Why is this vacation so splendorous, you ask?  Several reasons:

- Despite only lasting one week, unlike the Christmas vacation, I am not sick.  I managed to come down with acute bronchitis before Christmas, and was more interested in sleeping and not dying than reading.

- I am not traveling.  During my February break, I traveled to Berlin, Dresden, and Prague.  While this was a fantastic experience, I did not have much time to read.  The chunk of reading time I did have (nine hour plane flights) was devoted to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.  I unfortunately could not get into my Agatha Christie novel on the nine hour flight home, so I read and re-read Discover magazine.

- Today is my second full day of spring break, and I managed to finish the ARC of Holly Black’s newest urban fantasy, White Cat (will be on sale in May), and a Scholastic biography of Vlad the Impaler in the Wicked History series.

- I “accidentally” forgot my lesson plan book in my office at school.

- I have two books I definitely plan on devouring this week (it’s always nice to have goals, isn’t it?).  The first is Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice (oh NPR nerdiness), and the second is Masquerade by Melissa de la Cruz.

- The weather is still cold enough that I can bake.  Through bookshelves of doom, I found a recipe for candied bacon-chocolate chunk cookies, and good heavens, I will make and eat those cookies!

- I am almost done with season 2 of the X-Files.  This means I can get back to working on the never-ending wedding afghan for my cousin and his bride.  Their wedding was last September.

All books, with the exception of White Cat, came from my school and my public library.  White Cat is an ARC.

They did, they got candy, I rejoiced.

They’ve been quiet again. When I asked why … they wanted to know where the candy was. Oops.

In my effort to energize my third period library skills class, they walked in to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” If there is anyone who is not bopping along to that, or pretending they are wearing a helmet with horns, there is something wrong. I noticed the kids seemed more awake. I wonder what will happen if I play rock … headbanging and air guitar in the library?

My next trick was to introduce hot pink sticky notes. As my students are slowly realizing, pink is my favorite color. That did not explain why these florescent squares were on their folders though. I encouraged them to write down any questions they had during class. Third period is a quiet group, and I was not sure if it was because they felt shy, were not getting the material, or just asleep. Some of the kids wrote down questions, which was great, because I was able to pinpoint what needed more work. One question was great though: “Will you give us candy on Friday?” We struck a deal. If every kid in the class asks me a question on Friday that relates to the lesson, I will give them candy.

Finally, since today’s topic was the NOVEL-NY database, and how to use it, I gave them more sticky notes, with semi-ridiculous search queries. Some kids were looking up cheese, others, Bob and Science, vampires and zombies, airplanes. Last time I taught this lesson, I did not suggest topics, and the kids faltered. With these topics, the kids were able to sit down and start working. The objective was to not only get the kids on the databases, but to start familiarizing them with it.