October 4, 2012
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The Daily News1 ‘Tober.
2 Giants. Boche. Mota. REALLY???
3 Why DO that to people who might have heart conditions?
4 Well, the better team won, and a kindly note to the Dodgers: Don’t celebrate in front of champions. It’s not healthy to your season. Happy landings, fellows.
5 Meanwhile, the A’s!!! One of what hopefully will become the most storied seasons in history. They have to finish the miracle today.
6 Hey Giants’ fans, I’m still one of you. But you have to hand it to this year’s A’s. They started at All-Star break and never looked back.
7 And with all due respect, it took two former A’s to beat the Dodgers last night.
8 I just think it’s fun to enjoy us some Bay Area sports.
9 And we have hockey.
10 The San Francisco Bulls start their lives this weekend with some sort of promo that absolutely nobody knows about.
11 Meanwhile, the NHL is resuming talks…
12 Right now, I’m sticking with baseball.
13 The NFL almost lost me with those idiotic refs. I’m getting pretty tired of sports doing stuff like that to the fans.
14 I guess it’s all a part of life.
15 But right now it’s all about baseball, and it’s ‘Tober, and our teams are in the hunt, AND deservedly so.
16 Will I ever wear an A’s/Giants’ split cap?
17 Not in this life, not in the next. I bleed orange and black.
18 Moving on, Part the First: I missed the deadline for getting my grades done a day early, if that makes any sense.
19 We have a pretend deadlining the day before the real deadline. I was too busy trying to be accurate, so I missed that deadline by about two hours yesterday.
20 Instead, I went student by student, thought through every issue, and did the best job I have ever done in terms of accuracy.
21 Spell check just underlined the word “deadlining.”
22 Dude it’s a gerund of my own creation.
24 Gerunds.
25 How did any of us ever get through life not knowing what a gerund is?
26 People who do are like a secret society. They have their own handshakes and they party in Occidental.
27 I’ll let you in on one of the best-kept secrets of grammar: a gerund is a word ending in -ing used as a noun.
28 How’s THAT for revealing the best kept secret in human history?
29 Gerunds. Yeesh. Who came up with those boring grammatical names for things anyway?
30 I try to tell my students that if they named all those boring grammatical names stuff like “chocolate flavuh,” “cherries and whipped cream,” or “peach pies,” that students might listen a little more.
31 They rarely get that. If the guys who invented the language had named “participles” something like “saucy pasta,” people might listen more.
32 I heavily doubt it.
33 Moving on, Part the Second: What an eternal nerd.
34 Doedeedoe.
35 I love that I could write anything here and nobody really cares.
36 I just felt like writing, “Doedeedoe.”
37 Twice.
38 That’s what happens in the 4 a.m.
39 You do stuff like this: fafjdklfjafja;fjdskfjdskfjdfjdslfja;lfjdsjf
40 No news is good news, yo.
41 Moving on, Part the Thoid: Long day ahead. It is ironically a short day, because my school decided a few years ago that Wednesdays would be good days to have collaboration, which translates loosely to “teacher meetings.”
42 I actually pleaded for Monday mornings, since that is a pretty useless day for productivity anywhere on the West Coast.
43 Any teacher anywhere will tell you that the most productive days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
44 Our teachers VOTED to have collaboration on Wednesday afternoons, so the students have short periods and go home at 1:30 every Wednesday.
45 So today we have a shortened schedule interrupted with a Code Red drill one of the periods, our weekly meetings about doom and gloom, and then I get to fly over to a monthly union meeting for more doom and gloom.
46 That meeting is scheduled for 4 p.m., the same time that our REAL grades are due for the students’ “permanent records.”
47 Nifty.
48 Is there a back door outta this place?
49 Moving on, Part Four: Nah. Despite all these glimpses, I would do it all over again.
50 I absolutely love teaching, in spite of all its boushit, and there is a tremendous amount of boushit in this profession.
51 I remain absorbed.
52 Why?
53 Because I could simultaneously watch two freshmen boys knocking each other’s hats to the floor like first graders, and three freshmen girls rolling their eyes like they were thirty.
54 And the boys are clueless at how idiotic they look.
Their ears turn red as their behavior looks more and more like grade schoolers.
55 It’s hilarious.
56 And I simply walk over, pull my glasses down, give a knowing glance, and one will inevitably say, “He knocked my hat off!” And I will hold a stern countenance, and then smile, shake my head, say nothing, and walk to another part of the room. They will chirp like Disney characters, and I will re-direct all of it with a scary mute stare.
57 They will chirp back and forth in whispers until one of the girls will finally say, “Shut UPPPPPPPP!”
58 And all will be peaceful.
59 It’s into the 4 a.m. I’m going to get myself a little more sleep, and then I will turn and face the day.
60 Just another glimpse.
61 It’s what I do.
62 Peace.
~H~
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