O Brave New World...

I am trying to collect all the examples of AI that I use without minding it at all, AI which is useful to me and doesn't set all of my teacher alarms off, because boy, do I get shirty about AI and student writing, or AI and its generation of "art" or "fiction", etc.

1. I am quite fond of being able to search for information on the internet, though the little stuck-at-the-top Google announcement of their AI version of my search results pretty much annoys me and I do not use it without checking more.

2. I find Google Translate extremely useful in a pinch, to check my own guess at a Spanish translation, to use with languages I absolutely do not know (which involves some blind trust, obviously) -- Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin, Latin... obviously those are not the only languages I do not know. I worded that poorly. But Google Translate has gotten a lot better in the past few years.

3. I find Ancestry.com's scraping of uploaded information very helpful in terms of what my dad calls genie research.

4. I am sort of hit or miss, mostly miss about predictive typing. I don't make many typos on my own, or misspell much, and autocorrect mostly enrages me and does not get it correct, whatever it is. Also, if AI is so great at that, why does it not correct the typo "on" to "in" or vice versa; you'd think it could manage that.

5. Map/Direction apps are... useful... though I will say they give me much the same feeling as a calculator, which I still avoid for fear of losing what little knowledge of basic calculation I have -- same with the ability to use a map and retain directions in my head. But map/direction apps are so convenient, sigh.

6. Speech recognition and Speech-to-text apps for my students who have various forms of dysgraphia... those are very useful.

7. Again I am less sure about grammar and spelling fixes... I mean, they mostly work, but I do feel like ... well, first, my students are too lazy even to make use of them, but if they DID, I fear they would not actually learn from them, just lazily accept corrections. What do other people think about this?

8. welp, that might be it. If others have examples that are useful and not predatory and/or dystopian, I would be interested to hear them.

(Some teachers here thing ChatGPT might be a fine thing that students would 'learn from'; some also think that it's not exactly ChatGPT is useful tool in some formats that, for instance, allow you to input text and then choose a register in which to spit it out: snobbish academese, for example, or sarcastic, or some other historical period. I have not checked these out yet... they don't flick me on the raw like straight up "write me a five paragraph theme on X journal topic)

Working with one of my eighth grade students, Samaa is so fun, no matter what I am teaching her. She is avid to learn, and even though her skills are not the highest (iReady diagnostic pegged her reading at the third grade level, for two reasons, I think: 1) she's an English Learner, and 2) she has little exposure to text and avoids reading ... and doesn't go to the library, or read the books I've given her... she prefers videos -- K-dramas, C-dramas, and now T (Thai)-dramas -- and iReady pegged her math skills at the first grade level, some of which may also be due to ELL issues) she WANTS to learn and is not bored by things.

Today we were continuing with back to basics grammar (I have jettisoned those stupid grammar drill sheets I used as a crutch last year) -- we'd reviewed Parts of Speech, but now I am connecting those to building blocks of sentences. I want Samaa to be able to identify each part of speech in a sentence, so that when I tell her to build a sentence using at least two nouns, a pronoun, an adjective, a past tense verb, a conjunction and a preposition, she'll be able to do it. After color coding the PoS (shades of Montessori instruction, though I don't really know much about that and should look it up), I gave her three topics and said she should write one sentence, any sentence, about each. (Topics, two of which she suggested because she did not want to do two of the ones I had come up with -- the election, and Gaza*: fruit; next weekend; and K-dramas). All three of her sentences were perfectly grammatical utterances (with one misplaced word, because of ELL). Then she painstakingly, bit by bit, underlined each part of speech in the associated color, with help. Then I asked her to figure out which two PoS EVERY sentence MUST have. She guessed an article first (I think because they are so ubiquitous) but then corrected herself to a verb and a noun. So we made up a ton of two word sentences with nouns (people, animals, and things) and pronouns, and a verb. Finally, I showed her the most basic first step of sentence diagramming. She was able to correctly figure out where to divide each of her three earlier sentences.

