The Right Choice

One week of teaching down. 35 to go...

Tonight was the FIRST FOOTBALL GAME. I've come to know some band kids, some football players, some cheerleaders. Students have been asking me for the past couple of days..."Hey, Mrs. G...are you going to THE GAME????"

I was non-committal. Frankly, I was exhausted. This teaching thing...it's not for wimps. "Hmmm...maybe. I'm not sure right now. I'd love to see the band!"

In the end, I was still at the school at 6:10 on Friday. I'd hardly seen my husband or my own child all week. I opted to go home and skip the game.

At 7:30, a HUGE storm blew in. POURING rain for nearly an hour.

May I just say..."I'm glad I WASN'T at the game"?

Take my money. Please.

It's hot and humid, there was a snafu with Isaac's school schedule, Dave's worked until after 8 every night this week. School starts on Monday, for better or for worse, with me at the front of the classroom. There are just enough things still left undone to make me edgy. This afternoon I made one last trip to the Big Box Office Supply Store and crossed one more thing off of my list. Happy with my progress, I exited through the automatic doors.

Picture a table at the exit, covered with goodies bearing the D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) logo, and manned by a young lady, maybe early 20's.

She said:
"Ma'am, we're helping out the people at DARE today. May I tell you about the program? Do you have young children?"

I said:
"My youngest is 17, and I'm well aware of the program. I have a very high opinion of it. All of my kids participated in the program in elementary school"

"Would you like to purchase a t-shirt or mug to help fund the program?"

"No, not really, but I'd be happy to make a donation."

"Ummmm...like how much were you thinking?"

"$10.00"

"That will get you the mug or the t-shirt".

"I don't want the mug or the t-shirt, but I'll donate the $10".

(Rummage in wallet...pull out a ten, try to hand it to her).

"Well, there's tax involved. It's really $10.83".

"But I don't want the mug or the t-shirt. I'm just making a donation".

(Insert very confused look on girl's face)

"So what do I do with the t-shirt? I don't think I can take money unless you pay the tax"

(Picture me trying to thrust money toward her, and her backing away from me)

"But I don't want anything in return. I'm just DONATING THE MONEY!"

"Well, should I donate the shirt to someone, then?"

(My turn to look confused).

"Ummm, sure, that's fine with me".

"But you still owe me 83 cents!"

I did not pay 83 cents. Nor did I pass go, nor did I collect $200.

My children remind me occasionally of the year I danced with the Salvation Army Kettle Santa Claus. That's got nothing on the year I argued with the D.A.R.E. t-shirt lady...

Six Sox August Knitalong

The designers at the Six Sox group have a real winner with this one! The pattern is called "I Love Ganseys" and the stitch patterns are typical of Fishermen's sweaters from the British Channel Islands area. I'm using a merino wool/silk blend yarn which is extremely soft and fine to work with, even if it's not totally in keeping with the original intent of the patterns.

Lots of ribbing in an amongst the cables and seed stitch hearts, so these aren't nearly as narrow as they appear.

Overheard

Something you do not want to overhear while waiting for the child to finish getting the haircut for the senior photo session two days hence:

"Maria! Can you come show me how to fix this?"

What's in a Name?

Elizabeth sent me an e-mail last week with an exciting image attached. It seems her new business cards are ready, advertising her new status as a software engineer in neat block letters. I e-mailed back, complimenting her on how professional her name looked, all printed out like that.

Rarely have I experienced such an exquisite case of "open mouth, insert foot".

She might have warned me that she'd be calling less than 24 hours later to announce that late next year, she'll be needing new business cards, as she'll be changing her name.

I can't say that the news was particularly surprising, but the timing did catch me off guard. Due to the couple of thousand miles that separate us, my sister-in-law and my mother will have the fun of seeing "the ring" before I do, and the mother of the groom will be handier for consultation on "details" as the wedding approaches, but e-mails and phone calls have been flying fast and furiously between central Texas and the East coast.

Elizabeth and Matthew, we wish you every happiness. May you always find as much joy in each other as you do today. May you support each other, respect each other, laugh and celebrate with each other. I love the fact that your shared website already refers to you as a family, for you each will be, from now on, the most important person to the other. A wedding is for a day, but a marriage is for a lifetime.

Summer Camp 3, Day 3

It's not Colorado, but it's awfully pretty anyway. Texas Hill Country, "tamed", as much as it CAN be tamed.

Summer Camp 3, Day 2

The Zilker Botanical Gardens. I'm not sure how I've managed to live in this area for 10 years and missed this treasure the whole time.






And another animal too cute to ignore (look out, little fishes!)

Summer Camp 3, Day 1

"Community Gardening" and "Native Plants"


And one animal that was too cute to pass up.

Knitt'n (more) Mitt'ns

Lots of seminars, workshops and classes this month, most with coffee breaks, so there was a fair amount of "short block knitting time", and mittens aren't too taxing to the mind. I was able to finish 7 more pairs for the Cheyenne River Youth Project "Mitten Blitz". These are all wool, and the bottom two pairs seem to be made of a particularly attractively scented wild and wooly wool. Pandora could hardly keep her nose away and whenever I took a break from knitting at home, I had to hide the knitting FAR out of kitty reach...

