Well, from some of the comments I have received, it seems that many of you are happy about going to the computer lab on Wednesday’s now to work on blogs. I am glad that many of you have expressed your liking for this, and for various reasons. Some of you just like to blog, and that is GREAT! I know for some of you, you just like to be on the computer and type or communicate with your peers, but what many of you may not realize is that, every single time you get on the computer and write, no matter what you’re writing for, you are PRACTICING your writing skills. That is the BEST way to get better and become stronger, more skilled writers! (JUST PLEASE, DO NOT WRITE IN TEXT/IM STYLE- WRITE IN FULL WORDS, USE PUNCTUATION, AND CAPITALIZE WHEN NECESSARY- NO ALL CAPS!!) I encourage you to keep up the work and always, always put quality effort into that work. I will continue to do my best at providing opportunities for you all to use more fun ways to express yourself in written form, AS LONG AS YOU ALL CONTINUE TO DO YOUR PART by actively participating and engaging in the assigned tasks. =)

Okay guys, this is the first weekly blog “task”. From now on, every Wednesday you will be coming to the computer lab to work on blogs. I will have a specific task that I want you to do. You will only be using my post to read the assignment. You will then write  a post on YOUR page that relates to the assignment. Give it a title that relates both to what you are writing in your post AND to what the assignment was. Today’s assignment is to take me through the steps you took to conduct research on your specific topic. Not everyone went to the same places to get information. We all learned the same steps in class (Think back to all the steps you have had to take up until now), but everyone has their own specific topic. In your post, you need to explain how you chose your topic and discuss what different things you decided that your audience would want or need to know about your topic. Then continue explaining the steps you went through (Once you chose your topic, what did you do? What did you do after that? And after that? And so on…).

Basically, I want you to teach someone how to go through the research process.

Has anyone, like your parents, ever told you not to let others influence you and to be your own person? It IS true that we should be our own people. And, we shouldn’t ALWAYS listen to other people. For example, if someone wants us to do something we know is wrong, like do drugs, cheat on a test or assignment, or break the law, we definitely should NOT let them influence us. We should stand up and do what we know is right.

But, some influences can actually be good, and even help us. Those influences can be a bad OR good thing as well. For instance, when I decided to become a teacher, it was both the bad experiences AND the good ones that I had in school that made me want to be a teacher; but, not just a teacher… a GOOD teacher.

I remember when I was in 6th grade. My teacher was a short, blond haired Scottish lady who was extremely grouchy. Her face was always scrunched up. I swear I thought her forehead would stay wrinkled forever because of how mad she looked all the time. Her eyebrows always made this “V” shape in the center of her face. All she had to do was glance a little in your direction and you knew you were doomed to fall into the wrath of her foul mood. She actually reminds me of that horrible teacher/”substitute” in the book, Miss Nelson Is Missing. I used to think that if the perm in her hair were a little more relaxed, her mood might improve, but nonetheless, she was a true witch! Sometimes when she would talk, we couldn’t understand her accent, but we didn’t even dare to ask what she had said because she would simply snarl at us, “Well, pay attention and listen up! Clean the wax out of your ears!” She never really taught us much either. She just gave us “busy work”. My guess is that she gave us that to shut us up and keep us quiet so we wouldn’t disturb her in whatever she felt was more important. And, if we DID manage to take her away from what she was doing, she made our questions, no matter how legitimate they were, seem stupid and pointless. She always seemed to make us feel like we were a waste of her time. She was the ONLY teacher I ever had that told my parents at parent conference night that I was a bad kid. She called me “rude” and said I never paid attention. Luckily, when my parents came home from the conference, they asked me about it before yelling at me and punishing me. That at least gave me a chance to tell my side.

On April Fool’s Day, she played a nasty joke on our class. She said that the school was becoming too crowded and so some kids were going to be moved to another school, away from our friends. I actually didn’t mind much; I even wanted to go, so when she called my name, I was so relieved. “Yes!” I said to myself. I hated her so much that I didn’t even care if I couldn’t be with my friends. Others were not so happy though. Some kids even started crying in class. She waited until late in the afternoon to tell us it was a joke. Some kids spent the entire day devastated. You could tell she was not one for children.

Why did she even become a teacher if she didn’t like being around kids? Well, I should thank my 6th grade teacher because this horrible, cruel, unkind lady was a huge influence on my decision to enter the teaching profession. Of course, I also had many great teachers along the way who inspired me to become an educator. But sadly, I think that the way my 6th grade teacher made me and my classmates feel had the most influence on the realization that I wanted to go into that profession. I never would have thought then, when I was in elementary school, that I would want to be a teacher. But, when I was asked by my college professor to write an essay on why I want to be an educator, the first thing that popped into my head was… you guessed it, my 6th grade teacher. She taught me a valuable lesson. She taught me that I NEVER want to be the kind of teacher that she was.

Now that you have all had some time to gather information on your research topics, I hope that you are well prepared to write your drafts. I also hope that while you worked on getting your facts, you also learned new and interesting things about your topics. If you researched about something you knew very little about, do you feel that you could now teach someone else about your topic? If you already knew information about your topic or you had learned about it before (like in another grade) did you learn anything new? Tell me a little about what you learned while researching your topic. How do you think what you learned could possibly help another person?

