8 is great

This is quilt 8 of 45 in my challenge to quilt one a day for the rest of the year.

Another trick for cranking out quilts quickly is loading a piece of backing fabric that will work for more than one quilt.  I loaded a long piece of backing fabric and was hoping to get three quilts out of it.  Turns out it got two, but I'm happy when I can get at least two quilts from one piece.  That saves time pinning the backing fabric to the frame.  It only takes 5 minutes to pin the backing fabric, but that's five minutes per quilt I save.  Hey, five minutes times 45 quilts is a whole bunch of time.

I have to share this email we all got on Friday, the last day before break.  The kids were already wound up because it was the last day before break and they didn't want to do work.  They come in asking if we could have a 'free day'.  I told them they could have an entire FREE week, starting on Saturday.  We always do work all period in my class and then I get this email from one of our teachers on campus.  I almost died!

Dear Staff,

Today the journalism students are having their weekly Ice Breaker Friday. They are playing hide and seek, so they are allowed to be out on campus. They have been explicitly instructed not to disturb your classes. If they are a disturbance, please send them back to class. Thank you for your understanding.

I have this running conversation with another teacher on campus about the "Continuum of Acceptability" among the teachers at our school.  There are a few of us who work really hard.  We teach bell to bell and have high expectations for our students.  Then, there are the rest of the teachers who have "Ice Breaker Fridays".  I'm thinking the kids should know each other by now.  Maybe the first couple of days of school you can have a 'get to know you' activity, but by the end of the semester, if you don't know who the people in your class are, it's probably too late.  And running around campus, hiding from each other, isn't really a good way to know your class mates. 

I just had to shake my head and think, well, there's a teacher who isn't coming back next year.  

I've done some pretty stupid things in my teaching career, but at least I didn't send an email to the entire staff announcing them :)  I guess it is part of the 'look at me' culture we've created in the younger generation where we announce everything we are doing and then wonder why we have consequences for our actions.

I had a student come into my 7th period class the other day, the day before a 4 day weekend about 20 minutes before class was over.  I asked if she needed something and she said she just wanted to wait out of the rain for her friend.  I asked where she had come from and she said her teacher let them out early.  Just decided to end class early that day.  Really?  How can I not get away with doing things like that?

The Continuum of Acceptability!