* My sister likes to eat a lot of apples. -- divided between sister and likes

* Next weekend I'm going with my mom, shopping. -- divided (with help because of the contraction) between I and am going

* My friend told me about a new K-drama and I am going to watch it. -- divided between friend and told

Because I was late (boo -- I had to waste time this morning using my final [more than a year past expiry] Covid test because I have a wretched sore throat, which was RQ's first symptom a couple of weeks ago when she got it) this took up all of our time and we had to plan how she could do one hour of math iReady at home and use one of the Thursday hours on Social Studies instead, with me.

I fucking love small group or one-on-one instruction. It's where I began with teaching, at Evanston Township High School's STAE -- Steps Towards Academic Excellence program, which is what finally pushed me to become a teacher instead of a professor.


*She has written plenty about Gaza, in horror and anger and sorrow. Almost every one of her weekly Current Events assignments is on an article on Gaza.

ETA: Two hours later -- Samaa and her mother just stopped by with a Yemeni feast for my lunch -- something like Greek pastitsio with cinnamon and ground beef or lamb and macaroni; some roast chicken; saffron rice and a yogurt sauce for eating it with, and a salad. I was not expecting that.

I risked buying a box of [Stash extra spice] chai flavored teabags, and the results are... adequate. Not really much like actual chai, which I love, and which is messy to make (get Assam leaf tea, one teaspoon per intended cup, plus one extra; put it in about one to two cups LESS than the intended cups' amount of cold water, with say two cinnamon sticks, several green cardamom pods, some powdered ginger and maybe a couple of cloves; bring it all to a rolling boil, and then add in the missing cups [one or two] of liquid in the form, for me, of half-n-half, though you could use whole milk, too, and bring THAT to a boil. Watch it carefully, and the minute it starts to foam, take it off the heat and pour into a pot. Use a strainer to pour it into cups. Mmmmm. So rich. So good. I do not like sugar in mine, but many people do).

Anyway, this has the spices right, though it doesn't have the richness or the sort of ... boiledness of the half-n-half. Acceptable, if you don't want to put in the work, sigh.

I am about to make my dinner to go with this tea (well, and with a pot of normal tea, which is more to the point with this particular dinner. "Dinner"?) A couple of sandwiches. Both on Beckmann's sourdough bread, fresh. One will be English seedless cucumbers and Dubliner cheese, on butter. The other will be Branston's pickle and Dubliner cheese, on butter. There are vegetables in this dinner! Maybe I can remove the scare quotes.

I am slowly trying to cook a little more than I have for ages. Ages = years, basically. On weekends, like tonight. Over the Winter Break, I made two soups while my father and stepmother were staying with me (for four weeks; they stayed with me for about four weeks... it was much nicer than I expected it to be in my anxiety beforehand... more on that in a bit). I made my old family standby, as I changed it from my mother's version: Bean-cabbage soup, which I've detailed in this blog before, a long time ago. It's the easiest soup in the world, and could certainly be vegetarian if you omitted the ground turkey.

Basically: brown about a pound of ground turkey with about an onion (or more, if you like them, which I do) chopped up, in olive oil or any oil, really, with a bay leaf. Then pour in one to two cans of chopped tomatoes, three to four cans (or more, depending on if you want it to be vegetarian, to make up for the turkey protein) of cannellini beans, one can of which should be mashed up with its liquid (but include all the liquid from the cans); as much chicken or vegetable stock as you want -- enough to cover the finely chopped head of cabbage. Add some salt, maybe some thyme and oregano. Cook it down for a good hour or more. Then, when it seems done for you (the cabbage should be soft), make a bagheer of cumin (that is, heat canola or some other non-olive oil in a small pan, and put in several heaping teaspoons of cumin until they start spattering, and then dump the whole thing in the soup and stir. It will make an impressive sizzling near-explosion.)

I love that soup. Extremely satisfying on a cold rainy day, which we have had plenty of in the past month. My mother's version was beef and kidney beans, and no bagheer.

