What I learned from the interwebs today:

Snails hatch from eggs.

The wonders of the world amaze me.  I hope they never stop doing that.

Joy for Today

Today, C Jane's post is My Brief History with Beyonce's Single Ladies.

It made me think about how much I love that song.
And that video.


And it led me to this.  Which reminds me that I love dancing.  A lot.

It also included the video below, and the whole thing rocks my freakin' face off.



So, the moral of this post is DANCE! Fall down, get up, shake that ass!

BTW, today I saw the PT, and WE KNOW WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME! All this nasty bidness was caused by a pinched nerve. I shall now commence getting better.

Long day? Have a tall, cold...blog post.

As you may have guessed, I read a lot of blogs.  I split them up by four categories:

1. Friends
• People I knew before meeting them online
• Friends who live across the States
• Traveling family members (my snot little cousins insist on growing up and becoming adults)
  
• Friends who are serving in the Peace Corps overseas
  
2. Fun--Stuff that makes me purely happy to look at; all learning is purely coincidental
   
• The Oatmeal has been making the rounds of the teaching blogosphere (yeah, I said it) lately because of his recent posts on Words You Need to Stop Misspelling (I wish I could use this with my classes unedited, but...) and How to Use an Apostrophe
  
• LOLcats, LOLdogs, Daily Squee--Don't you judge me! (Name that show!)
• Pioneer Woman--I think everyone needs someone like Ree Drummond in their life.  She's a Renaissance woman.  I'm lucky to have some in-person models, but Ree is on-demand.
  
• Dooce--Definitely, definitely (name that movie!) have a blog crush on Heather Armstrong.  I love her writing style.
  
• XKCD--comics about love and computers, and math, and stuff--helps me relate to my hubby.
  
• Elements of Style--about design, not Strunk's book
  
• AltF--John Michael Cooper and his wife take some of the most beautiful photos I've ever seen.  Looking at their bridal, wedding and engagement shots is kind of a sweet pain for me: they are so gorgeous, and I can't go back 16 months and have them do my wedding photos.
  
• C Jane Enjoy It--a woman leading a joyful life and sharing it with the interwebs
  
• etc.
  
3. Interest--Stuff I can learn from
   
• Lifehacker--how to do everything, better--If you decide to add them to your feed, you're going to want the "Top Posts" feed, or they will totally flood your feedreader.
  
• Get Rich Slowly--JD and his crew can help your get your books straight and think about what you spend and why.  Also how I learned that my real hourly wage is $13.90 and hour.  Boo.
  
• Unclutterer offers ideas on organization of your physical and mental space.  I also need to give a shout-out to Erin's book, Unclutter Your Life in One Week. It's the best of it's genre I've read: sense of humor, reasonable guidelines, easy to read.  Oddly enough, today's post is about what your free time is worth to you.
  
• etc.
  
4. Teachers
• Look at My Happy Rainbow!--Dude is a kindergarten teacher, and he's all up in the meanigfulness and cuteness and higher level thinking.
• Joanne Jacobs worked for Knight Ridder, and now shares and comments on stories about education.
• It's Not All Flowers and Sausages--Mrs. Mimi has sass in all the right places.
• The English Teacher's Companion--Jim Burke was my very first teacher crush.  I sometimes wish I had more of the answers he seems to keep on the tip of his brain.  Sometimes I have to save his posts for later because they require deep thinkings.   BTW, have you joined the English Teacher's Companion Ning yet?
• Epiphany in Baltimore writes about life as an English teacher.  He's got a good mix of real life, inside and outside of school.
• The Line--Dina hasn't posted tons lately, but when she does, it's good English teaching juice.
• dy/dan is my first blog crush.  He teaches math, thinks hard about why he's teaching what he's teaching and how he's doing it, and is always looking forward.  Sometimes he pisses me off, too, which is always good.
• Huff English--I love Dana's blog.  She's a great sharing resource, and she also started up the Understanding by Design Wiki.  You should join.

