Schooooool's Out, For. Ever

Ok, maybe not forever.  But that was the song we played for Music in the Morning on June 22nd. 

What is Music in the Morning, you ask?  It's a pretty neat program developed by our local symphony.  Basically, all manner of classical music played throughout the school year and research shows that over time, this 5 minutes of music plus a little info about it makes everyone smarter.  I have no objections because I like music and I enjoyed about 96% of the selections. 

Clearly, that song is not classical, but our "maestro" felt it would be fitting to take matters into his own hands.

What were we doing at school on June 22nd, you ask?  Why, finishing school, of course!   Late, you say?  Psssshhhhht.  That's nothing.  One year, it was June 30th.  No.  Lie.

I am not one who usually counts the days until vacations, holidays and the end of school.  Life passes fast enough.  The last thing I want to do is count away even more days wishing for something better. 

However, this year was a little more trying with one particular grade than ever before.  I'm not going into great detail here because I've done that time and again throughout the year.  Suffice it to say, the phrase "good riddance" has never been so appropriate for a group of my students. 

We also had some administrative changes that changed the building in a good way, but in a very challenging way that caused me no end of feeling frantic.  All.  Year.  Long.

So, when June rolled around, I was more than done with school.  I wasn't counting the days, but I was getting excited that school was almost out. 

This past week, I could hardly contain myself.   Especially when the heat wave came on Wednesday and just about killed me.  Packing up a room in 90 degree weather , with no AC is pretty much the definition of torture.

A lot of the mothers whose blogs I read are, shall we say, a little sad that school is out and that now they have to entertain their kids 24/7. 

I will think of parents with glee as I spend the next two months lesson plan free.  Parent phone call free.  Rude teenager free.  I will think of them as their surly preteens treat them the way they treat us 6.5 hours per day. 

Ah, bliss.  I will think of you all fondly as I sip mint juleps in my hammock.

All Star Blogger Not So All Star

Well, I've just spent 3 days on the surface of the sun. Apparently, New England pissed off whoever is in charge of the weather, so they turned up the heat. And I think the dial broke. For three days, it was in the 90s. I think I've seen 100 degrees about a handful of times in my life and  we get 90 degrees maybe 2-3 days each summer.

I definitely enjoyed the 90s, as a decade, but as a temperature bracket? HELL no! Heat makes me mean, especially when there is no relief from it.

We don't have central AC because 80% of the time, we really don't need it. And it kind if interferes with my loving-summer-with-all-the-windows-open lifetstyle. We have a window AC for those unbearably humid nights in August and the occasional unbearable days here and there.

With k-ster landscaping in the heat, I had little objection to him putting in the AC on day two of the heat wave and we slept peacefully as we added to the greenhouse gases.

As the rain moves in to clear out the heat, I'm heading south for a few days at my sister a-ster's. It would appear that I actually do like the heat, being so foolish as to visit in the summer, but such is the life of a teacher, traveling only when school is out.

Plus, I don't have to do hard work outside while I am there (at least, thats what she told me) so it's not like I'm going to be out working the cattle or anything. And where they live, there's AC everywhere.

School ended yesterday and I jumped on a train today. Not the wisest choice as far as getting things settled at home. The Run for the Arts was last week and there are remnants of that all over the house and then I brought some stuff home from school that have to be dealt with and I did more laundry, so I've left k-ster with quite a mess.

And to add to the end of June confusion,my laptop, the one that I won in a raffle just two years ago, took a powder. Permanently. Or,as we are so eloquently inclined to say, it $h*t the bed. Only two years old. So I am without a laptop.

It's like I almost cut off a limb. It's still there, but barely manageable. I can use my old computer but it's a tad inconvenient. And since I didn't have my laptop to play with on the train, I borrowed my mothers iPad again.

You might remember how much I enjoyed using that the last time I tried to blog with it.  There are limitations. And beggars can't be choosers, so I'll take what I can get. I've had a few moments to blog about but I've been paralyzed without my own computer, so it's been dull around here and I apologize.

Expect better things this week.