But I also made a soup new to me that I have no idea why I never did before. I love pea soup -- it was a standard, when I was a kid, and it's easy as hell. This is almost the same but for some reason entirely different. The taste of yellow split peas is ... so different! And the savory. My father denied that that was an herb -- he's hilarious when he opines on shit he knows absolutely nothing about.

This was habitant soup -- yellow split pea soup, with ham shank (again, obviously one could leave that out). God, it was good. I have the ingredients to make it again this weekend, and I might.

If I get my fucking grades done. I am far, far, far behind on them, especially given some stupid tech fuckery to do with Canvas (a learning platform I hate very very much), and they are due on Wednesday. So I really have tomorrow and Sunday to do them. Gah. I am a world famous procrastinator, so I am hoping that those skills of last minute single-minded focus will come to the fore.

I will say, this sandwich is delicious. It works best when the bread is very, very fresh, as this is. Best of all would be a home loaf from a British bakery. That bread is incredible and I never, never, never see anything remotely like it in the US. I mean, sure, baguettes are nice and all, but honestly I prefer British baking.

Let's see. Xmas was nice. I wasted a lot of emotional energy being anxious about having my dad and Mary here from TWO WEEKS before I got off work for break to the day after New Year's, but in fact, it was really nice to have them in my spare bedroom -- as well as PQ (that's my dad, referred to by his initials as were we all, from childhood on) monopolizing the (really very large) balcony to smoke his pipe, and also monopolizing the dining room table to lay out all of his daily STUFF on. My apartment/condo, whatever I am supposed to call this place, was crowded but also very... comfortable. I mean, the apartment is comfortable. But it was nice having constant company, especially since PQ has ants in his pants and cannot stay in one place terribly long, so he and Mary borrowed my car for daily jaunts to various habitual haunts (e.g., a Starbucks up in Oakland by an old quarry that they like, and where Mary gets her daily NYT, my sister's house in Oakland, even though RQ and Tim were not usually there -- not at all, the first week, since they also were still working... Any of several Bay Area bars he has been going to since 1965...) I didn't even mind watching his endless, endless NCAA football Bowl Games, as well as the briefly resurgent Packers (though, it must be said, we all fucking hate Aaron Rodgers now, asshole anti-vaxxer idiot that he is). Or the daily news shows he is addicted to: CBS (I think, god if I actually know, though I watched it a lot with them) with some woman anchor they like, and the PBS News Hour, every week day, and 60 Minutes. As a Christmas present, I'd gotten him a month of Hulu + so these things were possible. I quit it the day he left.

I think I am finally, after these years of the pandemic, getting somewhat lonely. I was super outgoing and extroverted as a teenager and into my twenties and even thirties. But I retreated a lot in my forties and now. It's seemed fine to be quite introverted, but I am finding it less so recently. It's hard to know what to do, given my general difficulties with walking or standing. I have a travelscoot, but it's really hard for me to put it in my car. If I had a lot of money, I might get a car that had a high hatchback, like maybe a used Suburu Outback? I don't know. A used Honda Fit? But I don't have a lot of money, unless I raid my savings, and I don't want to do that.

It might seem not-exactly-perfectly-aimed, as a strategy to feel more connected to people, but I think I will try to write more often in Dreamwidth (lord, I still think that is a stupid name). The not many of you who read these entries are people I care about and would like to be closer to (What the hell is Devlin hearing outside my door; she's like a sentinal cat, but also extremely scared if anyone she doesn't know actually enters -- I don't think it's anything, actually. Silly girl.)

I might let LiveJournal lapse, too. I still go to the effort of posting here, and then copying and pasting and posting there, but it seems dumb -- and the Russians sent me a weird email saying my payment had failed... but that my "Professional Packet" (Professional what? Fanfic writer? I am not, though my older niece implores me to try it, I guess as an easing in to actual writing? Also because she worries about me being depressed, something she is familiar with) will expire... in January 2024. Uh. What? Did I pay two years in advance or something? It's hard to care about LJ. I did check to be sure DW has archived my NINETEEN years of entries (that is so bizarre... I started in November of 2003) and comments, and my first entry included the fact that I was far, far, far behind on grading and they were due that Monday. Ha.

