IDK!!!!!

I just read my last entry from what seems like 2 years ago, and I wanted to add that the squirrel never came back, at least while I was watching. Either he is camera shy, or the sight of 7th graders looking for his buried treasure made him decide to bury his nuts in a safer place.

Well, there aren't many days left of this year, and we are finishing up our chapter on equations. When we started this chapter, I had a great idea to relate using letters in equations to text messaging because I know the students are obsessed with it. They write IDK on their papers when they don't know the answer. I told them how many years ago when I was in college, before email was a common word, and cell phones were still too big to fit in people's pockets, I had a roommate who used to make up abbreviations for phrases she used often. The other roommates (including me) thought she was crazy to speak in letters, and we would often make fun of her. Little did we know, letter-speak was the wave of the future. One of her favorite sayings was LCBT (lost cause big time).

It worked somewhat to peek their interest, but now this learning thing is back to as easy as pulling teeth. Back in March a student asked me "Aren't we supposed to stop learning the last week of school?" And I was thinking - "I'm still waiting for you to start!" IDK, IDK ... I remember in my dad's classroom (he was my high school science and math teacher) the words "I Don't Know" weren't allowed. He's retired now, but I think he would also outlaw IDK if he taught teenagers today.

At the end of one day last week, I looked at my face in the mirror and noticed the black marker from my dry-erase marker board was smeared all over my face. I smiled and my teeth gleamed whitely in contrast to my face. I looked like I had been working in the coal mines, and I felt like it too. IDK, sometimes I feel like a LCBT, but at least I'm still smiling!