And if you have a laptop you love, tell me the brand and why you love it. HP is on my $h*t list right now, so it looks I might have to venture into greener pastures.

The Dirty Bulge

It's no secret that keeping a Spanish teacher in my building in the 16 years I've worked there has been more difficult than, well, I can't think of a good analogy but really, really difficult.

With teachers who are not effective in the classroom, come students who misbehave.

And who touch things.

Things they should not be touching.

Like this unfortunate matador.

Well, not this one exactly.  We had a very special matador who had a purple costume.

And his own bull at his feet.

And a bulge right there---->

Many, many times, that bullfighter had to be hidden or even removed from the room so certain kids would just leave that thing alone.

And over time, do you know what happened?

His purple matador pants became very dirty right over his bulge.

He was a very sad, sad matador.

And he has since disappeared.  Which is a good thing.  Because when you used to walk into the Spanish room and see a matador barbie doll posed....

Well, it was just something that you shouldn't have to see.  Whether you were 12 or 60, it was just an appalling sight.

Now, if that matador had happened to look like this...

Well, then he could have carried any color cape he wanted and no one would have bothered him.

Linking up with Finding the Funny

Field Day Woes

Yep, it's me again.  But I've added some style with a cowboy hat.  And it looks like maybe I have a little Captain in me.

It would certainly make the day much more fun if I did have some Captain in me.

Today was Field Day.  Since I know many of my readers have only recently joined me, I doubt most of you read the post I wrote about Field Day last year.  Being such a fan of recycling, I decided to go ahead and reuse a lot of that post right here.

If you remember field day, it's really just for the athletes.  Yes, we try to make everyone feel good about completing something, but when Susie is running the 880 in 1.5 minutes and Johnny just jumped 75 feet in the long jump, your ability to roll a tire 20 yards or catch an egg in the egg toss doesn't really matter, does it?

In my elementary school, we had field day every June.  I wasn't an athlete in those days.  

 

I'm not sure I'm one now, either, but I think some people think I am, so I let them believe what they wish.  

 

As I recall, we all had to do every event because we had such small classes and it was necessary for everyone to do everything.  My sisters will have to chime in here, because I may be wrong on that.  I just dont' remember selecting an event the way we have our students do now.

I remember thinking I was really dashing during the 50 yard dash, but there was no speed in me in those days.  And it was on the tar parking lot of the church, so I think I feared crashing to my death on that tar.   I think I might have even done field day in my white moccasins one time. 

 

I also remember the high jump, which we don't even do at my school now, but no one knew the word "liability" back then, so everyone did the high jump.  I had such visions of the heights I would achieve.  

 

An ant could have jumped higher.

One of the most vivid memories for me at field day in my youth was actually two fold.  A)  we got to wear SHORTs.  TO SCHOOL!!! and B)  we had LUNCH served to us AT SCHOOL. 

I know you wonder what sort of Amish life I must have lived.  We went to a small, Christian school that didn't have a gym or a cafeteria.  The basement of the church was our gymnastics center in the winter, in which everyone had to run around in socks because it was gymnastics time and there were mats on the floor but I was afraid to breathe because I was afraid of smelling feet; and the basement of the church was also the cafeteria in my early elementary years.  My sisters probably dont' remember this because I think it had stopped when they came through.  But, in 1st and possibly 2nd grade, we traipsed to the cafeteria with our lunches every day.  Except Friday, most people didn't bring their lunches because they would serve hot dogs on Fridays.  But I never bought lunch because I was weird.  Eventually, we just ate lunch in our rooms and no one served lunch to anyone but on field day?  Someone made hot dogs and we had watermelon.  That was a big deal.  

 

Watermelon at school.  

 

While wearing shorts.  (we had a strict dress code)

So, when I first got to the public, middle school that I teach in, and they said that field day was June whatever, I was thinking:  50 yard dash on tar, high jump with a bamboo pole, watermelon, hot dogs and SHORTS.  Of course, being a public school in 1997, anyone could wear shorts any day they chose as long as they were long enough (no so much a problem in 1997, but today?  Long enough shorts have been the source of many a battle in the past few weeks).

