1/3/2014 January 3, 2014Happy New Year to all! Are you familiar with the poet Robert Burns? Most people are familiar with the quote "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry." The poem To a Mouse, written in 1786, tells of how he, while plowing a field, upturned a mouse's nest. The resulting poem is an apology to the mouse. Here is the verse that contains the famous words: But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren't alone] In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry] An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promised joy. So...the best laid plans of teachers "gang aft a-gley" as well. I was excited about participating in the national Hour of Code with all my classes, but grades six and eight never got to do that because of missing two Tuesdays in a row due to snow. We did the introduction but missed the coding class itself. I still plan to have that session and distribute certificates for completion, eventually. Besides that we set up a stock portfolio and should be catching up on two dates that fell over the holiday but now we are about 4 weeks behind in the dates. All of these items still need to be accomplished, and it will take some effort to get everything back on track. The thing that throws a wrench into the snow day issue is that if we make up a missed school day because our snow days have been used, it will not be a Tuesday, in which case our missed classes don't get made up. Are you following me on this? A little work outside of class will be essential! Congratulations to the students who successfully followed directions for posting their Saint Report to their blogs. I will be reading and evaluating that assignment over this weekend. That and the first week evaluation of the stock setup are the only two scores we may have for the second quarter. What I would like everyone to do is come in on Tuesday with all of the stock prices already looked up for the past dates (list them in a Google Doc) and that way they can be quickly plugged into the portfolio spread sheet next week. That would mean having the prices for December 10, December 17, December 24, December 31, and January 7 already looked up. I will likely be sending a group email regarding the specifics of this over the weekend. Those who gather up the data before coming to class on Thursday will have a definite advantage. Comments are closed.
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