dozers

The last time I wrote, I was a baby teacher nearing the middle of her training in Chicago.   Now I am a baby teacher looking back on her first month of teaching in a real live public school to real live children.
At least I think most of them are alive...they're pretty good at sleeping with their heads propped up, so for all I know, they could be dead.  But then again, they do leave like quick little bunnies when the bell rings, so there goes that theory.

Alright, so my students aren't all sleeping though my classes.  There are a few who have gotten away with sleeping if they prop their head on a binder- OH WAIT. No they didn't. Newsflash: teachers can SEE YOU. You're not fooling anyone just because you're not drooling on your desk.
Although, I do have one student who kinda roosts himself into his chest like a mama owl and falls asleep sitting up perfectly straight, most of the time with a pencil in his hand, poised on the paper. It's amazing.  Once he fell asleep during a quiz, and I debated just letting him snooze his way to a zero...but then I felt bad, so I rapped on his desk, and he carried on writing as if nothing had happened.

...So I just thought I would share my thoughts so far, maybe a few anecdotes, so that those of you who read this every once in a while will know what I've been up to.

I made it through my first whole month of teaching! The days go by faster now (they always go by much much faster than they did when I was a student) and that is partially because the feeling that I am drowning is dissipating day by day. Yay!  It's also because the school day is not very long at all: due to budget cuts, my teaching day goes from

7:30 AM (high schoolers love that) to 1:45 PM.

 Yup.  My kids get out of school everyday before 2:00. So when they fall asleep in my 7th period class, I can say to them "just wait 20 more minutes! then you can take a 4 hour nap and still wake up in time for dinner!"  It also makes their "I didn't have time to do my homework"-excuse really weak.

soundbites:

it's the bangs. it's always the bangs.

• (male) Student:  "Ms D, I figured out who you look like. You look like Carly Rae."  Me: "Who? I don't think I know who that is."  Student:  "You know, (sings) before you came into my life I missed you so bad! I missed you so so bad/ So call me maybe! you know?"  Me: "Yes, but I am oh-so-glad you just sang that out loud."

• (female) Student: "Ms. D, can I make up the work I missed this week? I was in jail."  
• I don't even know what it was for, and I didn't ask.  All I said was "Sure. We did 3.7-3.9 in your workbook. Bring it to me tomorrow"

More to come soon!

beating a dead horse?

I promised a lot of people that I would blog about learning to teach, and sadly I have let all of them down.  Until today.

The fact of the matter is, I haven't done so yet because I talk about teaching all. the. time. now, and when I sit down to the computer at the end of the day, it's usually to lesson plan OR (better) to do something completely unrelated that doesn't require my brain to be on at all.  Yesterday I was introduced to Phineas and Ferb and watched several episodes before finally going to sleep at :yawn: 10 PM.

10 PM is my new bedtime, and 11 PM is my new "why am I still awake"-time, mostly because 5:30 is my new wake-up time.  Also because (I don't know if you have heard this yet) teaching is exhausting.  I was teaching a lesson in summer school today about multiplying complex fractions.

Obviously the kids were not so into it, especially because their previous teacher has been known to say things like "they can't learn fractions. It's like beating a dead horse. So I just let them use calculators on the tests because they don't need to know how to multiply or add fractions for algebra. So why waste your time?"   My first response-thought to this was "my kids WILL learn fractions. and they will LOVE them."  So I poured my heart, soul and body into my lesson today and got very little in the way of enthusiasm back. Their teacher (who had been observing) said to me after "you put in waaaay more work into that lesson than the kids did. Don't do that. Make them work."   And as much as I may disagree with their teacher's view of their potential for learning, I think this advice is pretty good.

I learn lessons like this every day. Some are real lessons, with lectures and worksheets, and some are learned the hard way.  When asked to describe how I am feeling today with a color, my response was "dishwater" and it's true. I feel thin, translucent, grey, and, for lack of a better word, whooshy. But there is one thing that is keeping me from collapsing into a puddle, and it's my students.  Today, my kids took a lesson they had been told they'd never learn (or need to learn, but honestly, where does that assumption come from?) and tackled it. Even though they weren't jumping out of their seats, even though they may have been chatty, even though I wore myself out doing it, they went from 0% of the class mastering the skill to 83%.  

