welcome to shark tales.

Do you remember the blog from when I was in 8th grade and one of our student teachers cried because kids didn’t like her, and they made a petition to get rid of her? We’re having similar problems now in biology. We have a student teacher now, and she was teaching our class today. She was having us take notes off a slideshow she made about mendelian genetics, that she clearly put a lot of time into to make it look good. Some of her definitions were a little longer than what we could fit on our lines in the note packet but instead of making it work like I did kids started tearing her apart about it. “Yeah..that’s not going to fit at all”, and you could tell she was kinda unsure about what to do in that situation so she had us fit it in as best as we could but kids kept complaining about it, and going on and on.

Then, some of her definitions had bigger words in them than what they were used to.. “This doesn’t make any sense at all.”, “These words don’t make sense, you’re not making sense”, “This is way too advanced for us” (speak for yourself, please.). She explained we’re going to have to learn the words sometime and kids started telling her how we’re only in 10th grade, not college, so don’t use them. Calm down, jeeeez! First of all, it wasn’t that hard to understand. Second of all, just fit the words in, make it work and stop being such a baby. And third, it’s one of her first times teaching a class, she’s nervous and maybe she isn’t as good as others but guess what, that’s why they have student teachers, she’s practicing. I couldn’t believe how rude some of the kids were being. The one quiet little freshman that never speaks even asked if she’d be teaching our lab next period.

After class, before lab my actual teacher told her she could go down to the library for the period if she wanted and he’d teach for her, which she did. I felt so bad, I wanted to go apologize for the class, even though that would be weird because I didn’t say anything rude. There’s a few kids in the class that should apologize on Monday, though.

I remember first hearing about jersey Shore while seeing “Snooki” on Saturday Nigh Live, and I laughed for probably 3 days straight at the skit. I saw the actual show later before I went to bed on Christmas Eve, it was the episode where Snooks got punched in the face at Karma by the guy stealing their drinks. I watched it then just because I had heard so much about it and thought it was fun to watch to make fun of. But, I have to admit that it is kind of addicting and the show is starting to grow on me. It’s a bunch of 20 year old italian “guidos and guidettes” living in a house, like the Real World. They’re all living on Jersey Shore and working at the Shore Shop on the boardwalk and they have to work to stay in the house. Angelina got evicted because she skipped work, but that’s another story. You have Snooki, these really short girl that’s from around here actually who says lots of dumb things and has an obsession with eating pickles. Then you have JWoww who punched Mike, or the Situation, in the face last week. Sammi “sweetheart” and Ronnie are dating, which is funny because Ronnie said not to fall in love at the Shore. And you have the DJ, Pauly D and Vinny..because it wouldn’t be an italian show without someone named Vinny. The season ends next Thursday, you should all watch it. It’s surprisingly entertaining, even my biology teacher watches it.

Yesterday was this blog’s “birthday”, 2 years old now! I hope you all had a good holiday and a Happy New Year, can you believe it is now 2010! I’ve been busy wiiing…playing Wii, I mean. 2009 was quite the year. Let’s relive some moments!

January 20th, Obama was inaugurated…I got an iHome that day too.
April 1st, R.I.P Whiskers L
April 22nd, a Holocaust survivor came to our school, that’s exciting right?
June 25th, the day the music died. The most famous person in the world, with the biggest selling album, Michael Jackson died just days before his This Is It tour.
July 1st, I got a new floor put in, in my animal room. Oh, I got to make my first 911 call that day too.
July..24th? I don’t remember the exact date but I went to a Nickelback concert.
August 27th, I went to Buffalo! And left my brother there, no seriously.
August 29th, NYS Fair Day 2, and a Shinedown concert!
September 3rd, first day of sophomore year.
September 13th, was another big story of the year…somehow. Kanye West interrupts Taylor Swift at the VMA’s.
October 23rd, our whole school gets sick and we come close to closing.
October 28th, This Is It came out in theaters, so I was there of course, with my white glove.
November 27th, first Black Friday experience ever!
December 2nd, I turned 16 and got a permit.

Many celebrity deaths occured in 2009 too, more than I remember from previous years. You had Michael Jackson (which everyone in the world knew about within an hour), Farrah Fawcett (who died hours before MJ), Walter Cronkite, Les Paul, John Hughes, Ed McMahon, Patrick Swayze, Roy Disney, Brittany Murphy, Bea Arthur, Billy Mays, Ted Kennedy, DJ AM.

As you can see it wasn’t one of the more exciting years for me, so I think that will be my resolution that I’m making late. Make it more exciting, cross some more stuff of that bucket list!

I was walking through the mall today, and I felt caught on something, so I turn around thinking my hoodie was stuck or something. Nope! There was a tiny kid, maybe 5, with his hand up the back of my sweatshirt, and he was holding onto my tshirt. As soon as he saw me, he pulled his hand out and then pointed at me and smiled while his Dad held his hand and dragged him away. You’re in New York, kid! That stuff don’t fly! Try that on someone else, they’ll turn around and slap you into next week, for sure.

