When in doubt, post puppy pictures

More Grammar

My students were, with a few exceptions, very productive last week. It was a short week, though, so we have some catch-up to do. We'll start on Grammar, Chapter 8, lesson 1, "What is a Clause?" tomorrow, January 29th, a 1 day. You'll find a copy available on the year plan page.

Suspended

If you're reading this, you're probably not at a district computer. The class's main website has been blocked because it is privately hosted. I can still modify it from school, but it can't actually be viewed. This blog, however, can actually be viewed from a school computer if the address is put in directly, I just can't post to it from the school.

Amazon is blocked, so I can't order stuff from there until I get home. Same with alibris and a bunch of other useful, unobjectionable sites.

Our tech support staff has a lot to maintain and a lot of pressure to upgrade a whole snotload of infrastructure throughout the district and the well-intentioned laws designed to protect students from unseemly internet content is a bit zealous about excluding students and not too interested in the efficacy of their education.

I want it!

This is the cool new toy I just saw advertised on tv.

Vexing Verbals

Nobody loves verbal phrases so far, least of all me. If you're struggling to make it through the worksheets we've been working through together, try to think of the various verbals this way:

Gerunds are verbs that went nouning: Running is the most inane form of excercise.

Participles are verbs that have been repurposed as adjectives (not adverbs): The running frilled lizard is a sight to behold.

Infinitives are not stuck on any given time, and are always betrayed by the inclusion of a "to," but not every "to" is part of an infinitive. Most are prepositions, which we looked at two weeks ago: To run is to suffer to death to impress others with your foolishness.

p.s. My apologies to any runners who read this, both for the derision and, well, because you run.

Last week, next week

7th graders have been learning about verbals, specifically gerunds and participles, in grammar chapter 7, lessons 1 & 2. They've also looked at the peculiarities of the English language's use of the letters qu in spelling lesson 22 and the frequently confused word with multiple meanings in vocab lesson 22.

This next week, we're going to examine infinitives and verbals in grammar lessons 3 & 4 (also chapter 7), synonyms, antonyms, and the spelling problems encountered with j, ge, and dge.

All of these lessons are linked and available for download from the 7th grade year plan of my website and all of them require acrobat reader, available free from adobe.

A [long] Conversation With Stephen Colbert

An [hour and 9 minute] Conversation With: Stephen Colbert at Harvard The interview touches on a number of funny and interesting topics, but the idea I found most compelling is the disparity between "discovery" and "invention" as processes. As Colbert touches on them, he is referring to a fundamental difference between improvisation and scripted comedy. I understand that critical difference well, having done both, but I'm more interested in how this disparity bears on education. As educators, we often do what D&D players refer to as "railroading." We prepare a script (without letting our students read it) and if the students fail to follow the script, we penalize them. A genuine process of discovery of knowledge would be vastly preferable in almost every way, but we worry so much about covering the standards that we miss the education. Addressing this shortcoming is a goal worth pursuing.

What P.E. ought to be

I just can't say enough about how much this impresses me.

Long Day

Complaining about a problem can be cathartic, but so can hearing how others have it worse.

My day today started (or, rather it was supposed to have started) this morning at 5. I rushed to get to work and had mixed degrees of cooperation and productivity from my students until about 3:30, when I left for a seminar, which ran over, finally calling the day quits at about 6:45, when I was able to go home and put together a dinner-like food substance and check in here before turning in for the night (it's now approaching 10 p.m.).

I know that plenty of people have longer, more arduous days than I do. If you do, please share. If your story is the most miserable, you win the sympathy of those who read it, bragging rights for the most trying schedule, and the satisfaction of knowing that you've helped the rest of us feel better about how much worse it could be.

If no one else posts, I'll assume that those who have tougher schedules than mine are wise enough to get the sleep they can rather than posting here.

Detention deferred

I remembered this afternoon that I have an important meeting tomorrow night which cannot be be rescheduled. For this reason, those who have detention of more than 30 minutes scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday the 18th, should plan on serving their detention on Monday instead.

Poetry in progress

8th graders are continuing on the same assignments already given. The first of the literary device assignments came in today, and while students will likely have time tomorrow and Thursday to work on them, I'll play it by ear and most likely collect them this week. Students should begin working on their imitations and, if they have not already brought them in, should bring in a poem they have found outside class.

