I Had to Turn on the AC

And so it starts...

It's nearly bedtime and 80°F outside.

Last night was a sleepless night: my neck sticky with sweat, and the fan only moving the hot air around. Surely it was not hot enough that I needed to start the air conditioner.

I blew it tonight when I cooked something in the oven. What was I thinking? I wasn't. I've become used to using the oven in the last 6 months.

My daughter's room, which gets the same hot sun beating down on it as room does, was an inferno. We brought the fan in from the garage, although it didn't do much good.

In our room, the fan has been on, still moving the hot air around in our room, for two days. Pointless.

Sigh.

Give it up. The heat has come back to Las Vegas.

Can't I Work By Myself?

In the grad program I'm doing, each class has two assignments that are collaborative. I hate these assignments. It's terrible for a classroom teacher who uses collaborative learning to say such things, I know. I tell my students that learning how to work with others is an important skill. At this point in my life I've been on many committees, teams, and work groups--some by choice and others by force. I know plenty about working with others.

In this online grad program in which I am paying through the nose to work my ass off, I think I can learn a lot from working with others. I adore hearing different perspectives on topics and having my own ideas challenged. What I don't adore are these Frankpapers we have to "collaborate" on each quarter. Usually the directions say we are suppose to collaborate or discuss, but what usually ends up happening is that we divide the work up and somebody puts it all together in the end. It's funny because we teachers would not want our own students doing it. Sometimes things work out fine, but other times, it's that age-old story of one or two people pulling the weight for everyone. I'm paying for this privilege?

Last week we had some drama because more collaboration needed to happen along with the cutting and pasting. Plus, some members turned in their paltry, incoherent parts and never checked in again. It's a precarious thing to change someone's work or discard it entirely. It's better to offer feedback and get them to revise, isn't it? Last week a few us found ourselves scrambling and weighing the options: redo work that was wrong or get a lower grade for not following the criteria of the assignment. Sigh. I'm loving my good grades...

Here are some things that get under my skin and I'd like to say to these people I've never met face-to-face:

• Work should be submitted ready to go into the final paper. Don't send a table in an Excel document and expect that someone else should convert it to Word and format it to APA standards.
  
• I don't care what grade you teach, you should be able to form coherent sentences and paragraphs. You should also know which words should be capitalized and where to use commas. A few errors are fine. Everyone makes them. Your overuse of capitalization and under use of punctuation screams, "I don't know basic rules!" E.B. White wrote another good book with a guy name Strunk. Check it out.
  
• That source isn't going to format itself on the bibliography page. You're as bad as my lazy middle schoolers who won't take 5 minutes to look up the proper formatting.
  
• Sure, you can say you did your part, but what if you did it WRONG or you DIDN'T DO ALL OF IT? Whose problem is that?
  
• If someone points out a confusing point in your work, don't just say, "That's what the website said." Go back and rewrite it so it's clearer. If we don't get it, neither will the instructor. And frankly, your explanation doesn't make any sense. You fix it!
  
• (Oh, and I'm glad you have found websites that are so helpful. I can rarely find anything that I would deem credible. It looks like you haven't either.)
  
• If someone needs help with her part, don't just say, "You'll figure it out!" I've had it happen to me, and I've seen it happen to others--just last week, in fact. These are not people who are trying to get our of their work. These are people who NEED SOME HELP! Nice way to work as a team, people!
  
• I am busier than you are. Wanna try me? Bring it. I should not have to do half of your work, too.
  

These online collaborative experience have not made me joyous in sharing ideas with a fine group of intellectual teachers. No, instead it has made me incredulous that there are so many stupid teachers* out there.

It hurts my teacher pride to say such things. Really. Sick to my stomach.