First week of this school year -- if you can call three half-days a week -- is over, and it was really nice. That's always the case for the first couple of weeks until my less than stellar classroom management cues a few students in to the fact that they can be lax as fuck. Sigh. However, it was still a really nice first week, one of the most pleasant I can remember. Today, two things happened that make this weekend super nice, as well.

1) I may finally actually start and finish (and all between) Moby Dick. For Reasons, I was looking at my Audible books account, and searched that weighty tome, which I have tried to read so, so, so many times, never getting past past chapter three. There are more than twenty different versions... there are even at least twelve that are unabridged. How to choose? I asked the internet, and lo, the internet told me that what I should really check out is: Moby Dick: The Big Read (http://www.mobydickbigread.com/), which is all 137 (or 138? something like that) chapters read aloud by different Brit personalities, celebrities. I've heard of some of them (Benedict Cumberbatch, e.g.) but not most of them. Tilda Swinton reads the first chapter. Some guy who is brilliant, Nigel something, reads the third chapter. Nigel Williams. It's great! I will listen to it, slowly, over time. Such brilliant and hilarious writing. I mean, I KNEW that. I've read other Melville and loved it. But this, this novel has been my unconquerable mountain. Other books I've never read, I don't want to read (most things Russian, and does that include Nabokov's Lolita? I'm never going to read that either). (Or any James Joyce, tbh). But Moby Dick? I DO want to read that. And this may be the way. Perhaps I will report on it as I make my way through it. In 2018, my mom and I listened to A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles, read by Stephen Fry, and she loved it. I read all the Sherlock Holmes there was to read by the time I was ten, but it was very enjoyable to hear it in Fry's voice. He does one of the Moby Dick chapters, too.

2) I slept really late this Sunday morning, but ah, I was LESSON PLANNING. I often do lesson plan in bed, not gonna lie. And this morning, that time allowed me to at last figure out what I am going to do with my brand new class -- a 6th grade "Wheel" class, which means a [s]elective for one-third of the sixth graders, repeated twice more during the year. So I'll see all of them? And each class will have about 13 weeks? We're on a semester system, really, so it's going to be odd, when we do grades for this one class. I was told by the principal that the class is officially named "University of Diversity", and "you'll be great at it! It's like Sociology for Beginners!" I know nothing about sociology and do not want to know anything about sociology, much less make up curriculum for it from scratch. The person who taught it last year made it about... if I understood her correctly... code breaking, espionage, forensic science, and reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. Me? This is the 400th anniversary of slavery in the United States, so we're going to dissect racism and read Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which I've taught many times (a long time ago) and which I have a class set of, along with an audible version, and lots of ideas. Hurrah, problem solved.

It is almost 10:30, and I am not ready to go to bed and concede that my weekend is over. I also haven't eaten dinner, and that is stupid for numerous reasons, actual physical hunger being one of them. (In a follow up to my last entry more than a month ago... I have been able, so far, to continue doing pretty well in tracking and being regular with diabetes stuff, despite school starting. I am especially doing well in eating well at school, and drinking tea there, and not wasting money and pancreatic health on the fast food franchises that infest all school neighborhoods in the US... I have a microwave, a plug in kettle, and a small fridge in my classroom, but until this year, I had not made the best, most consistent use of those things. I am also hella grateful for cheap frozen meals from Trader Joe's, and fruit, and cut up veggies from ditto...).

Anyway... as far as the title of this post... yeah, Sunday Night Blues, amplified by two things -- first, our union's tactics in contract negotiations with the district, see how they suck. The president has pretty much hinted (and it was no surprise given this union local's generally supine approach to the district, with whom they USED to be cozy as hell) that if we do go to impasse and then arbitration and then vote for a strike, it will be long and depressing because the district is headed by Scott Walker wannabes aiming to gut any union, and we'll lose. Great! So the only tactic the union leadership is pushing is a) electoral, as far as getting two new members of the local school board elected who might vote against the superintendent, and b) work to rule until that school board election, although not every site is participating. My middle school site is THE VANGUARD, ahead of any other school including the two high schools. Crazy.