And that is what will keep me up till midnight tonight writing lesson plans.

procrastiknitting, meet procrastiblogging.

Things that I am thinking about right now:

1. I don't want to be writing this paper.  

Prompt: If you'd been put in charge of raising you, what would you do the same and what would you do differently? What "risk factors" do you think you could have avoided? 

Seriously. "Tell me how your parents messed you up. Be explicit. Also, be explicit enough to fill 2-3 pages single spaced."
I told my mom about having to write this and all she said to me was "Don't let me read it. I don't want to read it."  Relax, Mom. I'm trying to figure out a way to write this paper but not write this paper.



      2.  ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT IS COMING BACK!!  

I feel like shouting it from the rooftops! Which I could probably do because we have access to the fire escape.
 
      3.  I would rather be using this time to finish knitting my sweater.

I only have the sleeves left to do. Well, and 8" of the right side...but if I play my cards right, I could be finishing that to.night. If I ever write this damn paper.

This is what it's going to look like. (pictures to prove my skill later)

OK, no more procrastiknitting or procrastiblogging.  Time to settle into this awful paper.

Good night.

things I think about in the airport...

I'd like to share a few examples of how my mind occupies itself when its plane is delayed for two hours. I scribbled down a few starts for things to eventually blog and apparently today is "eventually." Here they are.

I have a habit of, every once in a while, looking around and thinking "these are the people."

These are the people I will be trapped in this elevator with.
These are the people who will be left alive with me if everything in the world is destroyed except for this room. Everything  except for this specific bank of seats in the B gates at the LaGuardia airport.
These are the people who might (in a survival situation) look at me and think to themselves "could I eat a human being?" Or, you know, vice versa.
These are the people I will be stranded on a deserted island with (if somehow this plane from New York to Atlanta flies over a deserted island. Or an ocean for that matter).

These are the people.

please don't let me spend my last hours on a MARTA train

I will scan the faces of the people around me, trying to judge their character by the way that they talk or laugh or whether they move their stuff and offer the seat next to them. He's a good guy, I think. But will his kindness make him weak? These are the kind of things you need to know. 
(Additionally, which one of these people is most likely to stab me? The small Asian boy. Watching Power Rangers on his iTouch. Just trying to be a hero.)

So this is who I'm stuck with, I think. I already hate the way that woman cackles at her cell phone. That guy over there didn't even bring a book to an airport. He's clearly not the survival type. That muscly guy on his laptop could be useful... Maybe he's a g-man or an ex-cop. 
So as people around me stress about having to deplane and where Gretchen put her boarding pass ("is it in your bag? It's GOTTA be in your bag cuz it sure as HELL ain't in mine!") I am assembling my team. And deciding who to leave behind if we find an abandoned working vehicle in our now post-apocalyptic landscape. 
...I'm looking at you, cackling cell phone lady.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

mmmm light pollution

As my plane was flying over New York on the way back home, I looked down on the sparkling city below.  I had already been delayed 3 hours and thought I might sleep on the plane until I got distracted by the view outside my cabin window.

Then my sense of geography started to fail me.
If that's New York, and we're on the East Coast...it looks like we're going further East right into the ocean! Or maybe North to Canada??  

This worry (that the pilot had no idea where he was going and I was going to be stranded in Canada for the night) began to creep into my thoughts and disrupt my reading.

"Tobacco,  introduced to London the year after Shakespeare's birth,...  

Oh no what if the flight is actually going to Canada?

...was a luxury at first but soon gained such widespread popularity... 

I got in the right gate. Right? B8. Yeah. I got in the right gate. My ticket was scanned. It made that satisfying "ping" noise that means I am supposed to be on this plane.

...that by the end of the century there were no fewer than seven thousand tobacconists in the City....  

Dad would be so upset if he drove all the way to the airport at midnight and I'm actually in Canada.

...It was employed not only for pleasure but as a treatment for a broad range of complaints... 

no. they won't be upset. They'll be worried, won't they? I'll probably end up crying if I have to call home and say I accidentally ended up in Canada.