Quality vs. Quantity is a “rule” that many people use when referring to work ethic, whether you are an adult or a “young person”, such as my students. By work ethic, I am talking about the effort you put into your work, and really, this goes for everything in your life: your work, the sports you play, even leisure activities like MySpace and video games. How many times have your teachers said, I wish you would put as much effort into your school work as you do into playing sports and video games?” I bet everyone has heard it once or twice, or even more. It’s true too.

Think about all of you who are talented athletes and who work hard to make sure you get better. There are also some of you who can play video games so much that you become an expert at them. And, there are even some of you who are MySpace fans spend hours on it, changing your profiles and designing them intricately, perfecting them to show who you are and your personality. Most of you probably do not even realize how much commitment it takes to become so familiar and with those certain tasks. You peobably don’t realize it because it comes easy to you because you are interested in it. But, think about it. ANYONE can open a MySpace account and write the basic information on it (name, age, likes, hobbies, etc.), have one picture on their profile, and leave the rest totally plain. ANYONE can buy Guitar Hero and play it on Beginner level and make mistakes, but they are still playing the game. These people are STILL participating in the event, though they are not considered to be very successful at it. They may not even care that they are not that good at it. But, if QUALITY is more important than QUANTITY, the people participating in these activities will apply more effort, and try harder at them. This is called PRACTICE!

The point is: just like you practice a lot to get better at sports, games, and MySpace, you should practice a lot in areas of school (your work) to get better and become more successful. You should value the QUALITY of your work rather than how fast you can get it done, kind of like with your blogs Rather than hurrying through them and giving one sentence responses that have little thought behind them, value the QUALITY of the writing! Spend a little more time on them and add some real thought behind what you write. If you thought something was good or a good idea, then EXPLAIN WHY! Put some QUALITY effort into your writing!!

Teamwork is a word we hear pretty often. Coaches talk about it all the time. There is even that commonly used quote, “There is no I in team,” suggesting that a team must all work together cooperatively to get the given task done. But, this does not only apply to sports. Rather, it applies to every aspect in life where we have to work with others, like on group projects in school and even at work. If members of the group do not work collaboratively, or together, there can be severe consequences that hurt ALL members of the group. In school, consequences may affect the group members’ grades, but as we get older, consequences become more severe and even career changing. If co-workers are expected to work on a project or presentation together and can’t get the job done because the members of the team are fighting and can’t get anywhere, people may lose jobs. The team’s inability to be successful may even affect their boss, which may also negatively affect the whole company/business. The point here is that we ALL have to learn to work as a team to get a job done successfully. We may not always agree with or even like our group/team members, but we have to think about the important part of it: the outcome of working as a team. Just like I tell my players that I coach, “I don’t care if you are the worst of enemies. On the court, you better be the best of friends to get the job done.”

The presidential election is less than a month away. You have learned about Republicans and Democrats and their different beliefs. By now, you should know that the two candidates running for president are Barak Obama and John McCain. What do YOU want in a president? What kind of person should this person be and what things should they do to make them a good president?

On Monday we began talking about the research genre in writing. We established that people research to find out more about a certain topic and that once they have found their information, they present it to people (a reader or audience) to inform, or teach, them. Think about how many different people conduct research besides students: lawyers, doctors, teachers, scientist, and many others. What would happen if these people did not research? What do these people research for? (WHY DO THEY DO IT) How does conducting research in these areas help other people?

Here’s an example: If people had never done research on the effects of certain chemicals that we use on our environment, we never would have found out about global warming and deteriorating the ozone. Without that information, there might still be more problems with pollution and other things in our environment that contribute to global warming problems.

Okay, remember, I asked a question to you. Now, THINK about it, and give me a thoughtful answer.

I’m taking advice from one of my students. YES, I am taking advice from a kid

Someone wanted me to write a story about my other animals and some of the crazy things they have done. Well, they have definitely all done some pretty crazy things. One of the most outrageous was last year. I had a baby chinese water dragon (a big green reptile) named Krypto who had lots of personality and was very adventurous. His home was a huge aquarium with lots of branches to climb on and a large water bowl that he could swim in and take a bath. At the top of the aquarium, I had a lamp that clamped to it, shining down into the tank, to provide warmth from the “sun”. Because it clamped to the tank’s inside, I could not put a top cover on the tank. This was never a problem because Krypto was so happy in his home and got so much attention from the kids in my class and me that he had no desire to escape his home. In fact, he really loved us. He would sit on Mikey Gamboa’s shoulder while he wrote in class and he would watch me write on my desk sometimes. Occasionally, I’d take him out of his home to say hello to my students and get some loving pets from them.

