I Feel Like A Person

This weekend was really great (especially after Friday's day-long adventure), giving me a chance to put school-life on hold (harder said than done, as you'll see) for a moment to just feel like a person again, doing normal things.

The 5-and-a-half hour car ride with my roommates was actually a lot of fun, minus the constant razzing over my selection of music. It seems country and hip-hop are just not that popular with guys from the Northeast.

We had a lot of fun discovering the French Quarter. We never really left this area since our hotel was in walking distance and so was the Superdome. Kyle had been before several times, so was able to give us the 50-cent tour. Our romp across New Orleans included stops at Mother's for some po' boys, Cafe du Monde for some benients, and Bourbon Street for some... bourbon.

We topped it all off with a trip to the Superdome to see the Saints battle the Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens are Brian's hometown team, so you can guess who the rest of us were pulling for. Unfortunately, the Ravens dominated the entire game. I have to say though, I was thoroughly impressed with the Saints' fans - the Superdome was the loudest place I have ever been, and the game wasn't even that close.

We got back around 10pm Sunday night, so I've been playing catch up since then. I did get a little work done on Saturday. We found a sports bar in a nearby Hilton and graded papers and lesson-planned as we all watched the Georgia-Florida and Mizzou games. But I still had a lot of work to do Monday morning since this week is my observation window. That means that my AP has to observe me for 40 mins and submit an evaluation to the district. I also have to take a test over the 7 hours of ESL training I received last week for my certification.

Luckily, today I had both occur. My AP dropped in during my second period today. I'm not sure if it went well or not - it was up and down as per usual. She kept getting up and helping kids also, which I'm not sure was due to her perceiving me as a bad teacher so much as is in her nature to help out while she's in the classroom. She said that I did a "nice job" so I guess I'll be looking for good marks on that evaluation that I should see sometime next week.

I also went ahead and knocked out my ESL test this afternoon. I actually scored an 80% on it. The training required me to read writing samples of English-as-a-Second-Language students and categorize them according to their ability. Out of 15 sets of writings, I only missed 3. That sounds easy, but considering the ESL coordinator at my school has been teaching for some 20 years and is a native speaker, I was shocked to learn that she didn't pass this test on the first go-round (neither did my partner teacher). I have a whole laundry list of reasons why our ESL coordinator is too inept for the job, though.