I arrived on field day the first year, and every  year since  to find:

- there is no high jump

 

-50% of the kids HATE field day because they aren't good at any of the events we do offer, not even the sack race, tire roll or egg toss

 

-those kids who are not doing events and looking like star athletes are constantly in trouble  

 

-there is a special "cookout" that involved a hot dog, chips and watermelon, but it wasn't FREE!  our was always free!

 

So, after my first field day in the real world, I too HATED field day.  I would often take a personal day on field day just not have to deal with the bad attitudes of the kids and the lack of teacher support.

Fast forward a lot of years and we have different gym teachers.  While there still isn't a high jump or free lunch, it's not such a nightmare anymore.  Yes, everyone has to participate and there are some who can't even do the sack race, but there's something different.  We have our roles down to a science, we are a well oiled machine.  

 

Kids are allowed to sub for their classmates if they are absent- this used to be a major issue and if they hadn't notified the queen gym teacher of their subs by a certain time, they couldn't change and it would pit kids against each other and ruin the day.

The best part of today was that the sun never came out during school.  This greatly reduced the sweating, near-fainting, throwing up, flinging of water on everything and everyone, the tank tops and the likelihood that everyone will have outrageous sunburns tomorrow.  In fact, it was kind of cold today and for about 1.5 hours, it was raining.  On us.  So my hat was useful not for keeping off the sun, as I expected, but for keeping the rain off my face.

If only we could find a way to get rid of field day once and for all.

Blogger's Block

Either I have a bad case of Blogger's Block or there's just nothing worthwhile going on in my life this week.  Sad day.

I found this amazingly appropriate post on Royal Legacy's site today and I think it's worth visiting.   It's particularly appropriate if you are a daughter or have daughters or know someone with daughters.

All I can say is thank GOD I went through the teenage years before boys were wearing their pants around their ankles. 

Go read her funny words and pray that something entertaining will happen this week over here on my site.  Because peas and horses just ain't doin' it.

Peas on the Half Pod

I've had such a good crop of peas this year!  I love eating them raw because they are still sweet.  Cooked peas aren't so great.  For lunches and at supper, we've been eating them out of the pod, like this.  No canning of peas in this house!

The leftover pods remind me of shellfish after it's been eaten!  All the shells left behind!

Two Brains Converged By Genes

My sisters and I never played those problem solver type games that they have nowadays where you have situations you have to figure your way out of or you can't move to the next level until you figure out xyz, etc.  Maybe they played them together, but I never played them with them.

As illustrated here, I did not get the gene that does math the way the two of them did.  I got the gene that really WANTS to do math but not the one that really GETS why it is what it is.  But that's OK, I tell myself, because I got the gene that lets me talk in front of groups of people day in and day out without batting an eyelash, which most of my family could not do.

And I'm not teaching those people math, so all is well.

However, 2 situations have recently come up wherein my sister e-ster and I have been elected to solve a problem.  Not really of the math type, per se, but problem solving that probably does require the math gene.

Situation #1:

How to make e-ster's iphone work in her fancypants new car.  She has a super nice car with the option to put an ipod/phone in the glove compartment (I always say glove compartment, do you say glove box?) and play it from there with a fancypants hookup.

We are smart enough to know that there are buttons on the steering wheel to control the radio and all sorts of things, but there seems to be no way to control the iphone when it's hooked up.  It's really weird, you can see on the little dashscreen that there is a song playing, but there seems to be no way to change the songs.  So you're stuck listening to whatever song comes next out of your million songs on your iphone.

That seems pretty outdated for a fancypants car.

Especially when another option on that display lets you talk directly to the president.  Or maybe it lets you get current weather.  Something like that.

So, we fiddled.  We pushed buttons singly, together, in sequences.  We tried an iphone and an older ipod to see if there was a difference.

And YES we got out the owner's manual.  I have a degree in reading, remember? That was my first suggestion.  But it didn't really address the whole ipod thing beyond saying "plug it in here".  Not much about scrolling or changing the volume or anything.

