Middle School Memories and February Update

I love teaching Middle School for many reasons, one being that my students constantly make me laugh, even if sometimes I have to wait until the lunch period to do so. Here are just a few recent memories that make me laugh and that I want to hold on to.

***Today the Shakespeare festival came to our school to perform the play "Othello". It was amazing! I really enjoyed it and I think my students did too. They used the word "whore" pretty candidly, and naturally, because I teach 7th grade, this was a big deal to some of my students. Coincidently, the students it was a big deal to, are also my students who watch rated R movies. After the play I had a student come up to me and say, "They used the "H" word a lot!" :) At which point, I responded, "No, actually, they used the "W" word a lot." It made me chuckle.

***A few weeks ago my students were discussing the movie "The Lightning Thief". The book series has been a huge hit with my kids and so I recently read the first book in the series. My kids know me pretty well and I have no problem sharing with them how much of a book geek I am. At the beginning of the year, I explained that Sharlee and I loved "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series and so when the movie came out we made our own sisterhood of the traveling pants, pants, to wear to the movie. As my students were discussing "The Lightning Thief" movie I overheard one of them say, "Are you going to bring a pen to the movie?" (The main character has a pen that turns into a sword.) Then I heard the other student say, "That sounds like something Mrs. Dietz would do." :)

***Each quarter we cover a new set of root words. My students keep track of their roots in a chart with a definition, example words, and a picture to illustrate the definition. I usually use my whiteboard to create my own chart as they are creating theirs. One of our roots for this quarter is "auto", which means self. So, my example picture was a stick figure of myself. My stick figures always have curly hair, and I managed to make the hair on this particular stick figure huge. In response to my stick figures massive hair, one of my students said, "Do you have a hard time playing hide and seek with that hair?" :)

These were just a few highlights from the last couple of weeks. I'm sure I have more, but I don't write them down like I should. I really appreciate my classes sense of humor. I'm looking forward to summer, but I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to seeing this group of students go. I've really enjoyed them this year and I have a feeling that summer will be here before I know it.

As far as updates from my life outside of school, not much is new. Things are pretty much the same as always in the Dietz household. Fenix is loving school and doing incredibly well. We got to see a large chunk of Ken's family over the Thanksgiving holiday, which was really nice and we're planning a trip out to the Nebraska/Colorado area to see them again this summer. Ken and I also got to take a trip to Jackpot to celebrate a friends birthday in Decemeber. Unfortunately we didn't win big, or at all, but we had a really good time. Other than that we've been spending a lot of time working and just being homebodys. That's pretty much been our life in a nutshell the last few months:) Oh, and we have been playing a lot of Wii, which we can thank Santa for.