Music: A little bit of everything.
Mood: Hooray for semi-productive weekends!
Movie: Glass Fleet Volume 3, Tenchi Universe Volume 2, and Tweeny Witches Volume 3, Part 2.
Food: Pizza!
Literary Goodness: The Redheaded Princess by Ann Rinaldi, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire by Rafe Esquith, and an assortment of graphic novels.

Man, am I ready for Thanksgiving break.

The school year's still going well--abnormally well for me, apparently. My classes hardly gave me any trouble last week, but I heard from other teachers that they had many more discipline issues than usual, and the Assistant Principal said that behavior is only going to become more of an issue between now and Christmas. Holiday excitement and all that. Still, I can't complain.

We're about to wrap up an author study on Edgar Allan Poe, which has gone quite well thus far. I have Poe to thank for marrying his 13 year old cousin when he was 26 himself. I don't think my kids would have cared half as much if they hadn't found some odd thing like that to latch on to, but they did, and now many of them seem quite knowledgeable about other Poe facts because of it. After Poe, we're going to do a short unit on Folktales, including Tall Tales and Fairy Tales, and then we're going to launch into A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thus, content-wise, I'm beginning to enter the areas where I'm most knowledgeable. I kind of feel sorry for all the concrete-thinking students who have to sit through all this fantasy (since, after Midsummer Night, we're going into mythology), but at least the next huge chunk of the year is going to be fun to teach.

We also just wrapped up our first major creative writing assignment, which, for the most part, was hugely successful. Quite unexpectedly, I had many students fail to turn in their work on the due date. This disappointed me at first, but then the word slowly came out that these students didn't turn in their work because their stories were, on average, ten or more pages long...and many of them hadn't even met the first assignment requirement yet. Some hadn't even finished by the second due date, but I told them to turn in what they had anyway. I had to dock a few points for incompleteness (after all, part of the assignment was turning in a complete story). Despite the fact that the assignment had ended, though, many of them still wanted to finish their stories, so I'm working in some extra credit there. As a teacher, I get annoyed when students turn in incomplete work, but no way am I going to penalize a student for being unfinished at ten pages when I only asked for two.

The best thing about it is that, even though my kids' grammar needs some serious help, beneath it all, most of them are pretty good writers. Some have promised to bring me the novels they're working on outside of class so that I can edit them before they try to publish them. The fact that I have no fewer than five students who are writing their own novels and/or intend to publish them is something that I find quite exciting. It's especially impressive once one considers that I only teach about forty kids.

We're starting a class anthology where students can enter their work for critique. I've been checking out self-publishing sites like Lulu.com for my students who are interested in publishing their work outside of the anthology, so it's very possible that, by the end of the year, one section of my classroom library could be devoted to student-produced work. It's an exciting thought and, honestly, one of the reasons why I enjoy teaching so much. Even though I've hardly had time to write anything this year, it feels like I'm writing vicariously through my students.

Speaking of writing, I have all of two pages on this year's NaNo novel. I'll have more on that once I actually get around to posting what I've written. Man, do I miss having mornings free for writing...

Of course, half the reason that I haven't been writing is because I've begun Netflixing again. Originally I resubscribed in the name of Education, since I couldn't access certain DVDs that I wanted to use in class as easily as I would have liked through the library. Since I already owned most of the DVDs that I've shown in recent units, though, I've fallen back into the old anime habit.

Glass Fleet has become my new great anime love (even though there are parts of it that I could honestly do without). It's similar to Last Exile, another of my favorite animes, being that it's a military-oriented science fantasy. Glass Fleet however, seems to me the stronger of the two because, where Last Exile failed--in its pacing and plotting--Glass Fleet succeeds. It also has the added benefit of being a space opera styled with French Revolutionary images, and that odd combination is all kinds of awesome. (I'd attempted the combination myself in an earlier story, Wilted Roses in the Grey Starscape, but my version failed because of its buckets of aimless angst and symbolism-for-symbolism's-sake.)

I've also discovered Shadow Skill, which is an old-school-style fighting anime, more notable than others for the fact that it's strongest fighter is female. My teaching 8th grade, too, has led me back to one of the shows that I enjoyed in 8th grade, Tenchi Universe. It's also another of those shows that had a clear influence on my writing, seeing as how most everything I write these days seems to feature a Ryoko-style space pirate or a Washu-like mad scientist.

After I finish these series, I'm going to tackle One Piece and Victorian Romance Emma. Oh, and I also began watching Final Fantasy: Advent Children but didn't have the patience to finish it. The fight scenes that I saw were awesome, but the attempts at plotting and character development between them were at least ten different kinds of boring.

...And that's all for now.