When I started this list, I was all ready to write about a particular post, but this list seems to have gotten away from me.  Another post, I guess.

Are they so SMART?

Lately, the Tempered Radical has been wound up about interactive whiteboards (most recently here). I have a SMARTBoard, and I've mentioned before that doing without it makes me sad.

TR has a solid argument, though:

Even the “Internet access, video and audio presentations, and digital assessments” that Ed Week spotlights can all be done with a data projector alone.  The actual whiteboard does nothing to enhance any of these activities.

Now, Marzano goes on to argue that he’s an ardent believer that technology can make good teaching easier—and he’s right.  But Interactive Whiteboards don’t. 

Instead, they are disarmingly insidious gadgets—so stinking sexy to people making purchasing decisions that they're almost irresistible whether or not there are proven strategies for meaningful implementation.

I can't argue this from beyond my own classroom experience, but I have also worried about spending on SMARTBoards when I could get a whole wad of netbooks for my classroom instead.  Sigh.


Something to chew on, regarding the use of new technology, from Unclutterer:

What inspires me most about the Amish isn’t their alleged simplicity (which you can probably infer I don’t necessarily believe is simpler), but their ability to give up a convenience after experiencing it. It is extremely difficult to give up a technology (or habit or vice or any possession) that you greatly enjoy. The fact that the Amish know of the technologies and ways of our world, have even experienced them, and are willing to give them up if they start to interfere with their priorities in life is what I find impressive. They easily get rid of the distractions that get in the way of what matters most to them.

"All My Life's a Circle"

One of the things that I love about my job, about working with kids, and about working with literature, is that everything fits together. Recently, Jim Burke wrote about "teacher brain," when you see connections between you life in and out of school everywhere you turn. 

I had one of those moments last week: I had been trying to find a way to really get through to kids that what we call "Shakespeare's works" have been through so many different hands that changes have inevitably been made, and we never had a copy that was the one true thing to begin with.  That night, I was mulling over my crummy explanation at dinner, when my cousin started talking about seeing Avatar at our local theater's new "Omni" screen, which isn't really that fabulous.  It hit me: what we have from Will (I like to pretend we're close, personal friends, so sometimes I call him Will.  I don't think he stood to much on formalities) is a lot like old-school pirated movies where once in awhile the picture gets shaky and people sometimes walk in front of the screen.

I don't have any real deep thoughts to share here, but I did want to share one of my favorite songs with you.  I was raised by a mother who missed the sixties but never bought into to much of the seventies, and I think this guy holds that true spirit.
"All My Life's a Circle" by Harry Chapin with his brother Tom

Breathe in, breathe out

Yesterday I heaved out all my frustration here.  I apologize for the rant.

While I slept away most of the exhaustion and frustration of yesterday, I'm still fighting the mucus monster that is trying to swallow my head.  I thought I'd bring you some tastes of people more able than I.

Oh, and I can't read when I'm this sick, so they're mostly pictures.

Epic Win FTW

 

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar

 

dooce.com

Daily Squee

10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling by the Oatmeal

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME!? or, MIKD and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

The good thing about today: I did not go to sleep with gum in my mouth and wake up with it in my hair.

Welcome to Crazytown. Feel free to take a nibble, or just RUN, RUN AWAY.

A. Was shaking due to exhaustion when I woke up.  Am now doing so again.

B. A student, apparently thinking I am an idiot, changed five words from a paragraph on Sparknotes and thought this was sufficient mental effort on his part to get a grade for it.  So he turned it in on turnitin.com.  Really.  Really.

C. This student said "This is bullshit" when I informed him that he would not receive credit for the assignment and no, he could not just redo it and get the points (Have I mentioned previously that plagiarism, in addition to making more work for me, REALLY, REALLY makes me angry?  And you don't want to see me when I'm angry.)  He then argued with me when I told him to go down to the office.  NOW.  Did I mention that this physically imposing child likes to loom over me and also only asks me questions when I'm sitting down?  I need to bring back the "step into my office" chair.