...including venereal disease,... 

but NO. I won't cry. I'm an adult. I'm a grown-ass woman. I just went to New York all by myself!

...migraine,...

I'll take care of everything. I can get myself a hotel or something, and email work to explain my absence and book a new flight and - yeah. I'll be fine. 

...and even bad breath." 

Shit, I have to read that whole passage again. Didn't take in a word of it.

(excerpts from Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage)

Social Guard

I am really hungry but have to write about this first.

I was stumbling around the internet this morning, bumping into some Mean Girls/Harry Potter tumblrs when an ad caught my eye on the side of the page.

It was a fake Facebook post (it said "advertisement" at the top, so people won't get confused and try to "like" it or something) that had a girl saying

Some Girl: Can't wait for tonight! Party at my house and it's going to be aMaZiNg!
Bitchy Girl:  No one wants to go to your loser party!
Some Dude: Sounds great, what is your address please?

And then next to the two posts this X pops up and says BLOCKED or something dramatic. The fake profile melts away to present what the ad is selling: Zone Alarm Social Guard.

This is a program designed to recognize key words and phrases to block cyber bullies and potential stalkers. Bitchy girl was a cyber bully and using the word "loser" flagged her, and that dude is probably a 43 year old because he asked for her address. Right?  They couldn't possibly be being sarcastic or just need her address. While I do fully understand cyber bullying and it's new prevalence and severity, I still don't know if I like the idea of this product.

The website says "SocialGuard scans millions of records using a unique algorithm to determine threats and sends warnings to you the minute they happen, not just once a day like the competition."
This program sends parents alerts at the tiniest sign of trouble. Woah. That's like if you got emailed every time your kid was picked last for softball or ignored at the lunch table. These things happen.
I believe that the answer to bullying is to start at the child; to promote tolerance and compassion and help kids see that they can bond together because this happens to everyone.  This is not always a parent's battle, and although you want to do anything you can to protect your child, I do not believe that being an internet helicopter is going to do any good.

Cyberbullying
Alerts you to alarming words used in private messages, status updates, and wall postings.

Strangers
Alerts you when someone who may be a stranger is trying to interact with your kid on Facebook. 

Age Concerns
Flags friends that are much older than they claim to be; someone who may be pretending to be a kid. 

Dangerous Links
Catches dangerous links sent in private messages, status updates, and wall posts. Prevents viral attacks and data theft. (this thing checks private messages. hm)

Rules for being on the internet:

1. Don't "friend" anyone you do not personally know. Even if you have friends in common. Meet them in person first.
2. If your child is too young to be on Facebook, don't let them on Facebook.
3. I can't think of any more, I'm too hungry.

I am getting all confused in my opinions. This thing really threw me off guard.
I hate bullies, and of course I hate internet predators, but this SocialGuard seems so...
I don't know.

What do you think?

meh

Resume writing is hard.

I am not as adept at talking about myself as I thought I'd be.




...poop.

meta: birds are loud

I don't usually reference the title of my blog, because, well, for a while I forgot why I named it as such. Then I remembered that when I started this thing, it was mid-summer and I was annoyed at the birds outside my window waking me up. My first idea for a post was to complain about these stupid birds, and then I thought, well that's dumb, everyone knows birds are loud. But then that's how most of my writing here is anyway. Less-than keen observations.
So there you go.

ANYWAY, I was googling around and I found this story:

Quentin Tarantino sues neighbors over loud macaw birds

"Quentin Tarantino sued his neighbors whose outdoor aviary contains loud macaws that emit blood curdling screams at intermittent intervals for 7 to 8 hours a day."

"Courthouse News says the birds' squawks are a loud, grating call, and are particularly noisy at dawn and sunset. Bird publications claim that a macaw's call can, and does, reach the decibel level of a rock concert or a jumbo jet engine."

"Tarantino's complaint states that Macdissi and Ball are aware that their birds make "blood-curdling, prehistoric sounding screams, they do not maintain the macaws in their residence, but place them in an outdoor aviary.
Tarantino also stated in his complaint that "one would assume, that as a fellow writer,  Mr. Ball would understand and respect a writer's need for peace and quiet." Tarantino said that assumption would be wrong."

