songspinner

Heya! So many of you know I am a middle-school teacher. This year, I am mentoring a brand-new (1st year) teacher at my grade level. He's excited to get his students interested in reading, and noticed a lot of mine get hooked in with graphic novels and books which have strong representation of their own communities and cultures. We're doing a DonorsChoose fundraiser, and every little bit help. If you can't donate right now (and believe me, we understand), then please repost/blog so that others might see it. Every little bit helps us! The books on our list will be split between our two classrooms. Thank you.

https://www.donorschoose.org/project/new-teacher-and-veteran-teacher-need-boo/2167743/?rf=link-siteshare-2016-09-teacher-teacher_2002030&challengeid=318694

Open House is done. *thud*. Watching my kids finish their projects this afternoon in my history classes was sort of fun...lots of shrieking, giggling, and problem solving. Only a little whining...

Daughter is sick and trying not to hack up a lung (inhalers are helpful). So no getting to see grandparents this weekend while grandfather is only done with one chemo treatment. Hopefully, she will get well quickly, with no drastic physical response to this virus. (She and I can actually have allergic reactions to viruses)
Immunologist blew us off in an INCREDIBLY rude fashion, even cutting me off while I was asking a question. Sigh. Switching doctors for that, now. At least daughter's pediatrician is really good. On the bright side, a brilliant doctor who's been helping my sister back East will do a phone conference with me soon and refer me to someone not too far away who has lots of experience in diagnosing genetic immune disorders. So back to square one, but at least moving toward square two?

The first week of the school year is done and we survived. Whew. And tomorrow
will be two weeks. Some very cool kids so far, and a lot less of the antagonism
and stress compared to last year, and I have been enjoying the good questions they
ask. I already had to do some quick research to answer one..."well, did they have
messenger pigeons in ancient Rome?" The answer, btw, was yes.

My daughter is off to her first day of high school on Tuesday. Enough said.

And a very happy, joyful birthday to piratesorka! I hope it was a good one, full of music, friends, and giggles. :)

Lots of silliness on campus today - a bunch of staff members did a flashmob dance for "Thriller"; in the middle of the costume contest to surprise the kids. They were definitely surprised. And stunned. Teachers dancing?!?!?!? :)

I had, all told, in my classes today: 1 Corpse Bride, 3 angels, 2 rabbits, 2 Red Riding Hoods, 1 football player, one skeleton, 1 Minnie Mouse, and a skateboarding whoopie cushion. Don't ask about that last one...Our geek quartet on the staff consisted of me (see below), one Steampunk explorer, Magneto, and a zombie prom date.

And here's me as Helen Magnus from "Sanctuary"...

( click here for picture )

Ugh. Alarms and all again and back to school on Monday. I spent today trying to get my classroom ready, and still have to do some stuff at home this weekend before Monday morning. Sigh. An of course it's my classroom tech that's not working properly today, so part of my weekend will be rearranging lesson plans for the first day in case I don't figure it out by then. Excited to meet my kids for this year, though! I sometimes wonder about my school district, though...my classroom budget turned out to be $303...and 3?! How on earth did they get that extra $3?

My daughter's Celtic Music Camp concert to end the two weeks of classes is tomorrow, so that'll be fun. I have to cobble together a Viking costume tonight, as apparently that's the theme for this year's camp. :) And since it's my kid, she wants close to historically accurate.

Sorry, couldn't resist the high school choir music joke.

It was darned hard to sleep last night until maybe 1 a.m. when the wind died down to only 30 mph or so. It was up to around 70 mph for several hours straight. Garbage cans were picked up by gusts and smashed into the fence and house, loudly. I know we were lucky not to lose power for more than a couple of minutes early on last night. We're all going to bed early tonight, I think.

Only two trees down on campus when I got to work this morning, but branches and leaves in piles everywhere, we had to keep repeating to the kids that they shouldn't mess with it all. Safety and all that. My language arts tutorial class was studying personification, so we came up with around 20 sentences about the wind... ("the wind played piano on my windows", "the wind howled with anger"...) Lots of tired giggling.

