I found the culprit, Athena:

Front left paw.

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I rarely post (or even forward) forwarded emails, but this is well-written and very recognizable to teachers. Unfortunately, I cannot find the source online:

Have you heard about the next planned “Survivor” show?

Three businessmen and three businesswomen will be dropped into an elementary school classroom for 1 school year. The business people will be provided with a copy of their school district’s curriculum and a class of 28 – 32 students.

Each class will have a minimum of five learning-disabled children, three with A.D.D., one gifted child, and two who speak limited English. Three students will be labeled with severe behavior problems.

All business people must complete lesson plans at least 3 days in advance with annotations for curriculum objectives and modify, organize, or create their materials accordingly. They will be required to teach students, handle misconduct, implement technology, document attendance, write referrals, correct homework, make bulletin boards, compute grades, complete report cards, document benchmarks, communicate with parents, and arrange parent conferences.

They must also stand in the doorway between class changes to monitor the hallways. In addition, they will complete fire drills, tornado drills, and [Code Red] drills for shooting attacks each month.

They must attend workshops, faculty meetings, and attend curriculum development meetings. They must also tutor students who are behind and strive to get the 2 non-English speaking children proficient enough to take all of the state tests.

If the business person is sick or having a bad day, he/she must not let it show. Each day they must incorporate reading, writing math, science, and social studies into the program and must maintain discipline and provide an educationally stimulating environment to motivate students at all times.

If all students do not wish to cooperate, work, or learn, the teacher will be held responsible. The business people will only have access to the public golf course on the weekends, but with their new salary, they may not be able to afford it.

There will be no access to vendors who want to take them out to lunch, and lunch will be limited to thirty minutes, which is not counted as part of their workday. The business people will be permitted to use a student restroom, as long as another survival candidate can supervise their class.

If the copier is operable, they may make copies of necessary materials before or after school. However, they cannot surpass their monthly limit of copies. The business people must continually advance their education, at their expense, and on their own time.

The winner of this season of “Survivor” will be allowed to return to his/her job.

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I looked around the Web for a while for a CSS Cheat Sheet to give to my students for tomorrow’s Web design final exam. I found lots of good ones, but none that were stripped down enough to work for beginners. So I made one. If you’re just learning or teaching CSS, I hope this works for you too.

Web Version

One-Sheet PDF Version

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Actually, these sketches were done on note paper provided by my Press-A-Print trainers last week. Yes, I was still paying attention to the lectures.

The high school has bought a whole Press-A-Print set up for the students to learn how to run a small business. It’s a great opportunity for them and should be a lot of fun. The idea is to run the whole thing as a real business, serving students, clubs, sports, other schools, and eventually small businesses in the area. Another teacher will be in charge of having her students actually run the equipment and the business. My graphic design students will be the “art department.”

The nice thing about this deal is that it is not a franchise. They provide the equipment, supplies, training and support, but they don’t regulate how you run your business. I’m tempted to invest it in myself once I get really familiar with the equipment at the school. The most fun during training was learning how to do screen printing – my first time ever. Now I want to buy a screen printing machine at the very least. I could design T-shirts and print them right then and there, and then sell them somehow. These two sketches about might work well as T-shirt designs.

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The following assignment was inspired by a lesson in the book “Drawing for Older Children & Teens” by Mona Brookes. I first introduced my students to the art elements of color and texture. Then we briefly looked at the works of Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee for inspiration.

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PROJECT SUMMARY

Focus: Color and Texture
Summary: Fill a page with doodles. Fill in some areas with solid color and some with textured color.

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PROJECT DETAILS

Instructions

• Begin in one spot on the paper and start drawing doodles. Create as many doodles as you like. The only rule is that no doodles should overlap or interfere with any other doodles.
• You can draw both geometric (that is, squares, triangles, circles etc.) and organic doodles (squiggly "natural" shapes). Or you can draw only geometric shapes or draw only organic shapes.
• Fill your paper with doodles.
• Fully color your page in crayon, marker or colored pencil, or a combination of these media.
• Use solid color in some areas.
• In other areas, experiment with implied texture: lines, cross hatching, dots, dashes, squiggles, smudges, etc.

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STUDENT WORK

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