 So now you know. Birds are loud.

And whodathought Quentin and I would have similar problems. Go figure.

Dizzy Teddy and Brah-ms

I think it's safe to say that the worst word pair you can hear in a classroom is "group project."

...followed closely by "gas leak" or "cumulative final."

My Happiness class (which is slowly becoming an ironic title) has a group project component. We have to make up our own research question about happiness and design a research study and...

I already don't want to do this. I hope this isn't a reflection on my interest level in the subject! It's probably just a representation of my horrible work ethic. For example, I have a research paper due next Wednesday and I was all gung-ho to start writing/accumulating research and instead I sat down to my computer and started blogging. Blerg.

Anyway, group projects. Every group project is the same.  No matter how many members, it could be two, it could be ten, there will be ONE person whose schedule is days ahead of everyone else. This person makes the others feel lazy, but to appease this member, the others pump out whatever they were supposed to contribute according to the Proactive Person's schedule. How is that fair? It's not. But life isn't fair, as I was reminded constantly as a child.

There is also always AT LEAST one  incompetent slacker who has decided to ride on the coattails of the other group members, who are all really just towed behind the Proactive Person. Incompetent Slacker will finish his/her assignment at the last possible second and rarely be on time/show up to group meetings in the library.

During my last group project, I discovered that I was the slacker for the first time in the history of my education. I felt terrible to be bringing down my group, but then I discovered how liberating it was not having to carry the rest of the group as Ms. Proactive. And now I am spoiled and I don't want to be that person ever again. It's a vicious cycle. Actually, it's more like when you realize that the backpack you have been lugging around all day is 470 pounds and if you carry your books to class one at a time instead of being prepared for everything all the time, you are much more comfortable.
I mean I guess. I haven't taken my books to class since freshman year.

So in Happiness class, we are charged to make groups of four. I look at the three people in my immediate area.

1. Thom (see RLS: MetalSlayer) 
2. Thom's metal friend, who looks like a teddy bear that has been through the dryer one-too-many times. His hair sticks up, fluffy, and there is a slight dizzy look to him as he talks about the freaktacular MetalSlayer album out next month.
3. Brah-guy, named for his propensity to refer to people as "brah," which is slightly acceptable given our proximity to the beach. He has short red hair and clothes that look like he's been wearing them for years, not in a dirty way but in a loose and comfortable way. He's the kind of person who insists on wearing flip flops year-round.

 I really need to stop judging people.

Upon seeing my prospects for my group, I decided to talk to my professor after class and request a random assignment. But then, I thought, what if she assigns me to these dudes anyway? Decisions, decisions. I thought, for sure I will be Proactive Patty for this group. Damn.

As I sat lost in my own worry and ignoring the last few minutes of class, I write my contact info on the sheet of paper Brah-guy has handed me, and I hear Dazed Teddy addressing me from his seat directly behind me.

"Cookies. You want cookies? Cookies?"
Oh, man. This guy is high.
"I mean," he clarifies, "would you like some cookies? I work at a bakery and I took a bunch home today."

It turns out he works at Baked, one of my favorite bakeries in Charleston and just as I am about to say "sure! do you have any Monster cookies? They're my favorite," he says
"Do you want a Monster cookie? And I have chocolate chip. Take a few!"



Maybe this group thing will work out after all.

In love with the problem problem:

Why I <3 my classes.

As a freshman I took a class called Intro to Academic Writing, because I was naive and listened to my previously-unknown-to-me Honors adviser, who said that since I had already completed my English requirement with AP classes I should take this intro class to help me write papers in college. I unwittingly signed up, and did not realize until the first or second week of classes what "Introduction to Academic Writing" actually meant. It meant reading journal articles, analyzing "academic" writing styles and teaching me a trick called the "quote sandwich," which I still use in all my papers to this day. However, the most important thing I took from this class was "the problem problem."

