The Project: Week 23 - Finishing Egypt with the Textbook

This week we are finishing Egypt with the textbook. What? ... say you?! Whenever something seems to drag on forever with little progress seen,  I have adopted that phrase.  Why, you might ask? The statement evolved many years ago when I was teaching on a team with 3 other teachers in a technologically advanced Middle School. We were each given a new thing one fall.... a voice mail box! (That kinda tells you how long ago all of this occurred!) Instead of managing our own voice mail box, we pooled the numbers we were assigned and each number provided the parents and students with different types of information. One number gave daily homework assignments, one listed special events for the week, a third listed contests we were conducting and the last number provided an overview of what the students would be learning on any given week. Every Friday afternoon the teachers on my team would huddle around the phone and make our new message for the week. So, the message might go something like this: "In Math we will be working on multiplying decimals and there will be a test on Thursday. In Language Arts we will be reading several short stories and writing our own, so don't forget to bring your idea journals to school. In Science students will investigate population changes in predator and prey relationships and in Social Studies we will be finishing Egypt with the textbook. Our Social Studies teacher recorded this comment for two or three weeks. On the following week she was absent on Friday. We didn't know what she would be doing the following week, so we continued the pattern and recorded on the message that students would be, "Finishing Egypt with the textbook!" For some reason we repeated that message the following week. It became a joke to us, and we probably said that students would be finishing Egypt with the textbook for 3 months.
So, the project has been going on forever.... just like "finishing Egypt with the textbook"! But... as I mentioned previously, we are getting very close. We could actually move in any day! Woohoo! I can't believe it!

So, in addition to finishing Egypt with the textbook, this week we:

• watched Sebastian and Libre tear siding off the east and south side of the house. They wrapped the house in Tyvek and began putting up the cement board siding.
• moved tools down to the "workshop" area of the basement
• did some touch-up painting
• installed more of the dog fencing
• began to prime the doors