I have been! To Ukraine!

This is amazing. Watch a minute and get hooked.

say a little prayer

I've now watched this seven times. Totes wanna be their friend.

unvent

In the interest of my mental health, I've composed a list of POSITIVE things about my school.

• Sixth graders are hilarious in that they try to act like teenagers, but fail miserably. When you watch them working at their tables, they are still little kids.
• I love ancient history.
• My co-teacher is full of great ideas and has a wealth of curricular knowledge.
• I get snack and lunch delivered every day, and I don't even have to carry cash. It is automatically deducted from my paycheck.
• We have a cleaning crew come in to vacuum and do trash. We just hired someone to breakdown tables and chairs and set them back up for us.
• We have unrestricted wireless internet. I can show YouTube clips to my students. I can play music via Pandora.
  
• We use google for our school email / calendar / docs. It is brilliant and easy. I can gchat with other teachers at work.
  
• I can use the copy machine whenever I want.
• I have air conditioning and heating in my classroom, which I control.
• My school purchases paper and pencils and markers and glue and all manner of supplies for us. We have a budget with which to purchase additional materials. Last year, I did not pay for a single thing out of pocket.
• We are encouraged to plan interesting and meaningful field trips for the school. The process is simple -- you ask the principal. If he says yes, you get to go. There is no complicated form or long waiting process.
• It is five miles from my house.
  

• I can basically teach whatever I want in my class. No one is keeping me to a pacing plan or even checking up on what the kids are learning. I decide which texts to use and which tests to administer, if any. I could do a read aloud for the whole class period for a week, and no one would say anything.
  

This last one is what I have to keep remembering. It's one of the main reasons I was so happy to leave LAUSD and come here. While other aspects of our programming need tuning, and some staff members act like assholes, I am still treated

It's amazing how the students in my class manage to get out of the seats and mess around even WHEN THEY ARE TYPING.

gift horse! avert your eyes!

I forgot to mention the bright spot in my day, when one of my students gave me an awesome, soft, gray, new sweater for no apparent reason! The card reads,

Dear Ms. Superdeens,

You are very nice and you have a lot of patience. You teach very good and you do very nice activities, like the one where we had to find papers around the room and with the lights off. We needed a flashlight, we were like cave people. You are a very nice person.
Sincerely,
Student

....heart.


(Also there was the Deaf checker at Trader Joes who signed to me and I signed back and that was awesome but then I got flustered and forgot all my vocab. Next time.)

work vent

Maybe if I make a list of all the things that are bothering me at work, it won't suck as much?

• My classroom is way too small. Not enough room to walk around students. Not enough room to lay out materials. Definitely not enough room to separate and/or isolate students who are disruptive. Complete chaos, often. If you want them to stay in their chairs, you have to give them lots of materials and manipulatives and things at the their table to work with. If you can't rearrange the room, you have to let them get up and work in groups and be creative. It's impossibly limiting to have neither control over the room environment nor space to move around. Can you imagine teaching a class in the confines of your dining room? Without redecorating? It's kind of like that.
  
• From one to three extra adults on Mondays and Wednesdays cramps the room even more. I'm thankful that we now have a push-in resource teacher, but still. With zero adults it was already overcrowded.
• Co-carpool duty teachers often just hang out instead of helping. One is sometimes on her Blackberry. Blackberry usage during supervision or "on-time" should be reprimanded, in my opinion. It's worse than teaching with your Bluetooth headpiece on, because at least then you can still make eye contact with your students.
• The church continues to leave extra things in the classroom, like rocking chairs, diaper bins, and crap on top of the closet that could totally fall on someone's head in an earthquake.
• Plus they use our whiteboards, after protesting against putting them up in the first place.
• On shortened days, the sixth grade is relegated to the cafe. So in addition to losing an entire period, we also must move seventy five textbooks. All so that a certain math teacher may occupy our room WHY I DON'T KNOW. Seriously, I brought this point up when we discussed room placements, that it doesn't make sense to displace US with a displaced HER, she has to move anyways so why doesn't she move straight to the cafe and leave our class in our room instead of moving her class AND moving our class, and NO ONE WAS ABLE TO COUNTER THIS ARGUMENT, yet, we were forced to "Just try it."
  
• Why don't I have information about my IEP kids and it's already the end of October? I am failing students left and right because no one has even told me if they are dyslexic or blind or lazy. It's not like I haven't asked. (Several times.) I am trying my best to play detective but I'm not trained for this. I fear that this could be a liability and the parents are going to be really mad come report cards.
• Teeny, tiny, miniscule closet. It's a few inches bigger than my TV cabinet. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that that is the only storage we have in the classroom for both English, History, and Geography.
• Co-teachering is not at teamwork level yet. Inching along.
• No windows. They cleaned our carpet last night. It is going to smell like dog tomorrow.
• Am going to have to begin teaching an elective in November, even though I and the other humanities teachers have MORE classes and LESS preps than everyone else. I do love electives, I just desperately need the extra two periods.

Whew. I'm going to stop now because it's time to brush my teeth. I feel slightly better because I boiled down the room thing into that great dining room metaphor.

this is so two thousand and nine

I just got this text message from my friend in Sacramento:

"Um, your brother just came out on Facebook."

My first thought was, people are still using Facebook?

My second thought was, which brother?

So I called up my friend and she told me which, (Irony? I was expecting it to be the other one), and then she read me the posts and the comments, because I'm the only person in the world not on Facebook, and we're chatting, speculating whether it's serious or a joke, and the whole time I'm wondering when my cell phone is going to ring with that personal call from my family member, oh dear brother... I mean, right?

Since the call didn't come, I hung up and called my brother myself, exclaiming, SERIOUSLY!?!?!? FACEBOOK?!? And he laughed a little guiltily, or amusingly -- the two are hard to distinguish -- and I reassured him of my love and happiness and all that BUT! Made sure to tell him how insulted I was that this is how I find out.

