In which I’m listening

I got new albums from Prince and Billie Eilish today, both of which were released today, and I feel like that fact represents most of the breadth of my music tastes pretty accurately. The Prince album was recorded in 2010, at the tail end of the New Power Generation years, which for me is Peak Prince. I’ve only listened to it once (and am currently halfway through the Eilish album) but it’s entirely possible that there will be gushing about it in the near future. I need a couple more spins before I’m going to be able to write coherently about it, though.

Yeah, I said “spins,” even though I’m listening to MP3s. My blog, my grammar. Shuddup.

I went over to work today, as planned, and while there was some stuff that I wanted to do that I wasn’t able to (they had all summer to move my desk, and they haven’t, which … grr) I got a decent start on setting the room up. One thing I’m going to try out this year: I have more bulletin boards than I know what to do with, so I’m going to use one of them to display student compliments for each other. I’ve used this a few times on assignments as a bonus question– literally “say something nice about someone else in the room for a bonus point,” and the kids generally do a pretty good job. It’s also interesting how cleanly the compliments seem to get spread around– I pay attention, and while there are some kids who are more popular than others everybody seems to be getting mentioned every other time or so.

What I’m thinking I’ll do is make a little form– maybe a quarter of a piece of paper– and occasionally pass them out and demand everyone write something nice about somebody and also leave them out so that they can leave compliments for people whenever they want. Maybe on the days where I make them write them I’ll clear the board first so I can pass the kids’ compliments back to them. I figure anything I can do to make the classroom more welcoming is only going to result in good things, and this is going to be a year where I need as much buy-in from my students as I can possibly get, since I’ll be asking for a lot from them. And if it doesn’t work, I can always take it down after the first quarter if I want to.

Off to do some recording. I’ll likely do some live-streaming tonight as well, so swing by the channel this evening if that sounds like fun.