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 |  Welcome to Whatsit's Wild World. |
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Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know. ~Dorothy Gilman The Tightrope Walker |
| Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect. ~ J.K. Rowling, Wednesday before last, I was late to work. I overslept. I didn't leave for work until 8:30 and got there about 5 minutes until nine. The last thing I did before I left my house was go into the family room and turn the TV off. I picked the remote up off the table where it stays. I didn't even turn around, I just pointed the remote behind me and turned the TV off, then laid the remote back down in almost the exact same spot from which I picked it up. Well, that was the last we saw of the remote for a while. When we went to turn the TV on to watch the news that night, we couldn't find it anwhere. I distinctly remembered lying it back down on the table. In fact, I would go as far as to say I have a thing about it staying on that table because it so easy to lose track of. We looked everywhere: the couch cushions, recliner cushions, under the couch and recliners, on top of the TV, in the laundry room, in the bathroom, and even in the refrigerator. It seemed to vanish off the face of the earth. I had thoughts of remote-stealing ghosts and burglers with a penchant for useless items, so strange did this seem to me. It wouldn't have bothered me so much had I not so distinctly remembered putting the darn thing back on the table. The problem is that the power switch on the TV doesn't work, so the TV will not turn on or off without the remote. We have lost the remote before when the TV was already on, which means that it stayed on for a couple of days until we located it, but at least we could watch it. Since hubby and I both are teachers, when we get home from fooling with hard- headed young-uns all day, it is somewhat of a relief to mindlessly stare at the tube. Anyway . . . we lost the remote Wednesday before last. After a week, this past Tuesday night my husband ordered a new one from Dish Network for twenty dollars. Twenty dollars! We just sucked it up and ordered it. And guess what? The next morning we found the old one. It was in Matt's room. He had wandered off with it without realizing it. Grr! The new remote showed up this evening. It was on our porch when we arrived home. I suppose now we have his and hers. Now isn't that something? |
| Believing we can improve schooling with more tests is like believing you can make yourself grow taller by measuring your height. ~Robert Schaeffer of FairTest Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts. ~ Albert Einstein The elementary school where I work is doing standardized testing this week. Actually, this is a district-wide test. We have 8 high schools, 12 middle schools, 39 elementary schools, and all of them are taking nine-weeks tests. We just had midterms in February. We do this every nine weeks - take midterms halfway through and then nine-weeks tests at the end of the term. That's a standardized district-developed test about every four weeks. As the librarian, I don't have to stress over the test as the classroom teachers do, even though I teach what I know will probably be on the test, which for me is Reference Skills: atlas, almanac, dictionary and encyclopedia, as well as Parts of the Book: mainly Table of Contents and Index. However, I hear the classroom teachers talk about te fact that only four weeks in between standardized tests does not allow time for their children to learn the material well enough to be confident on passing the test. Also, they have to give classroom tests, which takes up even more time from classroom instruction. Usually I help the Special Education teacher test. She has one child who must have the test read to him. He can read, but for some reason it is part of the plan for any standardized test to be read to him. Therefore I get fairly familiar with what is on the test. Yesterday the test had questions on changing simple sentences into complex sentences with appositive phrases on it. Also, lots of prepositional phrase questions. I remember doing all this in the seventh grade. This was a fourth-grade test. When they added Kindergarten to free public school, what used to be First-grade work got moved back. Instead of getting the students ready for First Grade, they turned Kindergarten into First Grade. In addition, they added the amount of work that is required for each year, so that children today are learning things several years before I learned it. A fourth-grader's mind is not developed enough to do all this fancy grammatical work, such as prepositional phrases. They should still be on nouns and verbs: basic things. We will have math today. I will see what is on the math test. I remember from previous years that there are several things on the test that I didn't see until junior high. One thing the tests tend to focus on are critical-thinking skills. You have a few elementary children who can think critically, but the brains of most children are not developed enough for it. Another problem with standaradized testing is that the teachers are concentrating so hard on teaching what they know will be on there that they have to let other important skills go. The main one of these is cursive handwriting. We are having a whole generation of children who cannot do cursive handwriting due to it not being on the standardized testing. Also, in Mississippi anyway, for some reason (and I wish I knew the reason), History and Geography are not on the test. So guess what happens to them? I complained when they turned these two worthy subjects into Social Studies, but I would be happy to even have that. I feel a little sorry for our children. They are being crammed full of knowledge they don't have the maturity to accept. When they leave school. they will be so glad to leave knowledge behind them that they will not be able to think of continuing it on their own as many people of my generation have done. |