Facebook. Hilarious.

I'm done with the writing every day thing. It didn't really work for me, given that I'm not trying to be a writer and most worknights I just want to lay on the couch and watch hulu. Also this year I am dealing with a lot of failure, and it's no fun to revisit these frustrations, like for example on Friday when I spent hours and hours setting up a very meaningful field trip and prepping the kids and sending out parent messages and creating worksheets and planning review sessions and then the fucking buses don't show up. So.....Narwals!

sexy halloween ideas

From Jezebel commentors.

It requires about 2.4 seconds to put on a short skirt and tape a piece of bread to the top of your head and go as "Sexy Toaster."

The best I've ever seen was at a costume party in college. Two friends went together as a joint costume: he dressed up as Santa with a collar and leash on, she dressed up as a dominatrix leading him around. They were "subordinate clause."

Sexy Hester Pryne.
Wear whatever you want, put a big ol red "A" on your chest.

How about a sexy leper!
My clothes fell off! so did my left hand!

This is good for a laugh. Here is a single item multiple choice pop quiz that I gave my students after a particularly appalling class. As you can see, only an idiot* or someone blatantly not paying attention would fail.

What was Friday’s movie about:
a) Whales
b) The Shang Dynasty
c) Fire
d) Christianity
e) World War II
f) The Roman Empire
g) Japanese Art
h) Trade in the Mediterranean region
i) Gods and Goddesses


Your answer: ________

*The correct answer is "F." Thank goodness no one picked "a," although sadly there were a few "g"s and "i"s.

egnever

A few weeks ago, before we (somewhat) successfully navigated a discussion about collaborating and sharing prep loads, I was hating on my co-teacher. In addition to all the not working together, she was also not cleaning up after herself. Our school is housed in a church and we must essentially "disappear" every Friday. There is a lot of putting away. All of which was begin done by me.

After a particularly stressful Friday, I returned to our shared classroom and discovered that she had not done a lick of work there, had not touched the work folders or worksheet piles or electronics or office supplies or textbooks or box of literature books or pencil sharpener, on and on and on. She had gone home and left thirty minutes of work for me.

In the front of the classroom was a big pile of student projects, most of them total crap, but a few were nice and neat and perhaps worthy of hanging on to. We had pushed them under the whiteboard and posted a sign the whole week that read, "Take your projects home or else we will throw them away." We planned that together, let's be clear.

Well, I am nothing if not true to my word, and so Friday afternoon, after I hauled all of our shit to the closet and to the parking lot bin, while I was silently cussing her out, I threw the whole pile of posters in the trash. Including the two posters that I knew for a fact were not student projects but were hers and had fallen into the crap pile that morning. I felt not a single drop of remorse.

All last week she kept exclaiming that she was missing this one particular poster (trash bin) that this kid had made and was going to be pissed if he found out she lost it. I kept shrugging and shaking my head that I hadn't seen it and even alluded to the fact that it may have gotten thrown out. I know revenge is a dirty thing, but I can't tell you how good it made me feel.

subject and predicate

Grammar is fun!

fall

The weather just changed. Friday was boiling hot, and I was wearing tank tops and slip-ons and sleeping under a cotton sheet and single cotton blanket, rolling the windows down in the car and blowing the fan indoors. Chocolate on the counter was melting and I was eating popsicles daily.

Last night I had to add an extra woolen blanket to my bed, and I didn't need to air out the car on the way home from work, and I wore my sweater for half of the day and even developed goose bumps while sitting out in the sun in the afternoon. Right now, I'm wearing a sweatshirt to type on the couch and planning on making tea for breakfast. I'm glad that I can finally wrap myself in a blanket to watch a video and break out all of those heavy jeans that have been sitting on my shelves all summer.

ardi!

How exciting is this?!!


Ok, number one, I'm psyched because human evolution is FASCINATING. Last year I learned about this hominid stuff for the first time while teaching my students. Then I learned it again when reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Which introduced me to the Mungo Man fossil discovery and theory of multiple origins and when did humans ACTUALLY begin to migrate or develop intelligent enough brains to build large boats? My trip to Australia yielded more fodder for this subject.

Number two is that for several weeks now, as we have been starting our first unit on Early Hominids and historical scientists, I have been telling my students that we can only ever be ninety-nine percent sure about prehistory, that since no one left writing and not many people even left bones, we are only making educated guesses at this point. Like, we think Lucy didn't make tools because we haven't found any, but for all we know they are all buried at the bottom of the ocean. And I kept stressing the point that scientists could find a bone or a tool or a piece of writing tomorrow, and all of our theories could be proven wrong, and we would have to get new history books.

AND THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Number three is that students came to school today carrying the article to share during current events. It is so exciting to have real things happen in the world that relate to the ancient things that we study in our classrooms. Newspapers don't usually print segments about transitive verbs or ancient Egyptian diets. Relevance is the spice of education!*

Number four is that in our conversation about this finding, students were throwing around the words "hominid," "Australopithecus," and "biped." Nothing is as rewarding as when your educating sticks.


*Naked pictures of ape-humans can also spice up a lesson.

whoa oh, oh oh, oh oh, oh ah!

It is past midnight and I just now got home from choir practice. We had an audition for the jazz ensemble, singing the Blenders' "The Christmas Song." I didn't think it was that hard, but many folks came to the audition not certain of the notes. Then our director had us sing by quartet, and within each quartet she listened to pairs. There were at least forty people auditioning. I think I killed.

I've had this song on repeat in my car every morning this week. I sing to it on the freeway on my way to work at sunup. It's been how I wake up.


Edit: I GOT IN!!!!!