So here's the deal. [This is mostly excerpted from a chat with a friend, to whom I was explaining what is going on]

Labor situation: our union, the [redacted] Education Association (so, NEA rather than AFT) has been in negotiations for the past eight or nine months, and we've been without a contract that long. The district is playing Scott Walker hard ball and has utter contempt for us. They offered a 1% raise while districts surrounding us were offering 8% or more. They've inched up to 2.5% or something derisory like that. They have tons of new money that is neither restricted nor one-time only income, but they refuse to spend it on either salaries or smaller class sizes in the lower grades, which was supposedly a California priority.

In reaction, we're "working to rule" at least at my site (I am very curious about at least one of the other middle schools, because they were supposed to vote on this last week) until mid-November, after the (stupid) school board elections. I don't think much of this electoral tactic — why the two board members supported by the union would make THAT much difference, and also, why they would necessarily get elected, despite a big push and precinct walking by the union. This is a pretty conservative community, small, mostly stable working class and lower middle class, with a lot of Christians and a lot of Mormons.

Working to rule means we can only do what is literally in our (expired) contract: we can't work early or late (which ALL of us do); we can't have our rooms open and supervise children during the morning break or over our lunch period (which sucks because I have a group of kids who like to eat there and who are hella nice, from last year and this year); strictly observed, we shouldn't even grade at home or send email to parents or students answering their email at home. I am very nervous about not grading, though generally I am hella up to date on that. Right now I have two weeks' worth of Reading Logs for my three English/Language Arts classes, and one article with "talking to the text" all over it to comment on in depth for those three classes, and one Review & Assess on a short story by Gary Soto, and coming tomorrow, one character trait/character/supporting quote assignment on the same story. The Social Studies grading mostly happens in class, so there's that, at least. There are two more weeks in the first quarter, and we've been told to do our "best guess estimation" on grades.

My friend asked how anyone could "catch me" grading at home, or sending emails at home. I told him that they (the union) cannot. But it undercuts solidarity with my fellow teachers if I grade and post grades for parents to see on Schoolloop when other teachers are not doing it; it divides us. I may decide to grade at home, but not post the grades publically, that is, update Schoolloop (the online grading/email program we use to communicate with students and parents). Literally, grading and planning and emailing students and parents is all unpaid overtime that teachers do at home and after school and before school ALL THE TIME.

But it sucks. It's painful, and it makes my job harder while I'm on the clock.

Here, have a couple of pretty pictures that show how my classroom has progressed since the first bare day.

Bookshelves with classroom library near front door



New bookshelf for my own teacher stuff, and more posters/decor



Past extra credit projects from first quarter's Medieval Europe unit

... when there are only nine days left?

But I do. Ugh. Lesson planning is done until the end of the year. Everyone is on final end-of-the-year-projects (well, not the 6th graders... I wish I could think of something for that... I should...) either poetry books for ELA, or make-a-boardgame-for "The Age of Exploration" or "The Enlightenment", for Social Studies. And after the poetry book is done, which should be this Thursday, we get to read and then do Readers' Theater for "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", which is an enjoyable Cold War allegory from The Twilight Zone. And then we get to watch it, and maybe also watch the one about William Shatner coming home on a plane after a nervous breakdown, and seeing an abominable snowman on the plane's wing, trying to sabotage the plane. But no one else can see it! Just the once-again-crazy guy!

I SHOULDN'T have the Sunday Night Blues!

Bah. I'm just going to go to bed and read. I'm on the second-to-last (boy, I'm liking the dash tonight) medieval mystery series about Isaac of Girona, by Caroline Roe. A blind Jewish physician in post-plague Girona, in the kingdom of Aragon. It's before (about a century before) the expulsion of Jews from Spain, fucking Isabella of Castile, and before the Reconquista, though the Jewish quarters are under pressure, and courtly exchanges between Moors and Christians are fraying. I like the series. It's a little slow moving, but it definitely does well with the setting.