I'm home today with my sniffling, cold-ridden child. Sent a message to the woman who teaches in the classroom next to mine. We have an understanding that if one of us has a substitute in our room, the other will keep one ear open and one eye on the other teacher's kids. She emailed this back:

My dear neighbour,
I will avenge your honour if need be.
Rest easy, and your offspring as well.
Any rebellion will be crushed by the wrath of
all teacherdom everywhere.

On the down side, these laws up for votes in the next couple of weeks are BLOODY TERRIFYING! It's like someone has a plan to take women in this country back to medieval law, with no rights of any kind. These men who proposed these laws (and apparently there are some female politicians supporting them as well) seem to feel that it's okay to erase the last century of gained rights, from the right to be safe in your home, to the right to be physically safe in a hospital, to the right to choose when to have children. And as the mother of the aforementioned daughter, this is doubly scary. One of the laws up in the House literally has loopholes to allow a hospital or physician to refuse to treat a woman dying if the only option is abortion. EVEN IF SHE'S DYING. There's actual protection for that hospital or person. The only hospital in my town is Catholic, and their staff once refused to help me on the phone when it had to with a "morning after" pill. I can only assume that if I had come to their ER actually bleeding out, they might have considered helping me.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c112:2:./temp/~c112spjNBA::# (see section 2, part G for the loophole)

Fun yesterday - Free Comic Books Day! So my daughter and I went downtown and got autographs by comics/graphic novel artists at two stores...one Marvel artist and a team of guys from Italy who did a great children's series. The funny part was that some of my students were doing a math competition yesterday and ran into us with their teacher downtown. They all had that "woah- a teacher in her natural habitat" expression, otherwise known as "my teacher has a family and a life?!". Heh...
The boys didn't care about the free comics, but the girls sure did!

Spent the morning gardening, which I can feel in every muscle today. There's a great plant sale every Mothers' Day weekend at a local college, and so we picked up some nice native plants...

SPRING BREAK!!!!!


Feeling disgustingly domestic this afternoon. I spent my free time on my last day of teaching before spring break sewing (and yes, my students were amused/impressed that I could do that) - a pouch to attach to my belt onstage to carry my drum tippers (the bodhran stick) and a sort of protective pad for my arm so I won't get bruises when I drum in a standing position. Used one of my husband's old t-shirts, so all I had to buy was the upholstery padding and some bits of elastic. Not bad.

Could have done without the smoke from a local warehouse fire this morning - burned the eyes and made us all stay in the building during morning break.

Once this weekend's performances are done, I get most of a week to myself. Husband and daughter are back at school and I'm off for the week, so it'll be nice and quiet. I see a walk on the beach in my future. And some writing and reading. Only a little paper-grading.

Off to get stage-makeup and costuming ready. Rehearsal until 11:30 p.m. Ugh. Now I remember why I didn't go into theatre for a living...

Wandered (as usual when I get to Whole Foods) to the Goodwill bookstore and discovered that someone had brought in boxes of comic books. :) So I called my daughter and suggested she and her father wander by on the way home and meet me...and she ended up with 9 Doctor Who comics. :) 6 from us and she paid us back for 3. Nice.

Had a marvelous time today with this year's history classes doing a "tea party" to review for the test on ancient Japan. Watching some of them follow the directions for proper bowing, try chopsticks for the first time with their classmates' help to pic up edamame (soy) beans, and try green tea (decaf, 'cause I'm not an idiot!) was fun, and then a few of them showed off their origami skills. I think one of the boys just totally impressed a whole passel of girls today!

And it's a good thing some of them volunteered for set up and clean up because my back is a mess and there's no way I could lift things or get down on the floor and then back up. Sigh. X-rays of that shoulder yesterday, so I'll see what happens. And I finally found an anti-inflammatory I can probably take, so it's on its way by mail, darn it. Because this hurts. If x-rays don't show anything, I think I'll ask about MRI's of both shoulders, since I'm pretty sure they shouldn't make those noises. If something's up with joints, I need to know. So it's cold packs, NCIS and White Collar, and entering grades into the computer tonight...