2015-2016 school year: day 32 recap

     Here's a recap of a much better Thursday following a tough Wednesday (DISCLAIMER: IF YOU'RE A CUBS FAN, YOU MIGHT NOT BE READY FOR THIS POST, THOUGH IT'S ALL IN GOOD FUN).
     In reading class, students continued reading Jim Murphy's The Great Fire, moving onto Chapter 2 and exploring how everything went wrong en route to this fire being a complete disaster. Thanks to Ms. Murphy for relating this to Murphy's Law, when anything that can go wrong, does go wrong (see Daniel Murphy's performance against the Cubs in the concluded NLCS). In the case of the Great Fire, this was certainly the case, as a series of mistakes helped the fire quickly become uncontrollable. Like yesterday, students read in groups, searching for a piece of text evidence that showed a grievous mistake during the fire. Students then shared their text evidence at the end of the chapter and formed a synthesized group main idea based on that evidence. I am excited to see what the students came up with tomorrow when they will present on the bumblings and stumblings of certain Chicagoans (not named the Cubs starting rotation) during the Great Fire.
       In social studies, the effort was much better than yesterday as students performed different roles (Previewer, Reader, Vocab Finder and Researcher) while starting Chapter 2, which focuses on the earliest civilizations in the Fertile Crescent. Students learned how the Mesopotamians made the best of a difficult situation, unlike Chicagoans during the fire who made a bad situation much worse. For example, the Mesopotamians were smart enough to adapt to the long, dry and hot summers that threatened their lives by developing irrigation systems that tapped into the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and allowed them to grow crops, create surpluses and specialize. Talk about an adaptive group. Too bad the Cubs weren't as adaptive at figuring out Mets starting pitching, realizing not to pitch to Murphy, and keeping the aggressive New York team more contained on the basepaths.      
     In writing class, my homeroom went to Ms. Reodica to work on the science fair review of literature while her students came to me to wrap up some work with subjects and predicates, which have proven as tricky for the students as the Mets starting rotation was for the Cubs this past series.
       Last but not least, we had a tornado drill in the morning. Gratefully, a real tornado was not noticed today in Chicago, though there was one in the top half of last night's first inning in the form of Lucas Duda's and Travis D'arnaud's back-to-back jacks that effectively ended the series and the Cubs season.
      It's wait 'til next year for the Cubs. As for the kids and me, it's wait 'til 2:45 p.m. tomorrow. While "It's Not Gonna Happen" this year, "It's the Weekend" (almost).