Morgan State, Getting Little Done, and IKEA

I’m getting frustrated because once again, I got very little done in my classroom. The day began at Morgan State, where we listened to a fairly interesting talk about student/teacher relationships. To me, the interesting (and shocking) part was the statistics, especially about the over-representation of Black students in special ed, and the under-representation of Black students in gifted/ AP classes. Have I mentioned how excited I am to teach AP Statistics this year?

I was whispering to my awesome friend about the statistics when a teacher sitting behind me shushed me pretty rudely. I think there are polite ways to tell someone that they’re being loud (especially because we had NO idea), and she was not polite. Since she arrived late and left early, I was a little bit annoyed that she was rude to me when clearly she didn’t care enough to stay for the whole thing.

To me, the best part of the talk was the “questions” time. I have questions in quotes because I’m not sure that anyone actually asked questions. Instead they used the time to preach their own opinions, and several “question-askers” got some pretty rousing applause. That was fun.

After a pit-stop to Dunkin Donuts (where I got my iced French vanilla coffee with extra cream and extra sugar – mmmm), we made it back to school where awesome friend and I tried to put up the dry-erase boards that I bought at Home Depot. We used Liquid Nails to attach them to the wall, since I don’t have the tools to drill into concrete. This was kind of a disaster, because we had to lean against the dry-erase boards for 20-30 minutes until the adhesive dried. Ms. Awesome’s dry-erase board kept sliding even after 30 minutes, so we finally put a file cabinet under it to keep it from falling. We’ll cross our fingers that everything is still on the wall tomorrow.

And that’s pretty much all I got done before I left at 3 pm to help Ms. Awesome buy furniture for her new place and now I’m off to help build some IKEA furniture. Which, by the way, I am really good at. It’s one of my best talents. Yes, I’m an awesome friend.