7th grade Grammar

Today, 7th graders received copies of Grammar lessons 1 & 2 from chapter 7. Both are available on the 7th grade year page for the week of January 22-26. We went over lesson 1, on gerunds, together. We'll go over participles tomorrow with lesson 2 and I'll collect both assignments on Thursday.

Mornings at work

I can't post here from work, or I'd have shared this a few days ago. This is the view from just outside my classroom when I get to work in the mornings. It's a peaceful way to start the day.

I'd like to thank my editor

Every other post, it seems, my mother, who sometimes comments here, and on other sites, as "your mother," or "heide" says to me, "Ray, that an 'e-i,' not an 'i-e,'" or "are you really supposed to use an apostrophe here?" A retiree, she checks this blog faithfully and catches the errors before anybody else has time to see them. She (a non-native speaker of English) keeps me, an English teacher, trained linguist, and admitted logophile, from appearring to be illiterate.

Thank you, Mom.

Now, I just have to keep people from finding out I make those errors in the first place.

Icicles over the pond

Some years ago, I helped my mother put together a koi pond in her front yard. It's big enough, some 600 gallons, that fish can survive the winter by sinking down to the bottom and waiting out the coldest months in a torpor. The pump keeps the water circulating, and relatively clean. With a few sticks and some occasional netting, she keeps the herons from preying on her fish.

Sounds nice, right? Yeah. Don't get into your swimsuit just yet. Look at this closeup of a stick over the pond where the water splashes.

Homework

As a student, I never liked homework.

I was never as self-directed as I should have been, I didn't have a suitable place to do homework as a child, and my learning style is such that I always just fared better - learned more - through interaction than through practicing in solitude.

How does it come to be, then, that I chose a career with huge amounts of homework?

Veternarian's office 10:40.
Optometrist's office 15:00.
Haircut, amateur carpentry, furniture rearrangement, and a week's worth of grading . . .
Well, I'll hope for the best.

Forgotten English

Today's, or rather, this weekend's entry is
"Duck's Dinner"
It means, according to Sydney Baker's Dictionary of Australian Slang, 1943
A drink of water without anything to eat.
Like all the entries in my calendar, this one has an additional note at the bottom of the page:

Hunting the Mallard
Once each century, this strange and obscure tradition has been reenacted at All Souls College, Oxford. According to legend, during reconstruction of one of the college's buildings in 1438, a mallard was flushed from its nesting site. On the second January 14th of each century, a specially chosen Lord Mallard and six assistants, armed with liquor, lantern, and staff, have set out to right an ancient wrong by finding the elusive duck (which is rumored to have grown enormously in nearly six hundred years), singing a ballad whose refrain is "O, by the blood of King Edward/ It was a swapping, swapping mallard."

I'm just impressed that anybody remembers a rite which only takes place once every century.

This week in eighth grade

As those of you who care already know, we're working on poetry. We're finding examples of commonly used literary devices like rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and so forth in our textbook, McDougal Littel's The Language of Literature, and we're just beginning to learn to imitate the rhyme and meter of the poetry we read.

In the course of preparing for this unit, I've used several online dictionaries and a number of online song lyrics databases, but here is one site I found particularly fun. I've always loved Silverstein, and it's nice to see that his fanbase lives on.

P.S. Turn the sound on before you link over.

7th grade Friday

We've had a productive week. The students have been working hard and staying on task. As a reward, we had some fun time today after the class had finished the end-of-week quiz. We played some hangman and we looked at a few rebuses and frame games and a visual-spatial puzzle. None of this was worth any points, and if you missed class today, you shouldn't worry about making this up, but we had fun.

I hope next week is this productive, too.

seltaeB eht evoL I

Abbey Road is sheer genius. “The Sun King” is an especially memorable song. The new album, Love, includes a song called “Gnik Nus,” which is, in large part, “The Sun King” played backwards.

When I first heard it, my jaw dropped and I just grinned (The two expressions combined feel strange and must look even more so). It is innovative and surprisingly pleasing to listen to.

