My First Block Day

It turns out that the school where I'm working has two days set aside each week as "block" days. On Wednesdays, we see classes one, three, five, and seven for (I think) 100 minutes. On Thursday, we see two, four, five, and six (period five is lunch, so it remains the same all week). Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays are "normal" days where we run from one through seven for 50 minutes.

I've never experienced a block day before. When I went to school there (have I told you that I'm now working in the high school from which I graduated 19 years ago?), we started earlier, ended earlier and, if memory serves me - which I'm not promising it is - there was an extra class period. I'm still not entirely sure I understand the whole concept of block schedules, though I found it very satisfying to be able to have a class discussion with the AP kids for a good chunk of time and having ample opportunity for everyone to participate.

Our discussion about forgiveness was interesting, though I think we may have frustrated some of the students' definitions of the idea and therefore made their task of writing a response to Weisenthal's book a lot more complicated than they originally thought it would be. It was fun to sit on the perifery and watch how the kids interact with each other, to see who spoke up and who needed to be prompted to speak, who demonstrated antagonism toward the class in general and the subject in particular. And to try to learn their names... SO many NAMES!!