In an article by Gerald Graff, he describes the "problem problem" in the academic community as the "tendency to make seemingly obvious assumptions explicit" and a "general obsession with searching for problems where often there do not seem to be any." I was relieved in reading this article that someone else had noticed how "academics" tend to create issues where there don't seem to be issues simply to have something to write about, and thus securing their employment through "searching for problems where there don't seem to be any." While in this class, I discovered a resentment towards academics, or perhaps my professor, for writing things I had to read about which did not need to be read about at all. Perhaps this is more the case in liberal arts disciplines, perhaps not. I just knew I was fed up with reading articles and writing papers about “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adults." Do we really need to analyze how people revise their writing? It happens, it's over, move on.

More recently, however, as I began seeing the problem problem as the underlying architecture for every college course I have ever taken (and therefore higher education in general, I believe), I realized that I do not hate the problem problem as strongly as I thought. In fact, I LOVE it.

Case in point: Happiness.

This semester, I am taking a class called Happiness. That's it. That's the whole name of the class. It is a Psychology class AND a Philosophy class, so we have two professors, 70 students (which is about as big as it gets at CofC) and a whole curriculum of the problem problem.

I noticed in my Family and Childhood Issues class that Psychology is about a lot of unknowns. Most things can not be measured in this discipline, and most of the things that can be measured can not be measured reliably, like happiness. We spent most of the class supplying questions as answers, discussing what influences a child's development: "What about his SES?" "Maybe there is a history of illness?" "Parental discord or harmony?"
My Happiness class is slightly more concrete, but only because Philosophy is a different discipline. Instead of inventing questions to define the situation, each person invents answers. That is why each Philosopher has his own "ism" or theory he is associated with.  There are dualists, idealists, hedonists, and anarchists. So when you get a group full of Question majors in a room with a group full of Answer majors, interesting things happen.

I love this class. I love all my classes because of the problem problem. When there is nothing left to write about, make something to write about.
And read that book, because so far it is excellent.

the NESP wasp

I am freaking out. Just a bit.

Tomorrow is D-Day. It should be happy and exciting, because I really only have two classes standing between me and Thanksgiving, but actually- OH WAIT there is another HUGE thing standing in the way, and that is this damned scholarship.

I have a meeting with my adviser for the NESP (Nastily Exhausting Scholarship Process) tomorrow at 12:30, right before I am allowed to leave for break. It's like seeing a lovely cake on the kitchen table and running toward it in excitement only to find a gigantic deadly wasp sitting in front of it, so that you are so freaked out about the wasp and how to maneuver yourself around it that you forget the cake is even there until the wasp decides to fly away by itself. Tomorrow is kinda like that.

I have a few more essays to write and I have convinced myself that everything I can get on paper (or a word document) is progress. Except it's NOT. Everything I have written is bullshit and that wasp is going to tear me down until all I am is a small weeping child.

Maybe I should have used pie as an example. It's more appropriate for the season.

fat bullies can't climb trees

Last night I set to work, whittling down my (hourly) growing to-do list, deciding to tackle my power point presentation for the middle school on Monday. This semester I'm conducting an independent study with one of my professors, and we have chosen to design a counseling program for grades 5-8 at a local Catholic school.

My first presentation was going to be about bullies- how to recognize when someone is being bullied, how to tell if you're being bullied, how to tell if you are a bully, yada yada yada.  So I got to work, researching and finding appropriate pictures for the slides...but then my mind wandered off.

I started a new power point.  I went to ehow.com and looked up "how to survive a bear attack" and switched "bear" with "bully." Then I spent an embarrassing amount of time adding pictures and swapping "grizzly" with "fat bully" and "black bear" with "mean bully."

I could say that working on something tedious got my creative juices flowing and eventually I'll pop out something genius. Like when I made myself write anything, anything, to start my college admissions essay and ended up writing about Mr. Bean. And then sending it to all my schools because it was actually an awesome essay.

But really all I've done is waste time, and my To Do list is glaring at me, judgmental and disappointed.

If you want to see the powerpoint, just email me and I'll send it to you.

The Lost Continent

I'm back. Now to business.

I've been reading a lot as I've been driving to and from New Orleans and Isle of Palms, and also spending a lot of downtime either on a beach, porch, or atop a mound of unmade bedclothes in the center of the chaotic den of mess that is my bedroom.

I finally finished Bill Bryson's first book: The Lost Continent. and thank goodness.

