Day 9: Back to School Night

Back to School Night is always a zoo: big school plus adults who are only in the building one or two times per year (unless something bad is happening) plus 8 minute 'classes' with 5 minute passing times do not make for many meaningful conversations. On the positive side, there were some meaningful conversations, I reviewed SBAR grades, introduced Edmodo, and distributed contact information.

What worked:

• Having a half-day for students gave me time to call parents to remind them about BtSN and make alternate arrangements as needed.
• Only had to talk one student-parent combination out of a panic about SBAR and conjunctive grading, and succeeded! There is to be no panicking and no tears in Physics.
• Did get to have a few in-depth conversations with both current and former parents.
• Dinner buffet at Sona (Maplewood, NJ) was delicious as usual. The lemon-coriander soup was especially tasty.

What didn't work:

• Not all of my students have signed up for Edmodo (partly because of the power/internet outages we've had), so I didn't have parent codes for all the parents.
• Did not reach all the parents.

I still have to check all the contact info parents gave me tonight against the info I already have before I turn in the sign-in sheets.