April 15, 2010: Tax Day

Yes, it is Tax Day, but it is a non event for us, have already received our tax returns. Our philosophy is simple, "Pay, pay, pay, and get a refund." We know we are not disciplined enough with our money to have money in savings in case we owe in taxes. Therefore we claim the least deductions possible, allow the government to take as much of our income as possible, and then settle up with us next year. In this way, we are involuntarily saving money and giving ourselves a gift each spring when the tax return checks come. Sure, I know, if we kept the money ourselves and held onto it in even a basic savings account we would collect interest on the money and technically we would have even more money when it is all said and done. But like I said earlier, if we see that money is in the bank, it won't be in the bank for long.

From the Classroom

I have been teaching at Leesville Road High School for almost 14 full years, but I know I still have a lot to learn about teaching. Just yesterday I made a couple of observations that will be pretty important in the future.

1) Students are superstitious.

My 1st period class, regular Civics and Economics, was viewing a Power Point presentation and taking notes. I offered to put the presentation online on my website - both the Power Point Show and the handout/paper version. The hope was to speed up the class by not having to spend so much time on each slide while the students all copied down the information. Mind you, although I have done this with my two honors classes this semester, I have been reluctant to do so in the regular class because I do not trust that they will actually view the presentation on their own time. But I took a chance and let them have a try. More importantly was that some of the students who were the biggest advocates for putting the presentation on line continued to write down the notes during class. So I did not save any time at all! From this I have that the students are superstitious, they will stick to their habit out of fear that if they don't do things the way they always have, that they will not do as well. I think I will change the expectations from the beginning and give them more independence from the start.

2) Some Students Need a Forum

I have student in my 2nd period honors Civics and Economics class who needs to be in the spotlight. This student has gone so far as to challenge me to a foot race (although we did not race, I am confident I would win). The class has discovered that his goal is to fill all silence in the class with words. He does not understand the idea of "meaningful silence." Every time I pause he will interject with a story or a "what if" type question. Yesterday this became painfully obvious because I needed to finish up a unit as I was giving test on the information today. True to form, every time I paused to allow the students to think on an idea or write some information down, he filled the space with a question. I learned a valuable lesson from this, do not give him an audience and he will eventually stop. For most of the semester I have enabled this behavior by entertaining most of his questions and comments (it is social studies, being social is an important skill). But out of necessity, I had no time to entertain him and so I was forced to move on and ignore him - which at times came of as though I was being rude. We did finish the lesson yesterday and had the test today. I must remember to keep the spotlight for myself.

From the Sports Desk

Last night, Fences of Cary Blue (our softball team) had a "West Coast" game - not literally, but since it started so late it felt like I was up late watching a game from the west coast. We learned that we are not an 8:45pm team, we do much better when we begin our game at 6:45pm. We lost 16-6, run ruled in the 6th inning. Overall our bats didn't come together for most of the game until the late innings, and our defense was less than spectacular. Tack on to that the fact they were good hitters that seemed to always find the holes in the field made it very difficult to get any momentum in the field. I did continue my usual contribution going 3-3 with two doubles, one single, one run batted in, and one run scored. I do take blame for some of the things that went wrong in the game. Right from the beginning, I tried to stretch a double into a triple to lead off our half of the first inning and was thrown out at third. It is the first game this season that I led off with an out. I put us out of our rhythm from the start. It is also the first game this season we did not score any runs in the first inning. I did learn a bit from the game, but I will see just how much come next week.

To see my website for my classes, visit: Caggia Social Studies. It will always be a work in progress. So far the only pages with content are under Civics & Economics.