Blogging My Way through Lab Notebooks

I'm half way through checking 8th grade lab notebooks. There are 13 assignments in them since I last checked them. A little blog break and then back to the tedium.Several years ago I worked at a university in London. The students had these long essay final exams that needed to be graded in a relatively short period of time. Each one took 20-30 minutes to grade. I could take them home. We lived in a cool place just across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament. I would start out in a lovely park with a backpack full of exams, grade four, get a coffee, and move on to another park. This passed the time.
I'm going to make this blog my symbolic parks of Westminster. Every 4 notebooks I'll stop to blog a bit.

Another 4 notebooks graded and moving to a new blog park.  Seventh grade was doing experiment today where they mix baking soda and vinegar and collect the carbon dioxide in a balloon and then calculated the volume of the balloon by displacing water. It was a little messy. Paper towels were needed. The students are all second language speakers of English and most would ask for a "towel paper". The words for paper towel in Spanish is "papel toalla". Why would they reverse the word order when they translate to Enlgish? Fascinating. Time to grade 4 more notebooks.

Another 4 notebooks done and moving to "School Vision Blog Park". Yesterday I was reading up on vision and mission statements and found info on statments that combine the two. When I reread the school's mission statement I developed a strong sense that it combined the two. The first part  ("Our school fulfills the needs of the whole child") seems to be vision and the rest ("by teaching intellectual, democratic, moral, ...) seems to be mission. I sent this info off to the administrative powers that are calling everyone together on Saturday morning to write a vision statement for the school. I have a strong feeling I have not saved anyone from the agony of a wasted Saturday morning exploring platitudes that (much like our current 'mission/vision' statement) will have no effect on the instruction that actually takes place. Time to grade 4 more.

I got in a zone a finished them all but a few I've saved to grade during the "Vision" meeting.