This was one of those days that keeps shifting shape. I got to school at 7:00, checked my email and RSS feeds, wrote some replies, and got some materials together for my 8:30 English class, where we are beginning a series of activities that are going to investigate the concept of quality: what it is and how we recognize it. The first step in the process is to have the students write three-minute poems. (Explanation in this post.)
At 9:30 I had a faculty partner meeting with a colleague in the Physics department, and we wound up discussing and making some changes in the directions for a long-term project-based unit he's initiating with his students. At 10:30 I went to grab lunch and sat with another colleague from my department, and we talked about what happened when the students in his class basically resisted doing an oral-reading activity he had planned, and the on-the-fly adaptions he made instead of trying to force the issue.
After eating I went back to my office and was doing some work when a student who has discovered I like to play chess came in and asked me if I had time for a game. I told him I had twenty minutes, and we began to play. I was able to gain some positional advantages that translated into a couple of pawns, and then toward the beginning of the endgame I let him fork a rook and next thing I knew I was down two pieces.
I conceded the game, picked up my notebooks, and walked over to the Luke Center for Public Service to meet with three other colleagues to lay out plans for how we are going to support a sustainability initiative, Punahou 2016, which is about to be announced by the school President, and which is going to have curricular implications, especially for sophomores taking chemistry and studying energy. We are trying to set up some frameworks within which individuals and small groups of students can begin gathering and analyzing baseline data with regard to energy use on campus.
So we had that conversation, and then it was back to the office to help one of my sophomore students set up a blog that she's going to use as an alternative to keeping a (paper notebook) commonplace book this semester. Then I had a meeting with a vendor to show him the t-shirt design that the staff of Ka Wai Ola, the literary magazine that I am advisor to, has come up with so that he can send us a quote. Then I had to type up the samples from the three minute poems for each class so that we can go to step two tomorrow.
I wound up making some turkey soup for dinner, after which my wife and I drove down to Ala Moana Shopping Center to see if we could find an umbrella to replace the one I left someplace two weeks ago. Couldn't find anything I liked. Went to Barnes and Noble to look at some books, but found I was by this point so bleary-eyed I couldn't tell whether what I was reading was any good or not, so we drove home and I sat down to write this, and found out I had an email from a teacher in China who has been reading my blog and wondered if I could look over a Cloze test they're using and check it for idiomatic usage. So I did that, and then I said to myself that unless today was going to be the day when I finally fall off the blog-a-day wagon I've been ever-more-precariously perched on I'd better get cracking. So here I am. And there it is, a day in the life.
1 comment:
I take complete responsibility for the phrase "get cracking" being present in your vernacular.
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