Welcome Back! A-Days

Welcome Back to school! I am so excited to get this year rolling. Today we did so much great stuff. We wrote 3/4 page about the coolest place we have ever been and one place we would want to go and why. Then we got to know each other. I introduced myself too. I'm Ms. Thackeray :) I was born and raised in SLC, UT. I attended West High School, which was fabulous. Then I attended BYU. I was the black sheep in a family where aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, and grandparents all attended the U of U. I didn't even know until I was attending BYU that my grandmother went there. (Apparently that is kept secret in my family). So I bleed purple. I still have a hard time at BYU vs. Utah games. I have lived and worked in Chicago, IL where I was the marketing coordinator for a friend's business. I have also taught high school in Washington, DC in an inner city school. I taught 11th grade there too! I have also lived in Thailand where I learned to speak Thai. It is amazing! And I'm sure I will bring it up a lot throughout the year.

After introductions we did a great learning activity: everyone guessed how many pieces of candy were in a jar. Then two students (self-proclaimed experts) told the class their guesses because they thought they were closest to the actual number of pieces of candy in the jar. After the experts gave us their guesses we did something unheard of: we did math in an English class! I know. What we did was we collected everyone's guesses and then averaged them together. And guess what the result was. Well the class's average was closer to the actual number of pieces of candy than either of the experts. Then we discussed what this means for our class. It means that collectively we are smarter than we are individually. And when we work together we come closer to perfection than we can on our own.

This is what I want for our class this year. I want us to establish a community in which we all work together to reach a higher level of success than we ever could on our own. We went on to discuss the origin, roots, and Thai translation of the word community. You can look up the PowerPoint slides on our class website: Community PowerPoint

Now, your assignment...it's not much today. I just want you to think, but think hard about what you expect from an English class and what you expect from me as your teacher. We will talk more about expectations next time. See ya soon!