One day in class, everything was going pretty much as it always does. I was at the front of the room, giving my lesson and all the students were discussing and participating. Ms. Werthman came by for a visit to see how all my kids were doing and she took a seat at my desk, right by Mr. Krypto. He was listening to the lesson as well, as he often would do, as he sat on a branch close to the “sun”. Mrs. Newkirk was in the room during that class and she was standing on the other side of Krypto’s cage. About half way through my lesson I noticed that  a few eyes were beginning to wander away from me and towards Krypto’s cage. I happened to finally catch Mrs. Newkirk’s eye. She had been trying to signal to me without being obvious. As I slowly looked a little more the the right to see what she so desperately wanted me to look at, I saw Krypto. He had managed to scale the glass cage to the top of it, which was uncovered if you remember, and out of the cage. He was sitting, quite happily, on the top of the lamp, ready to launch… RIGHT FOR MS. WERTHMAN!! I ran quickly for him and Ms. Werthman’s eyes opened wide in terror. Right as he jumped for her head, I reached him and snatched him in mid air. I was so embarrassed by my little reptile and had to apologize many times. Luckily Ms. Werthman understood that animals sometimes act a little crazy. I told her that he must have liked her because he had never wanted to get out of his tank to get to someone so badly. She just laughed and said that it gave the kids some inspiration for their writing. And guess what? It did! Several of my kids ended up writing about Krypto and his crazy act in writing class.

Last Thursday, I went home in a good mood. I was looking forward to going to dinner with my roommate and a friend of ours who is in the army, currently stationed in the middle east. My friend Stephanie was leaving Saturday so my roommate, Dre, and I had made dinner plans with her. Stephanie, another friend Destiny, and I had been talking in the living room, waiting on Dre to get ready. She was taking forever, as always. Despite the joyous mood, the night took a horrible turn in the wrong direction as soon as I opened the front door for us to leave.

As we were talking, still in the doorway, I had noticed Damon sitting on the porch. It was nothing new… he always lounges there. “What’s up Damonator?” I said to him. Dre also added, “Damonator, what are you doing buddy.” We always talk to him like he’s a human and he always seemed to like it. He’d look up at if paying attention to what  we were saying. But, as we stepped out, Damon dragged himself to the side. His hind legs were not moving. I stopped, noticing this, and I also realized that he was full of dirt. I immediately panicked, thinking he had been hit by a car, and probably had internal bleeding. “Dre, he’s not moving his legs!” I shouted. We all moved quickly. My other roommate, Diana, grabbed a towel so we could pick him up. I could already feel the tears of panic well up in my eyes. Dre remained positive, I think more to keep me calm than anything. We got him into the car and left for the Animal Emergency on Airway.

The drive seemed to take an eternity and so did the wait to get Damon into an exam room. Dre and I both became irritated at how long it took to get him in. When we finally did get him in a room, and the doctor came in, she examined him. It seemed as though his lower body were paralyzed. The doctor pinched Damon’s toes to see of he’d react. He did react on one foot, flinching, but on the other he seemed to not feel anything. She then took him to the back to get radiographs (x-rays).  After waiting for another very long period of time, wondering what was going to happen, the doctor called us back to look at the x-rays. “As you can see here, it appears as if someone shot Damon,” the doctor said. My heart sank to the floor upon hearing that. At first I was infuriated. I was so angry. How could someone shoot him!! He was the most affectionate, friendly cat (even though he tried to take Mr. Jingles that one time). Looking at the x-rays, you could see a BB pellet right against his vertebrae (spine). That wasn’t the worst part. The BB had fractured his spine, causing him to be paralyzed and also damaged a nerve next to his bladder. The job of that nerve was to tell Damon’s brain when he needs to go to the bathroom. Since the nerve was damaged, he would not be able to go to the restroom without medical help. Damon’s injuries caused him a large amount of pain and there was no way of telling if he’d be able to get through this. In order to make the right decision, the most humane and selfless decision, I had the x-rays sent to a specialist to see what Damon’s chances were of getting through this.

I had to wait for over an hour to hear back and the news was not good. Even the specialist was unsure. I was now faced with the hardest decision I have had to make. I didn’t know what to do and, in a way, I just wanted someone to confirm that the thoughts running through my head were correct. I knew in my heart what the right decision was. Damon was in pain, suffering from the cruel actions of some unknown stranger. So, I made the only decision that was fair to him. The doctor brought him in so my roommate and I could say our goodbyes. Though he was my cat, we have both always treated all the animals like they are our own. It hurt so bad knowing that was the last time we’d see him, comfort him. Dre and I stayed with him while the doctor put him to sleep. I held his head and looked into his eyes, telling him over and over that I loved him and that he was a good boy. He was. He was the greatest animal I’ve had. Needless to say, my roommate and I cried a lot that night. Losing a pet, if you’re an animal lover, is just like losing a child. These pets become your children. You care for them, feed them, comfort them, and most importantly, you love them. I loved him very much and he will never be replaced. I will hold him in my heart with memories of him forever.

There was a blessing in all this. Though he was in an unimaginable amount of pain from the BB lodged in his fractured spine, he was still just as affectionate as always, bobbing our hands with his head to pet him, telling us he knew we loved him. He was even purring. He knew we loved him. He knew we’d always do the right thing for him. After all, he had dragged himself home from wherever he was when he was unfairly shot.  I say it was a blessing because, despite everything, he was still himself. He wasn’t crying or motionless or unconscious. He was the same loving Damonator that he has always been. And THAT is exactly how I will always remember him.