I think I've been spoiled by working with such wonderful, insightful people in real life at my schools. You might read posts about how the students frustrate me, how daily life in the classroom challenges me, and how educational bureaucracy binds me, but you will rarely read slanderous posts about my colleagues. It's not to save my butt. It's because I work with wonderful, hard-working, thoughtful, introspective teachers. Sure, I have conflicts with a few, but ultimately, I still respect what they do. I wouldn't trade them in.

Of course, I've also been spoiled by blogs for several years now. There are so many brilliant teachers posting a wide variety of ideas. It's such a blessing to be able to grow (and laugh) from those teachers who open up their classrooms and minds for the rest of us. You have no idea how much I've learned from my teacher blog friends. Dear bloggers, even if we aren't friends, we're colleagues on the Net, and I appreciate your intellect. Thank you. I miss wandering around the edu-hood of the blogosphere. I can't wait until I have time to visit more often. I wouldn't trade you in, either.

These collaborative groups, though? Thank goodness I trade them in every 8 weeks.





*I should admit that many of them are awesome, and I enjoy them, but I've been exposed to an inordinate amount of fools.

What I Did on My Spring Break: This and That

It thought maybe I'd post a few more times over break. I ran out of things to say, which is funny because I always think of things to write while I'm in the shower or driving down the road. Quite inconvenient.

I had a lovely, low-key break:

(Hey! Where didn't the bullets go in Blogger?)

Procrastinated writing a paper, which ruined two days instead of one.

Calculated how much I've written since I started my master's program in August. The total came to 3,539 pages of pedagogical drivel. Felt sick for a day after that realization.

Did some honey-do chores around the house. Mostly things that were bugging me. Obvious chores left undone.

Woke up naturally every day.

Cooked some good food for dinner a few times. (Yummy pizza: eggplant spread, artichoke hearts, caramelized onions)

Read 4 books. I thought I'd read more, but I didn't.

Napped.

Had lunch with some work friends. (It became a downer, though, because we started talking about work too much.)

Watched Australia with a friend who has been to Australia. We had a nice visit after the movie, too. Nice to just chill and catch up the news.

Met up with relatives I hadn't seen in years and was sad when it was over. Wish they lived closer!

Went to a low-budget Vegas comedy club. You don't have to go to a big-name comedian to have a good laugh.

Convinced my sweetie to play hooky one day. It felt like an extra Saturday. So much fun. More convinced than ever we need to plan a vacation for just us.

Sweetie and I decided to trade in old (3 years) flip phones for new technology (Blackberry Storm). He has wanted a PDA for quite some time. I held him off for nearly 2 years. I don't need it, but they were BOGO.

Made iced tea for the first time this season.

Went to the beauty shop to deal with gray hair. Wanted to go blonder. Darker looks nicer. In the end I went both lighter and darker with some funky streaks.

Did lots of nothing important.

Going Nowhere

"What are you doing for spring break?"

"Nothing."

Blissfully nothing! Sadly nothing... Nothing.

My sweetie says, "Just get in the car and go somewhere."

I used to be so independent that I'd just take off and leave without him. But it's not like how I go to movies alone. I don't feel like going anywhere alone. Besides, my car left me stranded on the freeway last week, and although it's fixed, I don't fully trust it yet. It has to prove itself again.

I know my sweetie has vacation time that he could take. "Why don't you take a few days off and we'll go somewhere together." The kids are with their maternal family. It's just us. Let's escape.

"I could. Where do you want to go?"

"I don't know," I tell him. "Let's just get in the car and drive somewhere."

"Where?"

"It doesn't matter. Just pick a direction. Get in the car. Go. Just go."

"Okay, but where?"

Sigh. He doesn't get it.

Maybe he has a point. It might be nice to have a destination so we are sure that there is something to do--or a place to stay.

But does it matter? Let's cross a border. Find ourselves in Arizona just because Arizona is awesome. The California border is less than an hour away. Let's cross it and drive until we hit water. Water! That's always good.

My sweetie's never had much spontaneity, but I did...once upon a time. Where did it go?

Aaaaaaaaand.............................Break!

