March 16, 2010
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The Daily News1 So...Peter Graves walks into a bar...
2 Impossible.
3 It must be a hoax.
4 Ah, perhaps not. So another one bites the dust.
5 Thank you, Mr. Phelps. You helped make the world safe for democracy.
6 Good place.
7 Hope he meets my Mom. She could always make you think the impossible possible.
8 Moving on, Part 1: I THINK I made it through the Ides of March. Who knows?
9 It's a little bit funny ( ; ) ) 'cuz I was pretty superstitious yesterday. Not in a bad way, but our school decided to make The Ides of March a big deal. Of course, I became instantly superstitious and spent all day Sunday making vocab lists for both English 1A, who are doing Romeo and Juliet, and English 2, who are doing Julius Caesar.
10 Ride with me here.
11 I must have spent four hours on Sunday writing glossaries for both, in hopes that the students will begin to understand some of the odd language of the Bard.
12 I spent a LOT of time on this project, knowing full well that yesterday was the eternal Ides of March. Another teacher prepped the entire school with posters that said, "Beware the Ides of March!"
13 I jumped on that bandwagon and told the students all about the Ides of March, and EVEN the Ides of February!
14 I got to school especially early so that I could run both vocab lists in repro. I made sure that I followed every safety rule of the road on the way to school.
15 I was SO eternally careful to make SURE that I wasn't jinxed lol!
16 When I finally got back to the classroom with all my stuff, I realized about one minute before the bell that I had run ALL Julius Caesar stuff and NO Romeo and Juliet stuff. Somehow, I wound up with about a million vocab lists for JC, and NONE for R and J!
17 Just shoot me, haha! FML, right?
18 My first class were R and J English 1A's, and I had to tell them that they had to write definitions that I would dictate, including spellings and definitions.
19 They naturally balked, squirmed, and gave me a buncha noise about it.
20 Instead of throwing the text through the windows and turning into the Tasmanian Devil on them, I quietly walked out of the room to get some air. They were STILL stunned, because I'm usually so patient and nice about nearly everything up at the Chill. I used to have one major annual blow-up at YB, but calmed it when I reached the Chill-on-the Hill.
21 AnywayZ, I quietly walked out for a breather, and then returned to an astonished room. They thought I was MUCH angrier than I was. I actually walked in quite calm because of the beautiful weather outside.
22 From there, I dictated the entire thing by the seat of me pants, but did a dandy job of it.
23 I finally told them to make sentences out of the words I had somehow miraculously managed to lecture, and was able to look through all six-thousand Caesar handouts, and of COURSE, found the R and J master around three sheets short of a ream, which was sort of how I felt by the end of the period.
24 Well, I managed to get all the words to them, run to repro and run the remainder of handouts, so that everything finally worked.
25 They were a bit pushed, but the assignment got off without a hitch.
26 I then took to grading older papers while they created new ones.
27 In the midst of the day, I decided to goof off a bit on Facebook, and graded papers simultaneously.
28 Moving on, just a little: Near the end of the day, I ran across a vocab sentence that read hilariously. I was trying to give them words that had the prefix "mono" in it, meaning "one", as I assume most of you are aware.
29 Their job was to create sentences using the words correctly.
30 I realized that I had included the word "monocle", which most students have NO concept of in 2010. I insisted they try, giving examples of guys who wore monocles: Mr. Peanut, The Grand Duke in Cinderella, and other guys from old movies and such.
31 When the sentences came in, one guy had written this: "Mr. Peanut in Cinderella has a monocle."
32 You tell me. I almost went over from laughter, because the kid obviously knew what a monocle was, but mixed up my examples.
33 The entire image of Mr. Peanut somehow being a part of the Cinderella story smashed me!
34 I instantly went on Facebook and reported it, but Facebook has billions of people trying to throw something else out there, so the entire thing got lost in the shuffle of Farmville's, Mafias, and all the rest.
35 I absolutely LOVED it, because it is everything that teaching is all about.
36 After school, I pulled out my guitar and started learning the immortal Across the Universe, only because I found a list of cool songs that once came into my life a few years back. It was an AWESOME list of songs, and I thought I might even either make a playlist for my iPod, or just learn all of 'em!
37 So it turned into a pretty prodcutive and beautiful day.
38 Write it in your heart.
39 I got most of the guitar work down, and am now just trying like crazuh to learn the words.
40 So...life, right?
41 The best laid plans...
42 AnywayZ, no harm done.
43 Life is good.
44 Life is very good.
45 Live life.
46 Love life.47 Do the impossible today.
48 It is quite possible.
49 Love you Mom.50 Peace.~H~
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