Speaking of reading, I am going slower this year, on my goal of an average of a book a day. I put in 365 again, on Goodreads, but I am only 24 or so books ahead of where I should be. Last year I just kept getting farther ahead. Maybe I'll catch up over the summer. REREADING, baybee. (I still do that to comfort myself, springheel_jack).

I guess I do not have a ton to say. I hurt my right hand ring finger yesterday evening -- pulled a tendon or something -- and that ate up most of my Sunday, swear to god. No ice, so used frozen food. Elevation is a pain in the ass. Resting is resting. There was no compression. Oh, but getting the ring off of said ring finger took a long, agonizing time, involving frozen Trader Joe's tamales and olive oil. And pain. The tendon feels better now, but I don't want to do anything strenuous with my right hand. Yes, I am right-handed.

There are four days of this school year left. All of those days are minimum-days, meaning the kids leave at 12:25 and then I have a bazillion meetings each day until 3:30. I have already done a lot of the room-packing-up, with kids' help. And they are all finishing up with their last bits of final projects and so on. In the English/Language Arts class, we read the script of a Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and then I cast most of the class and we did a play reading of it, which was fun in both classes. Tomorrow we will watch the Twilight Zone episode, and probably a couple of other eps, like the one where William Shatner goes crazy on a plane.

In Social Studies we will watch Armand Assante in The Odyssey which is not the worst adaptation ever.* I took my ELA students (who are almost entirely also my Social Studies students) through the plot and some of the Robert Fitzgerald translation of the poetry of The Odyssey, earlier in the year, so I figure that should be a good year closer.



*Actually, I don't know of any other adaptations, even by the '60s cult idol guy who did all the claymation or whatever those monster movies FX were... what's his name? Did Sinbad the Sailor, and the Argonauts and what have you? Yes, Ray Harryhausen, that's him. These special effects -- for the TV miniseries from 1997 -- aren't awful. But shouldn't Odysseus have red hair? Wasn't that one of his defining features? Whatever, that's what I've got for them.

Day 3: What's worse, the fact that kids these days wear baggy pants, or that they won't get off my damn lawn?

This topic is hard for me. First, I am a terrible literalist. I like the way springheel_jack approached it, but I think that being a middle school teacher just gets in the way of that. I literally see baggy pants (well, not in the English sense... just the American and possibly Canadian sense?) all day long. I used to be around screaming teenagers on their homeward commute after school, on the bus, before I had a car. That experience very much lent itself to the 'please get off my damn lawn,' feeling, though I live in an apartment. Normally, though... youth fashion doesn't bother me at all, though I find it hard to view it as aesthetically PLEASING to me. I can't get excited about 500 gym shoes with marginal differences, or track suits and athletic team jerseys as couture. But it doesn't BOTHER me. It's not that I'd rather see kids wearing something else, exactly. (This is a bit sad to admit, but I sort of like how my niece looks in her hella boring Oakland school uniform -- khaki pants or a khaki skirt, a white shirt of some sort, and/or a navy shirt, I guess? She wears clothes well, though, so probably anything would look good on her.)

The off the lawn thing... well... sometimes. God, sometimes after a tiring day at work, yes, I feel crotchety as hell. But not today, thankfully. I am having a good time, for the most part, right now, teaching how to write an argumentative essay (responding to a piece of literature, in this case, the adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" as a play with 31 parts! Almost every kid in my class had lines! Only from their seats; we didn't memorize the script and act it out. Still). I was schooled to within an inch of my life on the organization of a five paragraph essay in high school, and I am happily forcing that method on my hapless students. But I think it works well, rigid cage that it is. Once you learn the rigid cage, though, you can fly free, yet stay on topic.

