Friday PM in the Middle School

I have always admired the ability of our students to focus in the classroom regardless of the day of the week, circumstance, or time of day. You might think that our students (and teachers) would be winding down on a Friday afternoon with only an hour or so to go before dismissing for the weekend. My walk-through of the Middle School on Friday afternoon (9/15) proved just the opposite. During a twenty-five minute stretch of time, I cruised around all floors of the building, typing notes on my IPAD2, and popping in and out of classrooms. I observed energetic teachers, engaged students, and productive lessons. My notes are as follows, with accompanying times: 7th grade English class discussing To Kill a Mockingbird (1:40 PM), 6th grade math class wrestling with a word problem about tickets to a circus (1:45), 8th graders taking a math quiz on integers and expressions (1:51), 6th graders enthusiastically turning in their carefully colored and labeled maps of Ancient Greece in history class (1:52), 7th graders describing people in a photo in Spanish class (1:53), 8th graders reviewing an Algebra II quiz (1:56), 6th graders making journal entries about a Ray Bradbury short story--"The Pedestrian" (1:57), a 6th grade science class watching a NASA video on the water cycle (2:01), and a 7th grade Spanish class working diligently to learn stem changing verbs (2:04). This school year, I plan to offer more reports of this nature to give my readers a snapshot of the exciting things happening at Calvert at a given point in time.