Day 125- “Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story." On Writing by Stephen King

Is it Friday yet? It has to be close. I didn't think anything could be worse than a white day, but today, I found out that I was terribly wrong. Extended day white days on a Wednesday have become my new bane. I understand why we have them, but it doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day I just sat at my desk, sort of stared ahead, and was in a daze for a few minutes. Well, maybe more than a few.

English 12 kept trekking through Slaughter-House, and we are almost done. I gave them another one of my infamous "did you read quizzes" today. For this one, I had a mere two questions. 1. Did you read the assignment? 2. If so, prove it by discussing one event in the assignment. Yep, that happened. My second period class doesn't quite get I mean what I say when I tell them to read, and I have a feeling their quizzes will show that.  The students had to tell me by today what project they were doing, and they all at least have one chosen. I hope they take their time on these and they turn out well. I know some are already working on them, which is necessary. 

Creative writing was an exercise in patience, improvisation, and surprise. Our school is having a group from Advanced-Ed here today for our reaccreditation, so there could be visitors in our classrooms at anytime. Even though I knew this and was prepared, the events of this class threw me off. First, as a class we were going to listen to Capotes' A Christmas Memory as they followed along. I almost didn't print these off, but I wanted to give them the option to mark up the text. These turned out to be what saved me today because about 5 minutes into the class, our network went down. Typically this isn't a big deal, but in a class where the students have a 1-to-1 device and we use it for writing and sharing this can be a bit tragic. Unfortunately, the audio to the story was also online, but that was nothing my iPhone hooked up to my speakers couldn't solve. As we are listening to the story,  I stop it at one point to discuss his use of descriptive language, and I see a strange man in my room. Ah yes, welcome Mr. Advance-Ed person. I'm glad he wasn't packing or we would have all been dead. Guy must moonlight as a ninja though. Anyway, I've regressed. We listed to about half the story, then I showed them a scenic picture of an old rowboat next to a shore at sunset, which they had to describe to someone who wasn't there. They just started on this and I didn't expect them to finish today.