We woke up this morning to the patut-patut-patut of the local field hands shaking and picking the last of the apples. I was too tired to stop them, even though this year I was determined to pick and can every last apple myself. By the time I got out to the car, the beautiful folks, two women and one gent, laughing and teasing had filled their last buckets and dumped them into the crate on the back of the tracker.

 Bye apples! May you make sweet juice.

Every last apple is gone, all the rotting ones, the wormy ones, and the bird pecked ones too. A bittersweet exchange, my decomposing piles gone, the yard free from fallen apples, and no more walking outside to pick the girls' lunch apples.



I left the classroom a mess yesterday, bits of cut out paper, wads of those bits of paper, mixed in with dirt from returning from the football stadium after a real fire drill (smoke from basement, though it was not really smoke, just steam, that tripped the smoke detector, that tripped the fire alarm). What did the students get from cutting out the examples of scatter plots and correlations that they couldn't of gotten out of regular notes? Does a matching activity mean they know what they are doing, that they understand why they are doing what they do?






I share my room with a lovely teacher who has been at the
school for many, many, many years. He likes the 36
desks in 6 rows of 6. Kinda challenging to move easily in and out of group work, make stations keep buckets of supplies out and such (we are packed in!). I am up for the challenge, AND taking any and all suggestions!