Can It Be A New Year and January Gone Already?

I haven’t been here in a few weeks. I haven’t been able to corral any particular thoughts that were worth blogging about. Could it be because I’m taking a spreadsheet class, a web design class, a data-driven instruction class, and an Italian class, plus another regular meeting once a week? I’ve been reading my RSS feeds just enough to find gadget news for my students (they love it when I take a few moments of class to show them new gadgets, online services, or mini-videos). Of course I followed what happened at CES and MacWorld, but that’s about it. I’ve barely had time to skim my favorite educational blogs or Twitter.

It was a very strange week at school. One of our kids, a former gang member trying to go straight after 4 years in jail, was arrested burglarizing houses. So he’s off to incarceration again. He was starting to make some progress. We had a plan in place to get him on the fast track to high school (he was already 15). I just hope some of the success he had with us taught him 1) there are some adults who care and can be trusted; and 2) he has some intelligence and capabilities beyond succeeding in the gang life. I suppose I should be grateful he won’t be here to pull any more of our kids into his lifestyle, but I’m not. We wanted to bring him back from the brink. We just don’t save all of them.

Then there was the incident with of a couple of my students who were involved in a nasty love-affair-breakup-thing, which they wrote about all over their class web sites. I had to delete their accounts because they violated our school’s User Agreement. That wasn’t so unusual. Drama is an everyday fact of life in middle school. What was unusual that this very public exchange was between two girls. Girls who are 13 years old. I don’t find it shocking that they are gay, but I do find it surprising that they were willing to be so public about it. We know our kids are dating, experimenting, and emotionally volatile in middle school, but this relationship was really in-your-face. I sincerely wish it hadn’t happened online with the tools I provided. It doesn’t really help my cause. Let’s pray there’s not a backlash because of one incident. And that next time it happens on MySpace instead! (grin)

That’s all I can process for today. I suppose I’ll be able to come up for air around the middle or end of this month. We’ll see. Until then, ciao!