December 16, 2011
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1 The End.
2 That was today's headline in the Merc News.
3 The End.
4 The headline referred to the end to the war in Iraq.
5 To a lot of vets, I'll bet that was a moment. Most non-military people probably looked at that, and then to the ads for Christmas deals.
6 To a soldier, or to relatives and friends of soldiers, it is probably a bittersweet headline, but a meaningful headline.
7 It was a sweet, short headline, and maybe it should be an understated thing.
8 4,487 U.S. lives lost. 32,226 wounded in action.
9 And it isn't The End to the 4,000 troops still over there. Most of these will be out by December 31. I prayed for them this morning.
10 Give it all a bit of thought on this day.
11 Moving on, Part the First: Well, this is the last DN of 2011, and comes on a morning of extreme deadlines. My goal was to have all my grades done by 12:50 today, but I now don't see it happening.
12 I forgot about an evaluation I had to write for our Assistant Principal. I've reached a point where I no longer have to be visited by an administrator, and where I can create a project and then report on it.
13 I knew I had to get that done this week, but in the midst of the blizzard of papers and finals and all, it slipped my mind. So I put everything else aside yesterday and attacked that project head-on.
14 I tried to retrieve an email I had sent to her, and did, but it didn't have the attachment I had sent when I originally began the project.
15 The email had a document attached, but when my laptop crashed, the doc was lost. The importance of this is that it had all of my original information on it, as well as all of the California Department of Education Standards I hit when I did the project in October.
16 I didn't really want to write her, because she is more overworked than am I, and asking her to dig for that document would have been ludicrous.
17 I began from scratch, worked all afternoon yesterday, and then awakened last night at 3:30 a.m. and finished it up.
18 The good news is that it was about my ghost unit, and the Heidi stories that worked famously this year, almost better than ever.
19 I actually felt that I wanted that unit to be "immortalized" in my personal file, or wherever these evaluations go. It is always an amazing couple of days, and this year gave extra credit to students who brought in cultural stories, or stories from primary sources: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, etc.
20 The results were fairly remarkable. I had stories from Vietnam, Mexico, India, Japan, Germany, Italy, Africa, the Philippines, Scotland, and numerous other countries. They were much better than time spent listening to the same old stuff about the Sunnyvale Toys R Us, Chuck E. Cheese, the Winchester Mystery House, and on and on.
21 Many of the stories were told in our darkened Theater, with lighting from our Drama Department's fall production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible working perfectly with the darkness, and with the flashlights on the faces of the students.
22 I just thought it would be fun to have that unit written out on paper. My "evaluation" is actually a sort of "How to" model, and I'm just glad that I wrote it and saved it, because it is really a fun and sometimes it is an electrifying time for my students. It is also the oldest unit I've ever used, dating back to my student teacher days.
23 It is now officially a "classic".
24 It feels nice that I did that, and mailed it off this morning at around six.
25 And so this is Christmas.
26 I'm up against a deadline, which would only make perfect sense, since I've been up against enormous deadlines all year.
27 Santa already came to me. I've mentioned it a few times, but how, at Christmas, did I suddenly get a windfall of money if their isn't a Santa?
28 Simple.
29 There is a Santa.
30 I hope you've been nice. I also hope you've been naughty. You gotta live a little.
31 Santa came to me this year. I've been naughty AND nice, so maybe the rules are changing!
32 I hope he finds you and yours. It happens in good deeds, or in good moments during all the madness. Someone will stop you and make you smile. You do the same, and then we could spread that through the coming days.
33 And so this is Christmas.
34 Have a happy holiday, and I'll see you when we get back.
35 In the meantime...
36 Peace.
~H~