D. While I was talking the kids through the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Geez-heck, do I love that play!), a girl sitting in the front row was texting.  I made eye contact, asked her to "put it on my desk," and then kept talking.  When I was done and we were transitioning, I said, "[Insert child's name here], set the phone on my desk."
"It's not a phone, it's an i-Thingy."
"I don't care what it is.  Set it on my desk."
"It's not mine."
"It doesn't matter.  Set it on my desk."
"But I'm leaving right after lunch, so can you bring it to the office right away so I can get it back?"
"I will bring it to the office at lunch.  Set it on my desk."
"[Insert under-the-breath sigh of deep suffering and snottiness here.]"

E. Fast-forward five minutes.
Same child: "Can I go to the bathroom?"
"Is it an emergency?  There are only ten minutes until lunch and I don't want you to miss what we are doing."
"I have to go NOW."
"Fine."

F. Fast forward to the lunch bell.  I see the SAME DARN CHILD ask another student to write a note and sign it for her.  IS SHE KIDDING ME?
After I drop her phone off and mention my suspicion that she has forged a note to leave to the attendance secretary,I run into the girl who was doing the signing.
"Hey, [Insert generally pretty straight-laced student's name here], what was [Apparently a Rebel Without A Freaking Cause] asking you to write?"
"It was a note.  I'm sorry.  Am I in trouble?"

[Insert call to mother of said rebel using up my lunch period.]

G.  3.5 hours after school calling of parents whose scholars did not see fit to turn in the essay that was due before Christmas.

H. The dog pooped in his kennel.

I'm going to lay down, and maybe move to Australia.

On being thankful: making your own luck

Over at Look at My Happy Rainbow, dude is on a roll. Today he wrote about penny luck.

"Living in Manhattan, my grandpa loved walking the streets. He particularly loved finding money on the street. While he often found quarters, dimes, nickels, and even the occasional bill, his collection mainly consisted of pennies.

“My grandfather is ninety-one years old.” I told them.

...“Let’s put the penny up on the board so we can all see it and remember how lucky we are, like your grandpa.”

He came up and gently handed it to me. I took a piece of tape and put it up high so we’d all see it and remember my grandpa and how lucky we are each day.

Today I was looking for things to be thankful for (I'm really struggling throughout the day), and I just kep repeating to myself, "I go pee with the door shut.  I go pee with the door shut.  I go pee with the door shut...."  I sang, "Just keep swimming" to myself in the shower when I got home.

Even more to be thankful for

Seeing this:

hat tip: IHasAHotdog.com

made me remember my thankfulness list from when I was tutoring Kindergarten:

• I can tie my shoes by myself
• I don't need someone to help me take a drink from the drinking fountain
• I go to the bathroom with the door closed (which reminds me: when I was in K as a student, I once slammed the very, very, very heavy door to the restroom in our classroom on my thumb.  Did I mention the door was heavy? OW-WA!  That same year, I slammed my thumb in a locked car door with no one within hearing distance to save me.  How I never did more serious physical damage to myself growing up remains a mystery.)

Though these things might be small, consider what your life would be like without them!

Something to be thankful for

Since I have been ill, I have been blessed with some great subs. One woman, in particular, actually moved the kids forward, curriculum-wise. In addition, the kids liked her!

The best subs I've had are all retired English teachers. Today, one of them was in for my next-door-neighbor buddy. At lunch, my mentee was talking about how Teach for America has become a means for some (not all of them, obviously!) Ivy League grads to pad their resumes before entering the "real" workforce. Then, the gentleman subbing for my bud said that he began teaching in California in 1958 with no qualifications other than his degree in what we now call Mass Communications. He spent the next few years completing an English degree and getting his teaching credentials. Sounds more stringent than what they're doing in some places now to get teachers into classrooms.

BTW, this daily blogging thing may be an excellent catalyst for me.  I feel dumb admitting this, but I just figured out that I can save a post on Blogger without publishing it.  Now I have a couple more posts in the hopper for a rainy day, just from this one!