WWYD? (What would you do?)

This morning while I was enjoying my bowl of pops (gotta have my pops ™) and noticed an article in the newspaper talking about whether we really need those extra two days of school before thanksgiving break. I thought it was a funny article because you could tell the writer had kids; he described the first day as slow and as boring as it was. And the last day of school he mentioned how hard it would be to hold the kids’ attention because it was the day before break. He said ‘Even if you told them there would be a kick boxing match in the gym between Super-Mario and Barney they would not pay attention.’
Now, of course we all know super Mario would win, but it also depends on whether or not Barney had a weapon. But my point being, what can teachers really do to us to make us pay attention? In my Latin class in 6th grade the teacher had tried everything to keep us under control, from rewards to punishments, nothing worked. So about midway through the year she just gave up trying to teach us anything. Even though it was way fun to do whatever we wanted, it still felt wrong to the teacher to be so rowdy, by the start of 3rd quarter most of us realized this and calmed down and prepared to learn.
So what can teachers do? Wait? It may seem like a long and painful road to take, but at least it was successful.

Blegheim (pronounce it slowly...)

Apparently the entirety of this quarter of blogs has to be based on the suggestions given in the first blog post by Ms. Reinstein. I don’t know if that’s possible because there are fewer blog suggestions than we have blogs to write.
One of the blog suggestions is to put yourself in a characters shoes and consider the decisions they made. Obviously I am going to put myself in Odysseus’s shoes (or sandals) because we are reading that book now. When Odysseus makes the decision to sail his ship through the cave of Scylla rather than Charybdis, I think he made the right choice. If he would have sailed through to Charybdis he would have lost all of his men, rather than sail to Scylla which would only take out 7 of them. I think he also made a wise choice in not telling the men the monster was going to attack them. If he had, the men surely would have tried to save themselves just to live, and the monster might have torn up the entire ship just looking for them. * as of that asterisk I finished with exactly 200 words, how about that?

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Ah, the start of a new quarter in the endless blogging season. I got all my blogs done last quarter entirely on time, which is a goal I have set for this quarter as well.
Today in the odyssey we were to read book XIII and XIV I read both and I believe I relate to some of the characters in these sections. When Odysseus travels down to the underworld and meets the people, I think I connected with Tantalus a little bit. His punishment was to eternally be hungry and thirsty. If he reached for water or food it would always escape his grasp. I feel like many things in my life are like that today, always out of my reach. Especially on the swim team, I want to drop that extra second in the swim meet so I train as hard and as long as I can but never succeed, the time to beat just keeps on increasing. Its why the name ‘Tantalus’ is now the root of the word ‘tantalizing’ meaning just out of reach/ desirable.