I. Introductory paragraph with thesis statement
II. Body Paragraph 1
Topic Sentence
generalization introducing evidence
detail (e.g., at this point, quote from source)
explanation (aka, analysis, commentary)
transition
g
d
e
tr
g
d
e
tr
Concluding Sentence
III. Body Paragraph 2, see above
IV. Body Paragraph 3, see above
V. Concluding paragraph

All the hard upfront work is done on a three by three rectangular grid, a G-D-E sheet, and then if necessary they add some transitions and maybe a Topic sentence with transitional language and a concluding sentence, and voila. It's kind of instant mix, add water, but as I say, if they learn it well enough, then they can evade it and write better than it.

But I've certainly gotten off topic right now! Ha. Anyway, it's somewhat fun to teach this in a writer's workshoppy kind of way, with kids scribbling furiously on those forms and then checking with me and getting immediate feedback. I don't get as much time as I'd like to interact with kids one-on-one, and they are like thirsty plants drinking up the focused attention.

God, I loathe teacher meetings. And I loathe my school district. Oakland Unified would NEVER pull this kind of shit on teachers. The morning session of today's "Professional Development" meetings featured, a) a lot of blah blah blah on the new, supposedly nationwide "Common Core State Standards", which, in 2014 will lead to new standardized tests which will supposedly have more to do with hands-on demonstration of mastery of skills. I am interested to see how they will score these. But even in that part of the presentation, it was mostly just stupid acronyms and a lot of menacing passive aggression from the horrible attack dog administrator who swans around the district popping into classrooms to grill students on what standards they are being taught that day. And at the end of her spiel, b) she forced us to watch this video. I wanted to scrub my brain out afterwards. I hate shit like this so, so, so fucking much.



The second half of the morning session was on equity, which means that white teachers should stop disproportionately referring black students on discipline issues, and recommending them for expulsion, although the rules about expulsion are kind of hard and fast and if you have a knife, you have to be expelled. I mean, I totally agree with the principles here, it's just the dude delivering the message strikes me as a careerist opportunist who does not have one useful tool to offer clueless teachers except guilt. The images for this half were marginally better than the butterfly effect video, because the guy had a powerpoint with slides from the old days of innocent and happy hip hop by, e.g. Monie Love and Grand Master Flash versus later evil developments like NWA and Nicki Minaj. He said nothing like Monie Love exists any more, and I wanted to say "What about Willow Smith's 'I Am Me'?" I am kind of stuck on that video actually; she's hella cute. I know she's the daughter of multibillionaire actors and all, but I love a short natural, honestly, and gawky tall girls, and sometimes even autotune.



Okay, fine, it's not hip hop. Still.

Day 12 -- What's in my bag, in great detail.

Yeah. I carry a shoulder bag -- the kind that is called a messenger bag, I think? I have had this preference since middle school, and I wish I still had the cheap vinyl one I had then -- it was a cheerful red plastic/vinyl plaid. Unfortunately, these bags are not brilliantly constructed and strong, so they never last as long as I would like.

The ones I have now (I use one until it is on the edge of collapse, and then trade for the other and try to repair the first, then switch again, eventually) I got at Cost Plus, or whatever it's called now. World Market. There was a stand with five different colors and I couldn't decide so I got two. I wish I'd gotten all five. I REALLY wish I'd gotten all five. Here they are:



I do not like purses, generally.

In my bag: keys, wallet, iPod, nice earphones for the iPod and phone hands-free device in a little case, checkbook, with no checks, in a nice interlace-pattern tooled leather holder, lanyard with school ID and school keys, large comb, hair barrette with cloth flower on it, plastic film canister which I put my morning's pills in because I never manage to eat breakfast before leaving for work, and I can't take them until I've eaten, a black mesh bag which contains all the little sundry items like pens and pencils (MANY), eyeglass cleaner and cloths, ibuprofin, lip balm, pencil leads, nail files, etc. You may suspect my motto is 'be prepared'... and finally, my iPad. Occasionally I also try to stuff in my journal, which is bulky and heavy, and a wireless keyboard, which is really an inch or two too long for the bag.

Day 13 -- what was this one? My week in great detail? God, also pretty damn dull. Do I even recall it well enough?