| I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. ~ Dr. Seuss Theodor Seuss Geisel March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991 Today is Read Across America Day, otherwise known as the birthday of Dr. Seuss. My school is having a celebration. There are teachers with Dr. Seuss shirts on. There a children dressed as Sneetches and wearing Cat in the Hat hats. They are so cute! And there is much reading going on. There are parent guest readers reading the Dr. Seuss books. Hooray! And this is the coincidence of the year: the week before Christmas I placed an order with Rainbow Book Company for lots of the Dr. Seuss books, and guess what? I got them this morning. Isn't that great? It really gave me the big head with myself. I found out that Dr. Seuss wrote his books in anapestic tetrameter. I wonder if he knew that. Another Dr. Seuss fact: I have always heard Seuss pronounced "soos." Evidently this was not correct. Here is a poem by Alexander Liang giving the correct pronunciation: You’re wrong as the deuce And you shouldn’t rejoice If you’re calling him Seuss. He pronounces it Soice. One final fact: the most checked out book last year in my library was Green Eggs and Ham. However after all that I must have a moment of honesty. I rarely ever read any Dr. Seuss books aloud. Why not? you might very reasonably ask. The reason is that they are very hard to read out loud. Go get one from the library or the bookstore and try it. Happy Dr. Seuss's birthday, everybody. Go have good fun that is funny today. |
| Please allow me to say that I have withdrawn myself from my husband's checking account. I have done this for a reason. I have also started using a different cell phone company - my husband, my oldest daughter, and myself were all using AT & T and now I am using Cspire. I have divided up all the bills. Why? Because I do not agree with hubby's financial decisions. I would go as far as to say that they are bad decisions, and not just because I disagree with them. They are not bad in themselves, just bad for our situation right now. What got me started was the porch. Hubby wanted a back porch. I thought a porch would be nice, but let's face it, you can't eat a porch. It is non-essential for two teachers in Mississippi with three kids. We were on the brink of survival every month. This is when we were still sharing an account. Hubby went and borrowed the money for the porch, which we are in the process of paying back to the tune of $400 extra a month. Also, some people around the corner from us were selling an SUV. This is a nice SUV with perks, like a DVD player. Hubby wanted it. His rationale was that we could drive my mother and grandmother around in it. He had a CD inherited from his Dad which he borrowed on in order to purchase this vehicle. This added $300 a month. Did I mention that we were already just paying bills and buying groceries? I went with this plan for a while. I'm trying to remember how long I did go with it: let's see, we bought the car in April 2009. On November 1, 2011, I opened my own checking account. That's a year and a half. I decided he could pay for what he bought: the car and the porch. As far as what we share, if he pays the house note and I pay the utilities, lunch money and groceries, that comes out to about the same amount. If he wanted to sign up to buy anything else I didn't think we could afford, that would be his little red wagon. Also, the cell phone bill was ridiculous every month and I rarely talk on mine. At my job I never have been able to get a signal inside the building, so I had a very real reason besides the finances to leave that company behind. Now he pays his and I pay mine. Oh, and by the way his bill is still as much as it was before I left. He has had it cut off several times for being unable to pay it. He can be very persuasive - he has always been able to talk them into turning it back on. I don't know how he does it, but all of that is up to him now. Also, my car broke down. It is ten years old and we are about to make the last payment on if, after which I am driving it until it croaks or I do. My mother very kindly paid to have mine fixed. There was a problem with the ignition. Well, now his car is broken down. My mother has very kindly offered him my grandmother's car to drive around. His broken-down car is very naturally sitting in the driveway, since my mother just got through paying for one car repair and is not inclined to pay for another one, for which I blame her not one iota. I am thankful she had mine fixed, otherwise we would be completely stranded. Okay, back to the porch. Remember how we used to owe $400 a month for it? And now HE owes $400 a month for it? I have a small personal loan from the same place. I went by there today to make a payment, and they asked me when he was coming to pay the $800 he owes for the two months he has not paid. Okay. I said all that to say this: He thinks I am unreasonable because I think that he should be paying on bills he already owes instead of shopping online to plan a Disneyworld trip this summer. He told me "If we work together, we can make this happen." Which really translates to the fact that he expects me to pay for it and will probably ask my mother if she wants to contribute. He has no idea how much is in his checking account right this minute. I don't either. He asked me this evening how much was in there and I told him I had no idea, that I had not fooled with his account since November and that I did not even remember the account number. I have no intention whatever of supporting him in his bad financial decisions. Not at all! |
| 1. My husband can't turn out a light or turn the TV off when he leaves a room. He leaves the house without saying goodbye. He answers his cell phone during supper. How hard can it be to exhibit basic decency toward your significant other? 2. There is a second-grade class at my school that has some of the worst-mannered children I have ever laid my eyeballs on. They came to the library today. Bleck. 3. My mother wanted me to come by her house yesterday after I got off work. She was not there when I arrived. She had taken her car to have non-emergency repairs done. 4. The workers at McDonald's don't have the words "Thank You" in their vocabulary. 5. People on the interstate in Jackson, Mississippi have no driving skills whatsoever. The ones in front of me drive too slow and the ones behind me are maniacs. |
