Mock Trial Invitational and more!

January is a busy month for me, mostly due to Mock Trial events. We hosted the Owatonna Invitational this weekend, and we are attending Lakeville's next weekend. We have our regional matches beginning on the 21st. Second quarter ends the 20th, which means getting grades submitted. Matt's birthday was Friday. I have to attend all-day Read180 training tomorrow, which means getting sub plans together. And, of course, the normal everyday stuff doesn't just go away!

The invitational this weekend went pretty well. The attorney coach I work with pulled together judges for us and helped run the tournament and Matt came along to help, too. My job was to do all the organizing, which is not exactly my forte. We had 14 teams registered including ours, and we had three rounds. We were all set to start the first round at 9am when we discovered the New Ulm team hadn't shown up. Our only solution with 5 minutes notice was for our attorney coach, one of our students not competing in Round 1, and myself to oppose the team New Ulm would have played. That meant I portrayed all three witnesses and our attorney coach did most of the lawyer parts. She said she was more nervous to do Mock Trial that she feels during her actual job, so that should indicate how high pressure Mock Trial tournaments can be. Our second snafu came along when mostly prosecution teams won the first round, which left us to decide the priority for the second round: pitting winners against winners or allowing each team to do both sides. Apparently we decided wrongly, and when the coaches got wind of it there were complaints and mass chaos we corrected the problem. Once the second round was underway, I hid until it was over.

One nice thing was that my parents came down to watch their first Mock Trial event ever (they didn't even get a chance to see my cousin's team, which went on to win the national tournament last year!). Afterward we went out to dinner with Matt's parents who were in town for his birthday. We ate delicious tacos and had a great time.

This week at school was pretty stressful because I was preparing for the tournament. The highlight of the week might have been that I had my two of my Read180 students take the SRI test (which checks their reading skills progress) and they exceeded their September score by 200 and 500 points, respectively, which is basically unheard of progress. My 10th grade students took the NWEA, and I didn't have quite as dramatic success. Maybe one third of them improved their scores by at least one point, and about 10 of them total earned a score that makes them likely to pass the MCA test in April (which is required for graduation). Luckily I have a few more months to work with them, especially on informational texts.

I'm currently reading Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about a black woman whose cervical cells were taken by scientist while she was dying from cancer in 1951. Her cells turned out to be amazingly capable of reproducing in culture and have dramatically affected medical research, despite the fact that her family didn't find out about it until years later. I'm about halfway through, but it's absolutely fascinating and I would strongly recommend it. My mom gave me Jeanette Wall's latest book last night, so I think that's up next on my reading list. I told my Read180 kids that our goal before June was to read 50 books, so I figure I'd better add a few to the list to help them out.