January 25, 2011
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The Daily News
1 Is it Spring yet?
2 I don't personally know, but on Sunday I began Spring cleaning at my office at home.
3 Do not underestimate what that means.
4 I have a cabinet that I hadn't cleaned out in about a hundred years. I received almost as many gifts as I got at Christmas!
5 Here are the treasures that emerged: A U2 CD of No Line on the Horizon. I have yet to listen to it! I think I bought it one morning at Starbuck's or something, but yeah!
6 A VHS-to-DVD converter I bought when I saw that VHS films of my dottas were starting to fade. Bought it on a whim, and threw it in the cabinet. Got busy and forgot about it. It's still in the cellophane.
7 About three containers of Kodak photo paper, unopened.
8 A journal writing book from Barnes and Noble that is entitled Daily Sparks for my students. I forgot all about it. I got GREAT writing pieces from that last year. Probably some incredible topics for Socratic Seminars.
9 The box containing all the stuff I needed to make great pics with my "new" camera, which I bought last year! I've had camera issues all year because I didn't know where the thing was. It had a CD and a book! I could have gotten all that info online, but who's thinking about that while you're doing a million other things? Fun photo time.
10 A clean agenda so that I could plan this Spring's semester. Couldn't find it for the life of me.
11 Two folders of resume' paper, which isn't important to me, but is to people who might need it. Well, the way things are going with the economy, I MAY need it!
12 A pristine T-shirt that is the exact same one the Giants used when they celebrated their World Series' clinch, one for which I have been looking for well over a month now. It still has all the stickers on it and stuff, brand-spanking new! It's a four-for-you-one-for me Christmas gift I got for myself. I've been looking for it for a month!
13 A yet-to-be-opened pack of guitar strings, and four brand new guitar picks!
14 AND one of those digital picture frames that works with flash drives, or directly from your computer, a gift given to me last year by a student.
14 Yay! I felt like going out to the garage and finding bows and ribbon, and throwing it all over meself.
15 There's a lot to be said for being over-worked and too busy to get organized.
16 All that stuff.
17 I was like, "DUDE!" "REALLY?"
18 OMG!
19 You buy things sometimes, and then the world throws them into an abyss, I sweh.
20 Heaven knows what other trinkets and boushit I bought for myself this past year. I'm already starting on cleaning the garage.
21 Can you imagine?
22 In many ways, it's great to have moments of dysorganization.
23 Sidebar: So you know, I get irritated with the letter "y" suddenly replacing the letter "i". Some new issue, I imagine. Aren't there big enough issues already?
24 Don't know why, particularly, but it just annoys me when the word "women" suddenly becomes "womyn". Or some offshoot of that. I've seen it only about twice, but really? Is that truly an issue?
25 Dude.
26 If you're going to change it in the name of empowerment, them go with "wimminz." So much jazzier!
27 I mean come ON!
22 And back to it: The cleansing of that cabinet was symbolically significant as well.
23 It meant that once again I have turned the corner on being overworked, and had a little time to meself. That's quite rare these days. I even went out to the garage to organize a few items yesterday.
24 I found a treasure out there too!
25 I found a box of hard-copy DN's dating back to 1996!
26 AND the first fourteen or so were already organized by date.
27 They look amazingly brand new, because I went through a phase early on where many of them were done in Astrobrite colors.
28 I was thinking of scanning many of them, but my scanner at home is not working. I think one of my printers at work scans, but I'm not sure. I seldom scan things. One cheap printer does have glass to copy, so it may.
29 Unfortunately, I have no time even to worry anymore. It's the mid-year teaching blues. We get summers off, yes, but during the year, we make up for those months in spades.
30 Grading papers takes up a bunch of a teacher's time. Most people think the hard part of teaching is dealing with the students each day.
31 The students are always enjoyable. Yeah, they'll be wiseguys and people trying to drive you nuts, but that happens in every job. They're also some pretty good students. Lot of ears and braces.
32 The hardest part of teaching in terms of irritation is the massive amount of time it takes to grade papers and to plan lessons so that they're relevant and updated to modern techniques.
33 And yes, we get LOTS of time off, but much of that is spent catching up with all of the paperwork. It's sort of like when college students get a day off, but have huge projects due the day after the "rest", which either eats up all the person's time, or it looms over them like a gargoyle.
34 AnywayZ, the discovery of the box of old DN's worked perfectly, exactly one month after Christmas Eve.
35 I think I will annually do that from now on. Spring cleaning, dude. You get rewards galore!
36 AND an organized mess.
37 Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I may be able to share some of the classic DN's with you.
38 It seems that I'm getting the time. I am up-to-date on two of my five classes today, which is monumental. At this pace, I may be caught up by Friday, and grades aren't due for a coupla more weeks. That NEVER happens.
39 I tell beginning teachers who stress about all of this: "If you're a week behind, you're a week ahead." They always sigh a huge sigh of relief and say, "You're right. Thanks!" Great advice. Young people stress too much. And you have to live your own life. No job or schedule should keep you away from real life.
40 We wiser sorts have been around the block. Know what we're doin', even if it partially involves boring people deliberately to quiet down a room.
41 I'm a gunslinger.
42 I enjoy workin' the room and having answers to nearly anything thrown my way.
43 I give vocab tests where I say the word and they have to spell it, and then write the def.
44 The other day a kid said, "How do you spell that?" Joe Slick, trying to get me to spell the word out loud. Old trick. Old gunslinger.
45 "T-h-a-t." And then I slowly tossed a Judge Judy glance that made the guy shrink, and the class look up and smile.
46 Sidebar 2: Hey. Does Judge Judy have a right to tell people to sit up straight? Doesn't that in some way violate Constitutional rights? Don't get me wrong, I actually LIKE JJ, but what's up with THAT?
47 T-h-a-t?
48 And back to it: Anyway, it's 3:30 a.m., and I've already logged in seven hours of sleep. I'm just getting to bed earlier these days so that my days are alive and happening. I was exhausted yesterday after knocking down around six sets of papers. I went out at around 8:30, my earliest this year. I've been going down at around 9:30 and waking up in the middle of the night, and then going for another hour or so in the morning. It actually works rather nicely.
49 So it's moving on 4 a.m. I already awakened the dog and let her out. The OW cat has yet to make a sound, but I'm guessing at around 4:07, the very moment I nod off, he'll be up and howling.
50 Hope you guys get through Tuesday well. I think I'm rested and planned, but Tuesdays can really get all over you, so keep a vigilant eye out for people who grate on your nerves. They come out in droves on Tuesdays. Just an observation.
51 Have a great day.
52 Peace.
~H~
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