May 3, 2013
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The Daily News
1 Warriors win greatest sloppy game ever!!!
2 The Warriors wound up winning last night despite something like six-thousand turnovers.
3 With all due respect, they deserved to win against those polecats.
4 Just sayin.'
5 Bay Area sports.
6 Exhausting.
7 But a lot of fun!
8 Moving on, Part One: Speaking of exhausting, waking up in the middle of the night trying to hit a deadline gets pretty exhausting as well.
9 What is especially exhausting is adapting to Windows 8 AND massive changes on Xanga.
10 It is annoying, even though I'm quite sure I will adapt to all of it.
11 It's sort of like when someone moves your trash about six inches to the left.
12 You wind up with crumpled paper all over your floor.
13 I'm liking it in many ways because the fonts are working, and the automatic spelling fixes things instantly.
14 The verdict is out, but I think once I get used to this stuff, it is going to be faster and better equipped.
15 Meanwhile, I had to hunt down pictures. I had a huge library of DN pics I use all the time, and they seem to have disappeared.
16 I'm sure they're around, but we'll see. I went on my land desktop computer and they are all gone there as well. I also can't control color background our outlines.
17 The uploads have been annoyingly slow lately, but I think it is because Xanga is trying to upgrade.
18 Fine time.
19 They have been irritating me this entire year.
20 It's all good.
21 Moving on, Part Two: It's Frideeeeeee!!!
22 Our school is doing Disney's High School Musical at 7 p.m. tonight and tomorrow night.
23 I'm going tonight, if I'm not too exhausted from staying up all night trying to figure out Windows 8 and Xanga.
24 It's the talk of the town.
24 Everyone and his brother should go. Ah, good old theatre. Always fun. Google Evergreen Valley High School in San Jose for an address.
25 Moving on, Part the Thoid: We did masks yesterday.
26 I enjoy the mask project. The students make Renaissance masks and explain to each other little things they learned about the Renaissance. I play Renaissance music when the enter class.
27 We sit in a circle like first-graders and share the loves, the hates, the irritations, and the triumphs of getting the project done.
28 At the end of the period I play some more Renaissance music and have the students who want to put their masks on the wall of my classroom.
29 Many do it, and their masks become a permanent part of the history of my classroom.
30 It's now an annual tradition.
31 One group got a ladder and put their masks just above the center of my whiteboard.
32 No group had ever done that before. It's like having a California poetic license on the front of a classic car.
33 At one point time stood still. Students stood in a room filled with lovely music from the Elizabethan age and watched other students putting
these beautiful masks all around the room. It was a carousal of fun. No outside visiting teams. No bubble tests. Just pure enrichment.
34 Oh, there was a little bit of anger. When projects don't work for some kids, they feel a bit left out.
35 Happened to me when I was in high school.
36 I was a senior. We were given an assignment where we could do anything to "express ourselves."
37 It was in my Humanities class, this wonderful class where we learned about nearly everything in the world.
38 At the time, I was a relatively untalented cat.
39 My claim to fame was that I played reasonably evil characters in school plays.
40 And I could sort of write.
41 Beyond that, I wasn't nearly as talented as most of my peers.
42 I had decided to make a clay statue of either a Greek or an Egyptian.
43 The idea was for me to try my hand at sculpture.
44 He was a little guy.
45 I worked on him for hours. When I was happy that I would survive, I put him into a lunch bag and brought him to school.
46 When I got to class, the other students had ridiculously cool projects. One group wrote and sang a song, complete with guitars and
harmonies. Another guy brought a bust of his own head. Artists brought paintings in that looked like they were stolen from the Louvre.
47 I looked in my lunch bag.
48 My little guy was all crumpled and ruined.
49 When nobody was looking I threw him into the trash. I was crestfallen.
50 My friend Charlie took the bag out of the trash and gave it to my teacher.
51 She pulled me aside after class and said that my project was fine.
52 I wanted to kill Charlie, but after a bit of thought, I thought it was pretty cool of him to have come to my aid.
53 It's a story I share with my own students.
54 You get better at things.
55 To this minute my own students can kick my butt on any project.
56 I've just had a lot more success in the other things I naturally like. You do get better at things. I have to tell them that.
57 It's all a part of it.
58 Well, I'm WAY up against the clock. Think I'll get while the gettin's good.
59 Have a GREAT weekend.
60 See you again.
~H~
<can't find purple cool guy pic> = (
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