What's on your mind

I have just found a great web site that has a day by day list of specials. http://tv.popcrunch.com/2008-christmas-tv-specials-and-movies-schedule/ I hope this has your favorite special listed.

You asked to be kept informed of when the specials are on so here we go.... Tuesday 12/16 on ABC at 8:00 is Charlie Brown Christmas Wednesday 12/17 on ABC Family at 7 is I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus same night at 8:00 on NBC is A Muppet Christmas Thursday 12/18 on ABC Family at 8 is the movie The Grinch that Stole Christmas Friday 12/19 on ABC Family is a repeat of A Miser Brothers' Christmas in case you missed last week Saturday 12/20 on CBS at 8 is the movie Elf and on ABC is I want a dog for Christmas Charlie Brown (again) Enjoy yourself!

I promised that I would let you know when the holiday specials were on TV so here is the latest update: Wednesday 12/10 at 8:00 on ABC Family is Santa Claus is Coming to town. at 9:00 the same night on the same channel is Rudolph's shiny new year. Thursday 12/11 at 8:00 on ABC Family is The year without a Santa Claus. (I will miss that one because I will be at school watching the honor society inductions.) Friday 12/12 at 8:00 on CBS is Frosty and Frosty returns. Saturday NBC is showing the movie "It's a wonderful life" at 8:00 and ABC family has "A Miser Brother's Christmas" Then Monday 12/15 on ABC at 8:00 is "I want a dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown" Enjoy!

What an exciting weekend. I spent Saturday at Gillette Stadium watching some great high school football teams. Sure it would have been even more exciting if Norton won, but I am very proud of the team. I was also impressed by the turnout Norton had in the stands. Then Sunday I woke to a white ground. Anyone who knows me is well aware that I love snow. Too bad we didn’t get more than the dusting, maybe more will come Friday morning. Then Sunday morning I did a little holiday shopping, (I love to shop) and came home to watch the Patriots win. I had a great weekend!

Have you looked at the school calendar lately? There is so much going on here at Norton High School. We have the BIG Superbowl game saturday, which I am very excited about. Hopefully I will see lots of you there, but before that we have the snowball dance Friday night for the freshmen and sophomores. Next week we have the holiday concert Wednesday night and the honor society inductions Thursday night. I believe there is a TR-M recital tonight as well. December certainly is a busy time here at Norton High School. Enjoy all the festivities.

I have already told everyone that I love this holiday season and one of the reasons is because I love watching all the holiday specials. I have found a web site that tells you when all the specials are airing onTV. I noticed that a few of my readers have taken the poll of Christmas specials and picked "A Christmas Story". Well you may be happy to know that it is on TV Friday at 8pm on TBS. Thursday night ABC family has "Jack Frost", "Santa Claus is coming to town" and "The year without a Santa" Too bad I will miss some of those because I will be at parent Teacher conferences for my daughter at King Philip. Tuesday night the "Grinch who stole Christmas" is on. but I think most of us will miss that because we will be at the football playoff game. That is pretty exciting, huh? We win Tuesday and then Saturday we will be at Gillette Stadium for the high school superbowl. Way to go Norton! The teamn winning has made this time of year even mo...

Last night I went to the semi formal and as usual I had a great time. I love to see all my students dressed up so nice. As I walked in the door I was right in front of the dance floor and I don't think any girl was wearing shoes. You girls are crazy walking around barefoot in a public place, but it looked like everyone was having the best time. Makes me wish there were more events like this. Now I have to wait until the spring to come and see everyone at the prom. Anyone know the date of the prom? Well I am looking forward to it. I'm glad everyone had so much fun last night and I am so glad I was invited. Make sure you view my photo album to the left with all my pictures.

What is your favorite time of the year? Is it Summer when you are out of school and the weather is wonderful? Not Me. I'm not saying I dislike the summer, because I don't, but it is not my favorite time. We are coming up to my favorite part of the year. I love the holiday season. I love the holidays and the cold weather especially when we get snow (and snow days!). I enjoy all the holiday specials on TV and I enjoy the music. The only problem with this time of year is that I have too much to do. I get so excited about the holidays and the shopping that my school work tends to take a back seat and that is not a wise choice to make. I will have to make a conscious effort this year to keep up with the school work. If I start slacking I am sure my students will let me know.

