Good-bye, Kennedy. Hello, Roosevelt.

I'm not entirely sure why but, sometime in the middle of December, I became extremely apathetic toward this and all weblogs. I just got really sick of posting here and decided that I wasn't going to do it anymore...at least not for a while. I made one post around New Year's, just because I had been planning on writing a post like that all year and didn't want to NOT do it.

At any rate, I think I just wanted one less thing to worry about. After nearly two years of posting, I just got kind of tired of the whole thing. Things were pretty busy with student teaching and working my part time job over the holidays. Thankfully, my employment was only seasonal as teaching during the day and then working all night was quite grueling and I was basically a walking zombie for most of the time. It would have been even worse next semester.

So, tomorrow is my last day at Kennedy High School. I'm kind of bummed about it. I'm really going to miss the students. On Tuesday, the last day of class, my students all applauded for me. It was entirely unexpected and quite touching. So, tomorrow, I'll go in there, administer the final, grade their notebooks, submit the final grades, turn in my books and keys and then head home to prepare for my time in purgatory.

Next Tuesday, I start teaching Eighth Grade U.S. History at Roosevelt Middle School in Glendale. Honestly, I'm not looking forward to it. I've never really had the stomach for junior highers, truth be told. They drive me insane. The other day, I was over there at the school to meet my master teacher and check out the place, and I was immediately struck by how small all of the kids were. Not only were they small, they also had an attitude that was far too big for their diminutive state. There was one little girl who smiled at me quite a few times and said that it was nice to meet me. She seems like one of the nice ones- if I have a few like that then I should be able to make it through the semester. The thing is...I really have no intention of ever teaching middle school...if I can help it. Realistically, I know that I might have to accept a position at a middle school at some point. But it honestly would be a last resort.

I suppose it's possible that my attitude could change during the course of this semester. Perhaps they will all be like that girl who smiled and said it was nice to meet me. That would be nice.

Flashing back to high school for just a minute, I recently caught several students copying essays and research papers directly from the internet. It's actually kind of funny when you think about it. The internet has made it easier for teachers to catch their students in acts of plagiarism. All I did was take a sentence from each essay and enter it into google with quotes and...voila!

In days of old, students would copy essays word for word out of a book or something, and it was less likely that a teacher would be able to find it. Now, all you have to do is staple a printout of the webpage to their paper and they can't really even argue with you about it. What I find slightly disturbing about the whole thing, however, is the fact that they don't show even the slightest bit of remorse. No apologies...no admission of wrongdoing. They just say, "Oh. Ok." I guess honesty isn't what it used to be.