Monday -- the weekend seemed too short. I got to work at 7:15 or thereabouts, stopping at Starbucks on the way, because I couldn't deal with making breakfast and getting to work early enough. My lesson plans and the copies I needed were on my front desk, ready to go, and I had time to change the "Whiteboard Configuration" so it was accurate for the day. I taught Math -- problem solving methods -- and then did the first laboratory experiment ever with my science classes -- a "Senses Lab" where there were five stations, three with blindfolds.

At the hearing station, a group of four students plugged into the listening stations and listened to 10 recorded sounds on a CD, writing down what they could identify. Apparently many of them confused a coyote's howl with a woman screaming or moaning. At the tasting station, they put on blindfolds and took one piece out of four different bags, tasting it (eating it, really) and writing down what they thought it was, and whether it was bitter, salt, sweet, or sour. The tastes were: pretzel, bitter chocolate, dill pickle, and skittles (a candy... it's kind of a sour candy, so I think we could have done better on sweet). A couple of kids told me about allergies to chocolate in time, thank god. At the touch station, they were again blindfolded and felt four objects concealed in paper bags -- a golf ball, a pinecone, sandpaper, and cotton balls. At the smelling station, same thing, blindfolds, then coffee, peppermint, garlic, and ... god, what was the fourth smell? Lavender, maybe. And the vision station, which was nonsense, I'm afraid. I had nothing to do with that. It was a little picture with hidden drawings in it, like from a bland children's magazine.

If I'd had time to plan that, I might have wanted some of those optical illusion illustrations -- not only the ones where you misjudge the length of what you're looking at or whatever, but the kind that have hidden pictures in the color backgrounds that you can only see if you unfocus your eyes. Anyway, I'd been terrified about classroom management during this lab, but it went fairly well, at least for the 4th period class. My 5th period science class has 37 students. That was harder. Then, more Math. I stayed at work planning and venting and destressing and making copies and organizing stuff. For a very long time.

Tuesday, same program, with the one science class that hadn't had the lab yet. Notes from the science book with the other two classes. More problem solving with the Math classes.

Wednesday -- our 'minimum day', wherein students' classes are shortened to 32 minutes, and they leave at 12:18. We then get lunch and then have time for common planning meetings. And other, less useful meetings. On this Wednesday, we took down the Senses Lab and set up the next one -- two in one week, god, I hope that's not common! Then we talked about how we were going to grade the labs, and what we should be starting on after the problem solving mini-unit in Math.

Thursday -- again early, but today there was mass computer based testing. That is, for my classes, these tests were Thursday and Friday, for Math. For science, we did the lab we'd set up Wednesday afternoon. This next lab was one on practicing observation skills and measurement of time and motion. We set up physics stands, a ramp, and a stage. For the lab, one student counted off seconds "zero one-thousand, one one-thousand, two one-thousand..." and another let a wooden car start rolling down the ramp the moment he or she heard 'zero'. A third student marked on tape below the rolling car where it got to at 'one', 'two', and 'three' -- or more, depending. Then they measured the intervals in centimeters to try to determine whether the car went faster as it went downhill.

Friday -- finished up the computer-based testing. Discussed what scientists students have already heard of (not many) and talked about scientific facts, laws, and theories. Did some housekeeping stuff related to grading. Stayed late and organized, planned like mad for Monday and Tuesday, made copies.

There. That's pretty damn dull. Did anything NOT teaching related happen this past week? I ate dinner at my sister's on the way home on Thursday, on the spur of the moment. I was so hungry and I knew I'd just stop for fast food, because I couldn't deal with the thought of cooking. But my mom called and offered to feed me their leftover table scraps. Not really. Their leftovers, though, yes. It was good -- something T. cobbled together from his perusal of cooking sites on the internet. Sort of a stir fry: frozen veggies from Trader Joe's, frozen small shrimp, also Trader Joe's, quinoa, garlic and other herbs and spices, some oil, some fresh greens, I think. And soy sauce. My mom described it as comfort food. It was.

God, I think I am caught up, more or less.