| I work at the library at my school. Translation: I provide planning time for the teachers. Each teacher brings her class to the library for one hour. We have three classes each of Kindergarten through 5th grades and one Pre-K class. This equals 19 classes, so I spend 19 hours a week teaching instead of being a librarian. I have very few problems with the children in the library, where most of the time the worst problem is talking. What goes on in the library stays in the library. I rarely ever send anybody to the office, which is across the hall. You would think this would be appreciated, wouldn't you? Yesterday I had a little boy in First Grade to start being disruptive. He had to go. The rest of the children were sitting quietly waiting to be read to. He evidently had a problem before he came in the library because almost as soon as he came in he started. I have never had a problem with him before: I'm not sure what was going on yesterday. How it wound up was that when he got to the office he was yelling and fighting against me. The secretary told me she would take him and for me to go back to my class. He started fighting against her. I made a comment to the office manager that behavior like that in a first grader made me frustrated and tired, and perhaps I needed a new line of work. Somebody from downtown was within hearing range and told the principal what I said and I got in trouble. No wonder teaching is such an unpopular profession. |
| The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. -Oscar Wilde The reason I picked this quotes is because I had chocolate ice cream for breakfast. I kept hearing it calling me in the night, which I finally stopped when I got up by eating a bowlful. Emily, my oldest, had to go somewhere with her school this morning. She's in the junior-high choir. This may sound silly, but I am so happy that they actually call it junior high - that's what I'm used to hearing, not middle school. Anyway, the choir went to some type of choral event this morning in the next town. They had to be at school at 7:00. We made it at 7:05. I think the choir director shows great judgement in these things. She tells everybody to be there at 7:00, then shoots for leaving by 7:15 or 7:30. Emily just got a guinea pig. She has wanted one for years and years. My husband is the one who objected. He said that it would smell the house up. I can't smell that great - I'm not sure why, but my smeller never has worked that well. My grandmother couldn't taste that well, so maybe I picked it up from her. So I didn't really care about the smell, but I never wanted to spend the money on one. It happened that one of her friends at school had three guinea pigs and needed to get rid of one or two for some reason and was willing to give Emily the cage and everything for free. Therefore all she had to do was talk Daddy into it, since the money aspect was all I cared about. They went Thursday night and got it. It's name is Biscuit. And guess what? Daddy is the one who has fallen in love with this thing. He walks around holding it and hugging on it and talking to it. Ha! I am normally an animal-lover, but I am not that attracted to it. To me a guinea pig is nothing but a rodent. However, if Emily is happy, and unexpectedly Daddy too, who am I to complain, right? Since I have iTunes on my computer, I am always leaving music on during the day while we are gone for our two doggies. Emily has a TV in her room and our cable network has about 50 music channels, so she leaves it on the classical music channel for Biscuit every day. I bet we have the only guinea pig in Mississippi who listens to classical music. |
| An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts - for support rather than for illumination. ~Andrew Lang I had forgotton how addicting looking at my Summary Stats can be! "Unknown" is what kills me. What do you mean, "unknown?" I want to know who is looking, dadgummit! I go back to school and back to my little darlings tomorrow. That's the one advantage to Christmas: school is out! I have enjoyed being right at my house. Fortunately I wrote lesson plans for this week before I left for the holidays. I was trying to remember if I had done my copying or not. No clue. I'll figure it out when I get there tomorrow. I spent the day with my mother and grandmother. It was nice. |
| If I had my way, I'd do all my entertaining on the front steps. Alan Ladd It was hard finding a quote expressing my feelings about entertaining. Most of them were about how much the person loved entertaining and having people in. I value my privacy, probably too much. Once the people get here, I enjoy visiting with them. I'm just a weirdo about actually inviting people over in that I never do it. My husband invited his sister and her family over for their Christmas get-together. My house was already clean, so that wasn't the problem. The problem is that I have a bad attitude about having people over. And I have done an excellent job of not fussing about the fact that they are coming because I know that's just me being peculiar. Okay, rant over! But now that I am through fussing, I'm going to go to bragging on myself. My sister-in-law is doing the gluten-free thing, so I actually went to the store and got a gluten-free cake mix. I had to sympathize with her in her effort because there was only one gluten-free cake mix out of the whole bunch and it was way more expensive. It's in the oven even as we speak. It actually smells pretty good. I bought a glaze to put on it. Hopefully that won't ruin the whole gluten-free idea. A funny from yesterday: I went to the grocery store for my mother. I was going down the aisle, and coming the other way was the funniest thing. These two children were probably brother and sister. Their mother was about 15 steps ahead of them, trying to ignore them and concentrate on her shopping. I have been down that road, many times. Anyway, the girl was in the grocery cart (normally I would say grocery buggy, but the last time I did that, nobody knew what I meant), and the boy was pushing. She was saying "Slow down! Slow down! Stop!" So he did. I was impressed that he actually did what she asked. Then she said "Do it again!" That made my day. I laughed to myself the rest of the way through the store. Even though I was thinking that if that were my children, it would have been another story! |
| Fun is good. Dr. Seuss I was poking around my port, which I hadn't done in who knows when, and I found where I had entered my favorite website. I had to click on it to remember what it was. http://perl.guru.org/lynn/apps/ Here's another one. My kids love this one. When this one come up, there won't be anything but a little square in the top left corner. Click on the little square. http://www.thisissand.com/ Speaking of squares, I must be one. These are the only two fun websites I know of. Ah, well. |
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Well, it is the time of miracles I guess.