Size range is "Child's medium" to "Women's large/Men's medium". Sort of.

Home from Camp

I've been at camp for the past week, and it was great. OK, to the average outsider, it probably looked more like a week-long seminar on teaching techniques for Pre-AP Physics, but to me, it looked a whole lot like summer camp.

I packed my bag, left the family at home and "stayed over" for several nights.

At 8 AM on Monday, we gathered in the University Chapel for a welcome, announcements, introduction of the lead presenters, then our "counselors" for the week were introduced and we sorted ourselves into our cabin groups. There were 9 people in my group, and my Counselor's name was Mark.

My group (call us the Physics Nerds) came from small towns, larger towns, the inner city. Some had 30 or more years of teaching experience; some had next to none. If there had been a volleyball game, we probably would have lost, but afterward, we would have roasted marshmallows with the Chemistry Nerds and laughed about the game while secretly adding chemicals to the campfire to make it glow in strange colors.

We wore tags around our necks with our names and cabin groups typed on them and had to show our name tags to get into the dining hall where we filled our trays then sat at table clusters...with our cabin groups. If Mark got there late, we saved him a chair and waved wildly when he finally came through the door.

Our cabin had leaders and followers, those who had been to this camp before and knew all the rules and those who were brand new to the camping experience, talkers and observers. Two came together from the same school, and others of us discovered connections with others that we would never have suspected.

We had guest speakers, show-and-tell with projects and ideas from our home schools, and yes, even arts-and-crafts (have you ever made a model capacitor from common kitchen supplies?) We were given souvenirs to take home: a really, really heavy Physics textbook, a neon light bulb, a big bag with the camp logo printed on the side.

At the end of the week, we all exchanged e-mails and promised to keep in touch. Some will, some won't. We may meet again next summer, at this camp or a similar one. I packed the car and drove home, pondering the week's experiences.

Camp. What would summer be without it?

Order Rodentia, Suborder Hystricomorpha

Could you get much closer to the world's largest rodent than this?

The capybara at the San Antonio Zoo.

Going to the zoo with "big kids" is even more entertaining than going to the zoo with "little kids".

The one with the pansies...

I didn't mean to collect tea cups.

I'm not sure you could even say that I DO collect tea cups...I have a couple of splendid, heavy celadon cups that Dave has brought me from business trips to Korea, but I don't officially "collect" them.

I collect books and knitting needles and yarn and refrigerator magnets (by default) and souvenir spoons and strange little science toys, but I've never collected tea cups.

Not until a couple of weeks ago.

Grandmother collected tea cups. She collected them on trips to Europe in the 60's and 70's and I used to admire them in her kitchen when we would visit...so pretty and dainty and elegant and everything a bookish pre-teen was not. They spoke to me of storybook characters and summer days in the garden and something beyond Girl Scouts and bicycle bells.

I don't think I ever touched them, but perhaps I was treated to sugared hot tea in one once. It wasn't important that I touched them...gazing at them fulfilled some sort of princess-y fantasy and was sufficient. I admired the gilt edging and the various curved handles and my favorite was always the one with the little purple and yellow pansies.

Grandmother is 93 now, and in recent years, she has been passing on her favorite possessions to those she loves.

Two weeks ago, she sent me the tea cups.

Knitt'n Mitt'ns

The knitting folks at Children in Common have been rerouting some of the woolly goodness this summer, to the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. As a sideline, there's a mitten challenge going on, and I like nothing better than a challenge, so here's my first round of 7 pairs of wool mittens. Most are knit with a combination of one strand fingering yarn and one strand of worsted (accounting for the preponderance of TWEED), and I used up a lot of small ends of balls and odd leftover skeins. All are knitted on either 36 stitches or 40 stitches in the round. No special significance to the cabled pair except that I hadn't made anything with cables for a while.

350 million cards?

I had another one in my e-mail this morning. A small child with a terrible cancer, who hopes to set a world record by receiving 350 million get well cards.

350 million.

I see these things, and I wonder if anyone has thought through the logistics of the plan. Where, exactly, do you store 350 million cards? Not in scrapbooks...

Let's say, just for argument, that you can fit 1000 individual cards inside a cubic box 1 ft x 1 ft x 1 ft . Judging from the junk mail piled on my breakfast bar, that's a generous estimate.

You would need 350,000 of those boxes to store your cards.

The volume of those boxes would be a cube of the size (cube root of 350,000 ) on each side...or about 70 feet on a side.

Picture a room that is 10 x 10 x 10 feet (a small bedroom with a tall ceiling)

You would need 7 x 7 x 7 of those rooms...or 343 rooms.

Maybe we should turn to e-mail, instead.

Let's say 350 million people each send the boy an e-card.