I am in the middle of the longest hour of my life. Perhaps I'm being dramatic, but it is one of THE longest hours of the year.

The last hour before Spring Break.

Twenty more minutes with my sweet 5th hour, and then 30 minutes with THE dreaded 6th hour--you know, the ones who make me want to drink but we are so endeared to each other they want to start a gang. They've even given me a moniker. Oh, how I want to skip them tonight. The best I can hope for is that they've decided to skip me tonight. Please, please, please. I won't even mark you absent because I can't get into the attendance system tonight anyway...

If only I can survive those last 30 minutes. They just have to finish up some writing they started this week.

"Miss! It's the day before spring break! We shouldn't have to do work!"
"But Miss! It's spring break!"
"Miss! It's Friday!"
"We'll do our work over the break. We promise."

I wish I were born yesterday. And so do they.

There will be conversations about parties and being tore up and sleep and smoking bud and more parties and being tore up and sleep and smoking bud--and maybe worse. Lalalala. Don't want to hear it.

"Students! Finish up your work. We won't want this hanging over us when we get back. We're moving on." Please shut up and make the 30 minutes fly by. Please.

Please let it go by fast.

It Hurts You More

Have you see this test going around lately?

Created by Train Horns

Mrs. T is testing it out today, and it made me think of my silly students and how I like to torture them with this sound.

Or they torture themselves.

Last year around this time, a few of my middle schoolers loaded that sound on their laptops. Try it out in a classroom sometime. It's difficult to tell the source. Anyway, someone would bring it in, and it would cause a classroom disturbance. Yes, I can hear it, but I can tolerate it for a little while before it gives me a headache. (My student teacher at the time was in complete torture but had to act like it was no big deal.) I'd laugh and joke, "Ha, ha! Nice joke. Whoever it is, now turn it off." The jokester would, but for a few days, we had a lot of disturbances because of "the noise."

It happened mostly in the class after lunch, so before I left for lunch one day, I loaded it on a computer to play on a loop. When they came in, they had a hard time finding it because it wasn't one of them. After that, I never had any problems. Students hate to have their cool tricks used against them.

Last night, someone in my high school class had that sound. (This time I know which one it was.) At first, the students were trying to mess with me, to see if I could hear it. If I can't hear it, then they are doing something secret that the teacher doesn't know about. How they love to make me look the fool! If I can hear it, then it must irritate me, and that will get me stirred up. Oh how they try to get me stirred up!

I had such a good time last night with that irritating sound filling the room!

"Oh, yes, I can hear it, but I can handle it."

The kids were all wincing.

I laughed and laughed and laughed at them: "This is the funniest thing I've seen in the longest time! You are all suffering so much, yet nobody will shut it off! Wow! What are you going to do? I can't believe the lengths you'll go to just to bug me! That's kind of loud. Your ears must be nearly bleeding now."

So much fun! Usually we only laugh at them behind their backs, but when they are being so silly, it's hard not to laugh.

Here's another thing about teens: they don't like it when you laugh at them when they think they are getting one on the teacher.

Why Do They Do That? #456,392

I gave a vocabulary quiz today where the students had to fill in the correct answers with the vocabulary words. There were definitions needing words, synonyms, antonyms, and fill-in-the-blank sentences. I gave them the word bank.

Essentially, it's multiple choice, right?

Why did I have students turn in papers with blank answers? One student had 20 blank answers out of the 45 problems. Seriously? Guess who didn't study?

"Uhm. I don't think so. Try again." I hand the paper back.

"But, Miss! I don't know the answers!"

Sigh. "How I appreciate your honesty! But on a test like this, you need to work the system. Process of elimination? Or maybe guess! I can't believe I'm telling you this...but seriously! Don't leave blank answers when your choices are all there! And study next time!"

One of my brainaics came up later and said, "You know, Miss, if you know the all the definitions on the first part (20 of them), then the rest of the test is really easy."

"Yup."