Once again the Norton Community has a chance to show it's spirit. Fox 25 news has nominated Sean Ryan as one of five players for High School Friday Player of the Month of October. All you have to do is go to myfoxboston.com. Click on the sports tab and then click on high school Friday and you will see the names to vote for on the right side. As of today, Friday 11-7-08 at 10:00am, Sean is in second place with 23% of the vote. A player from Medway has 71% of the vote. Lets get those votes in for him. PLEASE PASS THIS ALONG!! Lets get some spirit going!! Lets all vote for Sean Ryan as High School Friday Player of the Month of October.

Sports and Math......do they go together? I noticed that my blog has been a lot about sports (especially the redsox) and I was wondering if you think that math and sports are connected. I took a tour of the Patriots Hall of Fame Wednesday morning and that has me thinking even more about the connection between math and sports. The Hall of fame has a lot of educational things in it. When the kicker is attempting a field goal do you think he is thinking about the math involved? Well he should be. Do you have any idea what the percent of increase is on ticket prices and the programs sold at each game? What about the all the statistics kept on these professional players. I am sure there is a mathematician involved, specifically a statistician. So what do you think about the sports and math connection?

When you have a long weekend, do you ever think "This is great. I'll spend this time catching up"? When I left school on Friday I was so excited to have a three day weekend. I thought I could have the extra time to get caught up on things. Well it is already Monday and I have not done one thing that I thought I would do. I wanted to get caught up on some correcting and make some extra practice sheets to post on edline. I also needed to get some things done around my house. None of that got done. Saturday My daughter had a double header for marching band competitions so there was a 1:00 show in Dartmouth and a 6pm show in New Bedford. I am happy to report that her school, King Philip, won both competitions. When I arrived home Saturday night I stayed up to watch the late Red Sox game. Depressing that we lost, but I’ll get over it. Then Sunday my son had a baseball game, which his team won. They are 5-1 overall this fall. When I got home from that I did manage to do one thi...

I went to Bridgewater State College today to listen to Mr. Alan November speak about learning in the 21st century. Now I am all excited about trying new things in my math class. I have set up a custom search engine on google to help search specifically for web sites that will help explain precalculus topics. I am going to ask all my students to contribute web sites to this search engine. I have also set up an account with jingproject.com so we will be making videos at the end of each class to summarize the key topics we covered that day. The videos will then be posted on the internet for all to view. Each day I am hoping to have a different student volunteer to make the summary video, or maybe I will pick students at random. I know the class is going to enjoy doing this. My next project is going to be on epals.com. I hope to find a math teacher in a different country that wants to have contact with us. We can start communications between the two classes and use skype to have ongoing co...

What a week! The Norton football team is going to have a great game Friday night and put on a show for Fox 25 and all the viewers, The RedSox won their first playoff game in California, and my sons fall baseball team is undefeated with only 3 games left to play. Did anyone stay up late last night to watch the redsox game? I don't know why I felt it necessary to stay up that late on a school night. Now, today I am tired and will probably be cranky. I will have to come home from school and take a nap at 3:00. Oh well, at least the sox won and I did get 4.5 hours of sleep.

I just finished correcting one class of Pre-calc tests. It took over 3 hours to correct the tests. I spent most of the time writing notes on why the answers were wrong. I put a lot of effort into making a review sheet to do for homework and then another to post on edline. I wish my students put the same amount of effort into doing those sheets and preparing for the test. There were four perfect test scores of 100 and I congratulate all of you that worked hard to prepare for this test. I was disappointed in the number of students that did poorly. I hope my students take this as a learning experience and if they did poorly they will try harder for the next one. You need to put a lot of effort into a Pre-calculus class if you want to be successful.

