Happy spring break to me! My students were so excited for spring break, they gave me a gift: a 6 INCH-high stack of papers to grade (no exaggeration--not needed!). What a great "break", right?

You know, in college, all the professors told the future English teachers they were nuts for choosing English because of the monstrous amount of papers that need grading. I shrugged it off at the time--naivete is bliss!

This week we're beginning poetry. You want a challenging profession? Try convincing 13-year-olds to love poetry. Thank heavens for Shel Silverstein. Here's one of the most beautiful and one of my favorite poems, as told by Youtube:



Also, after some deliberation, I've decided to go public with my weight-loss goals. According to "experts", people stick to their weight-loss program if they tell people about it. SOOO, people, my goal is to lose 15 pounds before August 8th (CRUISE TIME!!). To achieve this, I will be cutting way back on sweets and exercising on the Wii fit 5x per week for at least 30 minutes. I've read a lot of success stories of people who used the Wii fit, so here's hoping!