HHS Dual Retirement Party!

Laurie Ceccarelli and Jeffrie Young are retiring from Highland High School after years and years of service so we all put together a lunchtime potluck party for both of them.  We invited folks from our admin, from the district office and even their families!  It was a great turn out and everyone had a good time...there were mini speeches, hugs, laughs, and even a few tears!  They will be missed, but we wished them many of  relaxing and enjoyable retirement years!!! 

Christmas Pics at HHS!

Me an a few of my CRAZY art students...we were taking photos for a project!

Halloween--Highland Style!!!

It's Halloween 2011 and I needed a costume!!!  After creating an outfit for Octoberfest, I decided to use it for Halloween too!  By promising to dress up I got a bunch of my students to sport costumes too!  My friend Kim Smith (co-teacher in crime) dressed up as Lady Gaga with a platinum white wig!  My friend (and aide) Linda Bradbury dressed as witch!  My math class gutted pumpkins for a seed related statistics lesson (mean, median, mode etc.) then my art class carved them!  Oh-yeah baby, cross curricular madness!!! It was a fun gooey day!  :-)

LAST day of summer school...July 1st, 2011

It is the LAST day of summer school 2011...and today is the day to clean up and shut down until August!!!  I took pictures of my ceiling this year because we added to my semi-permanent decorations with more string art!  I do not like to work in a sterile environment with all white walls but decorating my ceiling tiles is a bit of a feat because I have approximately 10 foot ceilings and getting up their definitely requires a ladder.  In this particular case it took two ladders because getting the ceiling tiles down is a bit of a trick

thanks to all the suspension wires up in the rafters.  Oh, and did I mention they break REALLY easily (I know this because we had a couple casualties)!!!  Luckily the cracked tiles seem to be repairable with a generous amount of Super Tacky Glue!  I've always said that it is a good idea to get on the good side of the custodians and this was one of those times where a good relationship came in handy because they were able to "look the other way" while I had about 10 holes in my ceiling for a few days!!! 

You see, the reason I called the string art semi-permanent is because the students actually pin everything directly into the tiles while they are down and so its cork-like properties is actually what holds everything in place!  The name plates this year were created using block lettering and one-point perspective.   I'm hoping to eventually decorate each tile with student work but it'll take a few more summers before that can be achieved!!!  :-) 

Senior activities as the school year winds down...May 2011

It's May 2011 and it's crunch time...were quickly approaching finals, graduation, and summer school.  Often times it doesn't feel like you even have time to breathe!  Even with all the work related craziness, I think the thing that saved me was my commitment to bootcamp...at this point I was attending the 5-6am class five days a week at Bakersfield Fit and then I also tried to make it to Calvin's cross training class from 5:30-6:30ish a few nights a week.  As much as I hated waking up at 4:30 in the morning or arriving home at 7pm starving, they were a great stress release and ultimately made me feel better!  Back at school, we were planning end of the year celebrations and making constant calls home to remind parents of mandatory graduation events where they will be responsible to transport their students to and from.  Then the rush of having all final exams typed up at least a week early

because seniors take their tests early so that we teachers can get grades into the computer systems in time for the final clearance for the grad ceremony.  Amid all of that chaos, Kim Smith (my co-Deaf Ed. teacher in crime) decided that she wanted the seniors to paint the platform her dad recently built for her. 

You see, Kim is all of five foot and some change and often gets frustrated because in some of her larger classes the students in the back of the room have trouble seeing her.  In a standard classroom this wouldn't be such a big problem because the students can still hear the teacher but in our rooms this is not the case!  Our students are either Deaf or hard of hearing and actually do have to SEE us in order to "hear" us.  The signing space is primarily located in the torso area which for someone Kim's height puts her hands between 4 and 5 feet which isn't much above the head of a seated student.  So her father built her

about a 1 foot by 6 foot stage to put under her white board to teach from which she wanted brightened up!  This was a job for my 4th period art class...so we got to sketching.  Her rules were that it must be bright, must incorporate the school colors of green and blue, and because she is a girly girl it MUST have pink!!!  You be the judge, but I think we mastered it!  :)

Classroom Upgrades...Spring Break...April 2011

Highland High School went through modernization a few years ago and most teachers were given brand new blue desk chairs...I actually opted out of the order because they really weren't very comfortable and my old hand-me-down chair was actually quite comfy--just a bit of an eye sore!!!  To be honest, I forget exactly when I decided to reupholster my chair but I'm pretty sure it was over my Easter break sometime after I'd run across the most PERFECT (albeit gaudy) plaid material!!! Highland's mascot is the

Scotsman and he dresses in a Royal Blue and Kelly Green plaid kilt and this material was IT...and at a low low clearance price of 70% off (which brought it down to less than $2.00 a yard) a downright steal!!!  For my

first reupholstered desk chair I gotta say it came out looking pretty good!  Thanks to mom giving me the idea to use the old material as the pattern because I was trying to decide how to measure everything out and was a bit

scared I'd get it all ripped apart and never be able to get it put back together again!  Admittedly there were a couple of humpty-dumpty touch and go  

moments where I had one stripped screw and a couple extra parts with no place for them to go, but with a bit of frustration and some creative thinking everything seemed to come together in the end!  Once I got it back to school a bunch of people wanted one just like it!  :)