I had never gone out on Black Friday before this year. I always stayed home because neither of my parents wanted to go out, but not this year! My brother, Sandra and I all went. We left around 7 AM (yes, you can leave at 7 and still find good deals, 3 AM isn’t that necessary ) We stopped at walmart first which had these barriers set up to control the crowds and that store was kinda busy, but not too bad. We went to petsmart after and we were probably the only people in there! It was so empty! After that we headed to one of the malls, where we saw a car covered in burger king or fast food toys, whih was pretty..weird. In sears, I moved the $17.99 price of griddles to the $149.99 kitchen aid mixers, I found a cool book in Barnes and Noble to put on my Christmas list..and I saw 6 different Santas!

We stopped at Toys R Us which was BUSY! The line was wrapping around the store and it wasn’t gonna be worth waiting in line for one toy. After that we went to “Michael’s” but come to find out there wasn’t a Michael’s were we though, it was an AC Moore, which we looked around in just to kill time. We also went to the best food place in Upstate NY, Ted’s Fish Fry. After that we went to another mall, where there was NO PARKING, which wasn’t as frustrating as it was funny. We eventually found a spot and went in, we went in Best Buy because I wanted to get a season or 2 of King of Queens which was on sale for $9.99, originally $24.99! Talk about a deal. We searched and couldn’t find it, and as we were moving through the seas of people on the way out my brother spotted it and him and Sandra bought it for me as my birthday present! All in all it was a fun Black Friday! And I forgot to say.. Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m riding home from school and as we’re passing a house we see a little kid, maybe 4 or 5, run down his driveway, stop right before the street and stick up his middle finger at us. Before I even had time to give it back he ran off giggling while his little friend stood by their garage laughing. Where do kids learn these things? If only I was driving, I could have scared the crap out of him by stopping the car, and pretending like I was about to get out. Hopefully he doesn’t go to Albany sometime and do that..you’d get shot there if you did that.

Is one of my favorite movies, ever. (By the way, if you’re planning on seeing this but haven’t seen it yet I’m warning you I’m going to mention specific parts so, spoiler warning) Michael was seriously working hard preparing for this tour, and they had footage from April 2008 to just the day before he died. The beggining was a bit sad because it told you how they were just 8 days away from the tour when he passed. He sounded really good, and him and the dancers were getting it all down. It looked like it would have been an awesome concert. They had the dancers redo the thriller video to play on the screen which looked awesome and they’d have a black widow spider crawl out on stage and then Michael Jackson pops out from under the spider, so cool. They had really good dance moves for it, and the dancers being “toasted” was pretty neat. It wasn’t all sad either, there was some funny parts, such as the lady teaching the dancers how to properly grab their crotch for the dance, and when Michael was on the cherry picker for Beat It. He wanted to start it with music but they told him no, do it without music first to be safe. Then he told them he wanted to go higher, and he was all excited like a little kid they had to tell him “Michael, please hold on”. At the movie they gave us all a cool This Is It lanyard, too. I was wearing one white glove, and I know other people planned on dressing up as well for it, but I couldn’t see because if you didn’t know movie theaters are dark. I got home and wanted to watch it again already, usually I don’t like seeing more than one movie in a day! 5/5 stars! And, I’m not reading movie critics reviews, all the fan reviews I’ve seen have loved it but I heard our newspaper didn’t rate it so good, but when do they ever rate movies good? They said they didn’t even show the ambulance leaving or play the 911 call, like what the hell?! We’ve seen and heard it enough, we don’t want to be reminded about that day again, we just want it to be some happy thoughts now.

After days, kids are still sick and more continue to get sick. We had 136 kids absent yesterday and about 45 went home sick, today we had 146 kids absent. I doubt we’ll end up closing now because if we close they don’t get money. Everyday the school is open they get money from the state. It’s not like we can’t afford a day or two off either, we started earlier which gave us about 3 extra snow/emergency days. Our superintendent says we’re not closing until we don’t have a sufficent number of staff to teach, well guess what yesterday and today a lot of substitutes were in, and even a lot of subs were sick so some substitutes ended up having to be two different teachers. All of our sports games lately have been cancelled because we don’t even have enough kids on the team in to play a game. We were even on the news tonight, one school cancelled and they did a story about how many kids are absent and they had kids talk about it. In study hall today I was all alone, literally the only kid in the room, I even took a picture on my phone and sent it to twitter of the empty room. My study hall teacher went around with clorox wipes and cleaned all the desks which were pretty nasty. It surprised us all because our janitors said they had taken the time to thoroughly clean..no..you haven’t. I really wonder sometimes what these janitors really do.

That’s the question. Swine Flu/ H1N1 is now a national emergency and while there isn’t any confirmed cases of it in my school yet there has been many, many, many more absences Thursday and Friday, with a lot of students showing influenza like symptoms. I heard 120 kids were absent in the high school on Friday and 150 in the Middle School. And it’s a pretty small school…120 kids is probably a whole class, if not more. A lot of kids are complaining about how our school hasn’t closed for a few days like others have but I doubt they’re actually concerned, they just want a few days off. It is getting a tad annoying constantly hearing about H1N1 though, people are getting way too afraid of this, in my opinion. Sure, it has killed people but did you know 36,000 people die each year from the seasonal flu? People are getting paranoid about this thinking if they have a headache they’re about to drop dead due to swine flu. Just wash your hands and stay home if you’re sick to keep it from spreading. So do you think they should close our school? I’m undecided because it would be good to keep other kids from getting sick but then again if all of the sick kids are home anyway, what’s the point?