The best laid plans. . .

You should always have a backup plan. That's my lesson for the week.

I spent last weekend setting up blogs for my students with my brother. We both got very excited about how brilliant and talented we are. I linked the blogs with my website so that it will be easy for my students to find the blogs, and set them up to be private. Then, I wrote my lesson plans to include a day for getting on the computers and look over the blogs as well as set up student accounts in turnitin.com, a lovely plagarism site.

Well, I didn't sleep more than 3 hours Thursday night (fun with insomnia!) but thought, "No big deal, my kids will be playing around on the internet tomorrow, I can handle that with no sleep." I got to school a bit earlier than usual, and opened my school email to find that the internet was down and would be all day. FUN!!! So, on my 3 hours of sleep I had to come up with a completely different lesson plan. I never realized how much I rely on the internet until I didn't have it to help me. We'd just finished Of Mice and Men the day before, so I decided that we'd analyze the part of "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns where Steinbeck got his title. I sat down at my computer to search for the poem when I realized (duh) again that the internet didn't work. I had to use (gasp!) books! Luckily, I still have my handy dandy Norton Anthologies of English Literature volumes I and II from my days as an English major at BYU. For those of you who weren't English majors, Norton Anthologies are very heavy books with so much literature packed inside that the pages are almost as thin as tissue paper and the print is almost microscopic. I had a love/hate relationship with them while I was in college, especially the semester when I had to carry three such anthologies on Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays.

Yesterday, it was all love baby. I found the poem, typed it in larger print, made copies, and viola! I had a lesson plan. The irony that they were analyzing a poem with the lines "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/go oft awry." did not escape me. . . trust me.

My students did a great job analyzing and connecting the poem to the novel, I got their email addresses for the blogs, and I got a LOT of work done because I didn't have the internet to distract me. I never realized how much time I waste in a day, and I must say, I'm a bit ashamed.

Well, I've got to go to YouTube and watch some videos... catch you later.