At the beginning of the summer, I devoured countless books of his; accounts of treks through the Appalachian wilderness or sunburnt Outback. When I began reading Lost Continent, I became slightly put off at his attitude, writing style and general view of the country he was exploring: small town America. At first I thought I had simply had too much Bill; this was the last book of his I was reading, as I had exhausted all the others in the used book store. Then I decided it was his position in life that made him sound different, annoying even. He was fresh from twenty years in England and back to his homeland to gripe about the changes since the 60s and the excessive number of spray cheese flavors. It was also his first novel. Maybe, I thought, he's just more charming as a self-deprecating, balding, old guy. However, my judgement early on began to affect how I was reading his book. My inner monologue became hostile towards him as he described the south as backwards and stupid (how original!) and frequently made up town names that show his general feelings on the area: "[it was] in some place like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bareassed, Alabama." This was dangerous. Once I make up my mind about something, it's hard to stay objective, and once I notice something, it tends to poke at me (like the frequency and consistency of my R.A. using the word 'um' while delivering the fire safety talk: "...and um, if you could um, just make sure you know um, how long to cook your um, popcorn, we'll um, avoid any um, annoying fire alarms. um. um. um."). So, naturally, I began to dislike this favorite author of mine line by line, comparison by comparison, state by state.

Many things that annoyed me I chucked up to being a sign of the times (published in the U.S. in 1989), like his relative lack of political correctness. Perhaps today we're just too restrictive of certain terms, but it still bothers me in any publication to hear Asians referred to as "orientals" or all of latinamericans summed up as Mexican. In Lost Continent, Bryson refers to a college student in the news as "a black." Not "a black person" but: "[the students] were a twenty two year old black from Mississippi...and two white guys from New York." Just doesn't sound right to me.

Bryson goes looking for the perfect small town to bring his British family to, or as he calls it 'Amalgam;' a mixture of all the perfect elements a small town can have that don't actually seem to exist in the same place. Basically he quests after the perfect pleasantville of Leave it to Beaver, or more currently, Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls. In the end, I know from reading his books he ends up living in New Hampshire near Dartmouth. However, in looking for perfection, all he really finds is hatred. His attitudes seem too polar. Either he LOVES something, or it is despicable trailer trash. I do like that he describes Charleston as "perfect" but ultimately decides he could never live there because it is in the South which means upon moving his entire family would become uneducated and start speaking at the rate of dripping molasses. to which i say >:P

Overall, I did not enjoy the book nearly as much as his others (I highly recommend I'm a Stranger Here Myself). I was so eager to write about it, I began keeping a notepad next to my bed to write ideas, or more often criticisms. Among these are bullets like

• more cursing


• less apology for drunkeness??

or "he disses the Smithsonian!"

I can't even rate it. You read it and tell me how you feel.

jumping off

So I've decided to start this blog in the hopes of solidifying my writing style and keeping my meager skills in practice during the summer months when I am not required to write boring essays for boring classes. I know I will have to write some doozies for the mandatory western civ class next semester and I can hardly wait to set my pen to that blue book. If you can't sense the sarcasm, I blame the forum. Usually I am very sarcastic, probably to a fault, and trying to convey this tone throught the written word is an assignment I am setting myself for this blog, so here goes (not right now, but trust me, it will come up eventually).

I have blogged before, but not seriously. I had an account on xanga that served as a text box for bitching my way through my high school years and also to read the bitchings of my high school friends. It was a great writing experience. AND due to the miracle of the internet, I can now look back on entries from say, the year of Hurricane Katrina and read and entry or ten about how frustrating it is to live with your paternal grandmother or the trials of AP World History (it really did suck). However, this will be different. This blog is for writing, not diary entries.

Oddly, I named this blog my sleeping foot because for some reason the most comfortable seating positions at my keyboard leave me with sleeping appendages. I might need computer chair therapy to repair this tendency. I find that after spending some time writing on my computer, I get up to walk out the door and discover I have tiny ants crawling all over my foot/feet (metaphorically of course, we have a very good pest guy). And so, I begin this foray into blogging. I don't expect anyone to read this, but I expect myself to write it. You are welcome to read along.