. The noise level alone is astonishing.

Tomorrow is a field trip, though, as the kids are going to see Alice Childress' play Trouble in Mind at Center Stage. I'm looking forward to it a great deal. I wish it was my sophomores going, though. Their version of the same field trip was cancelled with the snow day last Wednesday, and Center Stage informed me today that they will not reschedule. I'm not sure why; every school in Maryland was cancelled that day, so it's not like they could have the performance. But maybe they did, I'm not sure. It just doesn't seem right. The sophomores were really pumped about going, complete with classroom visits from the cast and plenty of prep work.

Now I've got to figure out another field trip to take those kids on to make up for it. Isn't there some sort of Frederick Douglass museum down by the harbor and Fells Point? I seem to remember walking by a statue of him in a new-ish looking building that was closed at the time. I'll have to research that a bit; maybe it could be worth it. The kids are loving his autobiography... even with over a week off from it...