Go Lancers I love that the whole school is coming together to vote on myFoxBoston.com. This is a great way to promote school spirit. My last check showed Dennis Yarmouth with 311 votes and Norton High with 1672 votes. Keep spreading the word, we don't want to give them a chance to catch up. Then on Friday we need to continue to show our school spirit by coming to the game and cheering our team on to victory.

Hello all you Red Sox fans...Big game tonight. If we win tonight then we take over first place. Did you watch last nights game? How about all those homeruns? I'm ready to see that again tonight. I love baseball season when we get close to the playoffs, especially when the Red Sox are having a good year. Game time in 10 minutes.

Wow, the first week of school is over. Anyone else tired? It was a short week and I am so tired. I'm ready to go to bed for the night and it is only 6:30. This happens to me every year. My body is so used to being relaxed all the time and now I am on the go from 5:45am until this time at night. I shouldn't be complaining because most teenagers, if they are anything like my children, are on the go more than me. My daughter gets off the school bus at 3:00, does homework, eats dinner and is back at school for color guard by 5pm. She gets home from that at 9pm and goes back to homework. Hopefully is asleep by 11:00 only to get up at 6am and start all over again. Thank goodness the youth have so much energy. I need a little energy myself right now to go outside and pick up all the small items that may blow away when the storm Hanna comes through this area tomorrow. One thing you may not know about me is that I love the weather. I watch the weather channel for fun and I check www.we...

Is everyone enjoying their summer? That is probably a silly question. What student or teacher doesn't enjoy their summer? I have spent most of the month of July at baseball games. My son, Bryan, plays summer ball and I truly enjoy watching those games. It was great to see some of my students at the ball fields as well. Whenever Plainville had a game I would walk around all the other fields and see if there were any purple uniforms. If I saw purple I knew Norton was playing. I spent a little bit of time at school this month too. We have two new math teachers and I wanted to give them tours of the school and give them books for the classes they will be teaching. The highlight of the month for me was my family outing at Six Flags. All my brother and sisters came with their children along with some cousins and their children. We were at the park for an early AAA opening at 9am and we left around 9pm. What a day! My next trip there will hopefully be in May(2009) for Math Day. I ho...

I would like everyone to read Mr. Dewar's blog and comment on his blog. You want to comment on what he wrote about blogging. It is a couple of articles ago on his blog(not the most recent)I will be checking his blog to see if you made a comment. Thanks for doing this. scroll down and there is a link to his blog on the left side.

Can you believe it? June is right around the corner. I need a little more time in the school year to finish everything I want to do. Don't you want to extend the year school by a week or two? I guess I will have to accept the fact that I have to leave some things for next year. At the end of each school year I reflect on how things went all year. What I did that went well, and what needs to be changed for next year. Here is your chance to make a difference....What should be done differently in Pre-Calc next year? I know I will use the smartview software more. I will make sure I don't forget that we have it. I am going to show the students the little calculator tricks at the beginning of the year instead of at the end. (sorry!) I never thought to ask if you knew the little things like recalling a previous answer. I believe the students will benefit from more frequent notebook quizzes so I will make that change as well. Now it is your turn to tell me what you think. What would ha...

I have to admit that when I woke up Friday morning I was a little nervous about the weather, but the day turned out pretty good. I should have known that a little wet weather would not ruin our field trip. We all got a little damp with the heavy mist for the first hour we were there, but after that I stayed pretty dry. I had a great day and I hope that all my students did as well. You were supposed to have fun on this trip, but I also wanted you to make those math connections. Did you? Let me know. I have to stop typing and go correct those six flags packets. Then I will check my email for some more pictures from six flags. Don't forget to email them to me.

It is Sunday night and tomorrow morning I have to wake up with an alarm clock. Time to go finish out the school year. For those of you reading this blog that are depressed by the end of school vacation, you only have 36 more days of school. I hope everyone had a great week off from school. I went to watch the marathon. My family watched from mile 16.5 in Newton. We saw Lance Armstrong go by, then Mr. Taylor was only minutes behind him. My husband was about 15 minutes behind Mr. Taylor. After all 3 passed by I caught the green line into Boston to the finish line. Congrats to the two Mr. Taylors for a great race. Boston was crazy. So many people there was barely any room to move, but I wouldn't have missed out on the experience. My only complaint was the T was so crowded that everyone was squished in with little breathing room. Even with that said I recommend you go to the marathon. The rest of my week was very relaxing. I did a little bit of school work. I made up the workbook f...