If he opens one card every second, it will take him 350,000,000/60(seconds per minute)/60(minutes per hour) to look at all the cards, that is, about 97222 hours.

That's about 4050 days, or slightly over 11 years (around the clock, all day, every day).

Honestly, I bear no ill will toward the sick child, but what if, instead of sending a greeting card, each person were to donate $1.00 toward cancer research?

American Cancer Society

CIC Knits, April/May 2007

CIC is taking a slight detour this quarter and supplying handknits to the Cheyenne River Youth Project in Eagle Butte, SD. They have especially requested hats and mittens, but are grateful for anything, and these Baby Surprise Jackets and socks were already either on the needles or in the shipping box. I'll work on mittens in June.

Nine years

I started substitute teaching when Elizabeth entered 9th grade. I wanted to get out of the house, I wanted to keep an eye on what was "really" going on in the middle school and high school, I wanted to see if maybe, just maybe I could like this "teaching" thing.

That was at the beginning of the school year, 9 years ago.

Today, I turned in my resignation.

This "teaching thing". Yeah. I like it.

Day 10. What I learned in school.

Appreciative parents sometimes bring treats for teachers.

Kolaches are a delicious diversion during Tutorials hour.

There's another baseball game.
There's a student/parent bus available TO the baseball game.
What time and where to meet said bus, and how much money to bring.

Tryouts for Drill Team officers are this evening.
5 young ladies from Pre-AP Physics are trying out.

What time and where "Friday Night School" happens.

It surprises some students to meet Algebra in Physics class or to meet Biology in Chemistry.

I can see the value to co-teaching certain subjects.

4 out of 5 Physics students surveyed will jump right into the lab without reading the instructions first.

What books are on the Summer Reading List.

Digital cameras and computer projectors can be checked out from the library.
It's not called the "Media Center" for nothing.

The ladies in the front office know just about everything. The librarians know everything else.

Pre-AP Physics thinks I'm going to do "just fine". Easy for them to say, since they can be pretty sure they won't be in my classes next year, but I'll take them at face value and thank them for their vote of confidence.

Day 9. What I learned in school.

What day New Teacher Orientation begins.

Where and what time the baseball game is.

Where to vote for next year's Honor Society officers.

How much money is reimbursable for classroom expense each year.

How to keep track of inservice/training hours.

What the teacher websites look like, and how they are updated.

How many compasses we have for the next mirror lab. Not enough. I've fixed that.

When the textbook turn-in deadline is.

A certain percentage of Chemistry students thought I was there for their amusement. Daily chemistry discussions just for the fun of it. They didn't think they were supposed to be taking notes (or doing the homework, evidently). They have a test tomorrow.

Crawfish guts clog up the sink.

Some really, really good illustrations for the concept of low entropy/high entropy.
***
Low entropy: All the clothes folded in the drawer.
High entropy: Clothes all over the floor.
***
Low entropy: Kindergarteners in a circle for story time.
High entropy: Kindergarteners on the playground at recess.
***
Low entropy: Saving money in the bank.
High entropy: Spending money!

I learned that it feels really good to bring up a concept from a week ago in a different context and have students both remember and apply it correctly. Something clicked.

One more day. It's going to be strange to NOT go to school on Monday.
It's OK, though. I'm subbing in Physics on Tuesday. My cooperating teacher has promised to come by and say "hi".

Day 8. What I learned in school.

Teacher Appreciation Week has its perks.
I've heard a rumor of breakfast tacos on Friday.

The best perk of all might well have been "No departmental meeting today".

TAKS scores have been released.
There really are seniors who will not graduate.

How to submit work for a sick student who has requested it.

A whole lot of Science/Math teachers have 3-year-olds.
This is not a group I regret not belonging to.

It's an odd feeling to teach 3 classes in a row with a substitute teacher in the back of the classroom.

The Latin Club is raising funds for a trip to Italy.

The science wing cleaning lady and the crossing guard a block west of the school can lift anyone's spirits in about 10 seconds.

Working Dry-Erase board markers could be traded profitably on the black market.

A signed contract is a beautiful thing.

Day 7. What I learned in school.

An entire class session can be planned in 5 minutes when necessary.

5 more minutes to fine tune the plan is good.

I have the only set of overhead projector fine tipped markers in the department.

By the end of the day, I'd reclaimed all but the blue one...

When graduation is.
Where graduation is.
Which student won't be graduating unless she gets her Physics lab turned in post-haste.

How, when and where the field test for the Biology End of Course Exam is being given.

That next year Chemistry will be field testing an EOC Exam.

Proficiency in protractor use is rivaled by proficiency (or lack thereof) in compass use.

The compasses with the "safety points" are not worth the time or effort. I'll take the risk of being poked with the good old fashioned metal compass points, thanks.

How hard it is to use a compass intended for pencil and paper on an overhead projector with a fine tipped overhead projector pen.

How to input grades on the computerized/online gradebook system.

Where the safety goggles are kept.

(Note to self: splurge on personal pair of safety goggles. Mother's Day is coming. I'm worth it.)