So, e-ster hit upon the magic when she accidentally clicked on the right sequence of buttons.  Or as I like to call it, the scroll button....  and it worked!  Now she can scroll through her songs and pick what she wants to listen to!

yay!

We were pretty surprised that they didn't write this information down.  I guess they figure all fancypants car drivers have phDs.

And do you know where we eventually found this information was written down?

No, not in the owner's manual.  I already told you we looked there.  In the booklet that fell out of the owner's manual called "how to make your i devices work" or something equally offensive to two people who spent 30 minutes trying to operate the radio.


Situation #2

Now, this one is really difficult.  I will bet that 97% of you do not have the slightest idea how to do this either.

How to make a graph (which I now know I should probably call a CHART) out of information you put into an excel spreadsheet.

I asked e-ster to help me with this because:

a) she was a business major and I imagine that somewhere in some econ course or some other course that we teachers dont' have to take (still thanking God for that every day) she must have had to be skilled at taking numbers and manipulating them into charts, graphs, percents and whathaveyou

b)  she is pretty tech savvy (disregard the first situation) and works for a tech company

c)  she likes to figure things out and usually does (again, disregard the first situation)

So, I had some data that I needed represented in what I would call a bar graph.  You know, like little thick lines showing that this number of people got this score on the test.  I also know that it's totally possible to do this with excel and I'm pretty sure they learn that in like 6th grade in my school.

But I was at home and needed to make the data like 3 days ago, so I didn't have a student to help me.

I tried.

I tried everything I knew how to do.

And excel just laughed at me.

It made me charts/graphs but they were not representing anything accurate.  They could represent one piece of the data but not the other.  Round and round I went.

So I called e-ster.

She told me about a cool website that you can go to that allows you to get a password to remotely visit someone else's computer and help them work through something.  Yes, for all of you whose parents get lost trying to find pictures they just downloaded, this could be a GREAT way to help them remotely without punching them when they are sitting right beside you and still don't get it.

Anyway, so I closed all the secret files and let her into my computer from her house, oh a whole 15 minutes away.  But it was supper time and we had things to cook, so we couldnt' just drop over each other's houses.

I explained what I wanted and I let her go to work.

And I watched her do the same damn thing I'd already done for 25 minutes yesterday.  Do you have any idea what patience it takes to let someone who isn't sitting beside you manipulate your cursor?  I was on the phone with her while she did this and I kept pointing to things with my finger like she could see them.

Then I realized I could also manipulate the cursor to show her things.  Or to fight with her and undo what she was in the middle of undoing because I forgot she was actually in my document.  Wow, the 21st century is really amazing, isn't it?

Anygraph.   So we futzed around (wow, spell check actually believes that futzed is a word.  Not a single red line under that!)  and fooled around and took turns doing the exact same thing over and over and still not getting the right results.  That's the definition of insanity, right?

After a whole hour, we had somehow cobbled together enough brain power to get it right.    When she tried one thing, I noticed something she didn't see and vice versa and eventually we did one completely correct graph.

Talk about the blind leading the blind.

The real test was in creating the second one.  Eventually, we made two accurate graphs that actually represent real information that can be read and interpreted by the masses.  And right now, I could probably do it for you again, but a week from now, we will both have forgotten we even made graphs, let alone how we made them.

One whole hour. Plus the 25 minutes I had already spent.  Plus the amount of time she spent when she learned how to do this a long time ago and hasn't done it since.

I suppose someone would say that we should work together because we'd make a great team, figuring things out.  Sure, if all you ever wanted from us was the completion of one, single thing.  Forget mass producing anything.  We like accuracy in our problem solving.  Even if by "problem solving" we really just do what the other one did to see if it works better for us.

I continue to live in secret horror that someone, someday, might actually bear witness to our ineptitude or worse, that we might be in a situation with a-ster too and have such moments as described above.  She likes to figure things out too.

But then there'd be 3 of us trying to control the cursor.

The internet is definitely  not ready for that.

Sharing with Finding the Funny and Saturday Laughs.