We all know that the school budget is going through some tough times. One thing that I have been doing is sending in empty ink cartridges and old cell phones to earn points for our school. I send them to a company called funding factory. The points that are issued can be used to purchase educational items. My goal for this year and next year is to earn enough points to buy white board markers for all the teachers. This will allow us to have a little bit more money in the budget to spend on other things. I need everyone to help me out with this. Please ask people you know to save these items and donate them to the school. You can bring them to me or the items can be dropped off in the main office. I will continue to send these items in over the summer so they can be dropped off in July and August too. Thanks for all your help.

I wonder if you realize how lucky we are here in Norton? We have two administrators that really care about the school community. Whenever a school activity is going on we always see Mr Dewar or Mr. Barth here supporting and cheering the students. Dr. Ansay attends events as well. I want you to know that it is not like that at every school. I have been dissappointed with the principal at my daughters school about that. I spent most of my weekend at my daughter's colorguard competitions. Saturday they won the state championship and Sunday they got the gold medal at the New England Championships. They are having a rally Tuesday night because Wednesday morning they are leaving for Ohio to compete for the National championship. Going to all of her competitions has made me realize that we have such a wonderful administration here in Norton. My daughter is a freshmen in high school and she has had many home shows for colorguard and I have never seen her school administrator at these. Last...

I can't believe I have gone so long without a word on my blog. Sorry about that. My last blog was about the book we all read and this blog is related to that as well. In 3 weeks, on April 21st, the Boston marathon will take place. This year Mr. Taylor is running in the marathon with Lance Armstrong to raise money and awareness of cancer and treatments. Mr. Taylor needs to raise $3500 for the Lance Armstrong foundation and he needs our help. You can visit the web site https://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=259771&supid=203303370 to see Mr. Taylor's donation page and maybe you or someone you know can make a donation. I am excited about the marathon. I love to watch the race and this year it will be more enjoyable because I will know two people running. The two Mr. Taylor's (Mr. Taylor the English teacher and Mr. Taylor my husband). You all know how much of a sports fan I am, marathons included, so you know I am counting down the days until I make the...

Have you started reading? I am reading this book for the second time. If you read to the left of my blog "all about me" you know that I am a Tour de France fan and a Lance Armstrong fan so I was excited to hear our book choice for this year. I hope you like the book as much as I did(or at least half as much as I did). The picture above is Lance during the last stage of his last Tour de France when he won a record 7 times. Now that Lance has retired from cycling he is doing a lot to raise money for cancer and awareness of early cancer detection. I am sure you have seen the yellow bracelets that read "Livestrong". That is his motto. I have been wearing mine for 3 years now. Ever since I was diagnosed with cancer myself. Lance will be in Boston in April to run the Boston marathon. I will be on the route some place to cheer him, and all the other runners(maybe Mr. Taylor will be running again this year). Lance is doing this to raise money for his foundation. I found t...

Most winters I look forward to a snow day or two, as I am sure most of my students do, but I find myself a little sad at the prospect of no school tomorrow. I am having so much fun this year at Norton High that I actually do not want a day off. My daughter thinks I am a little crazy because she is very excited about having a three day weekend. This is so out of character for me. I even have a sign that hangs in my dining room during the winter months that reads, "Please Snow, I'm a teacher". I hope that all of my students can find a career that they enjoy as much as I do. It is a wonderful feeling to get up in the morning and be excited about going to work. This year I started a new position and I was a little nervous leaving my comfort zone to try something new, but I am glad I choose this path. I truly believe I am growing. I have been learning so much and I just want to continue to learn more. Now back to the weather. If the weather people are correct (50-50 shot at th...