I Love the Beatles

.ot netsil ot gnisaelp ylngisirprus dna evitavonni si tI .(os erom neve kool tsum dna egnarts leef denibmoc snoisserpxe owt ehT) dennirg tsuj I dna deppord waj ym ,ti draeh tsrif I nehW

.sdrawkcab deyalp “gniK nuS ehT” ,trap egral ni ,si hcihw “,suN kinG” dellac gnos a sedulcni ,evoL ,mubla wen ehT .gnos elbaromem yllaicepse na si “gniK nuS enT” .suineg reehs si doaR yebbA

Double Down

Today, I assigned the students Vocabulary lesson 21 and Spelling lesson 21. Both are due Tuesday. Both are available on the 7th grade year page.

Space hog

The new puppy, Alani, really doesn't care who else wants to sleep on the futon. When she's sleeping, all space is her space.

Forgotten English

Somehow, I got a hold of a 2001 desk calendar called "Forgotten English," but never got to use it. Cool discovery: it's usable again for 2007. The calendar features a new archaism every day.

Today's was "sic-sic," "Said to pigs when called to the trough by those who think little that they are speaking pure Saxon, in which sic is a pig." - The Rev. John Watson's Uncommon Words Used in Halifax, 1775.

I confess that I don't get it.

Monday's was more interesting, if a bit more disgusting: "Drink-meat" defined as "Ale boiled, thickened with oatmeal, and spiced." - Georgina Jackson's Shropshire Word-Book, 1879

7th grade Grammar

In class today, we went over yesterday's homework on prepositions and introduced Grammar, Chapter 6, lessons 3 and 4, on conjunctions and interjections respectively, which will both be collected on Friday. Lessons 2, 3, and 4 can now all be found on the 7th grade year page.

The walnut is no more

Aside from watching Shel play Fate all day, I did accomplish something useful today. The walnut tree that has been in my mother's back yard for twenty years is now no more than a stump. It took Shel and I all of about half-an-hour to trim it down from some twenty feet.

For all of my father's enthusiasm for recklessly planting every tree he could find anywhere there was space to dig a hole, I sometimes wonder if my mother's enthusiasm for cutting them down might not equal it. In fairness, the wanlut did need to go, but I still hate to thin the grove more than need be.

A week without caffeine

It's been a week since I had my favorite beverage. I'm drinking caffeine-free Sprite instead. Other than chocolate, I think that I've pretty much without cafffeine all week. So far, so good. Let's see what happens when I go back to my daily routine.

Finally, a break! Now back to work.

I am pleased to say that I am finally caught up on grading and am ready to submit grades (thank goodness I didn't have to turn them in before break). I'm now ready to enjoy my vacation.

Students return on Monday. Guess I'd better get started on lesson planning.

I love IMDB. I love Broadband

We went to Sac International tonight to pick up my in-laws and my father-in-law remarked that he thought "that girl from that tv show Bones, the computer tech girl" was the same actress as "the girl in that third Blade movie.

Click. Click. Click.
No, the former is Michaela Conlin. The latter might be Jessica Biel, Parker Posey, or Tamara Taylor. Either way, they're not the same actress, and we have a quick, easy answer to what would have, even in fairly recent years, been a fairly obscure question that would likely have just gone unanswered.

Another addition to the reading list

One day, when I have time to read again, I'll pick up the novel Shel just finished, Holly Lisle's Talyn, another military/political swords and sorcery book, but first I want to finish Jaqueline Carey's Kushiel series, which I hope to start on as soon as I've finished reading Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels. Mind you, this is just my junk reading for vapid entertainment, and doesn't include the really good stuff like the late Ladefoged's A Course in Phonetics or Wong's The First Days of School.

Ah, so many books, so little time. . .

Indiana Jones 4

Surely, Suzanne must already have blogged about this.

Web design

I suppose that at some point, I might catch up with all of the web design goals I have set for myself and just need to do maintenance, but until then, wow! It takes a lot of work to put together even a simple web presence. I hope somebody's getting some benefit out of the web page.
Oh well, at least this gives me a lot more appreciation for the well-designed, fully functional web pages I visit.

The holidays were great. Are they over, now?

Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. . . and at least one big family dinner for each. I like my family, and we always have good food, but now I'm full - like long-term full. I got great gifts, including one very sweet gift from a student, but now I have more stuff than I have time to use or space to store. I bought some fun gifts for my family, but now I'm broke. I missed Yule. I missed Hmong new year (which I would really like to have celebrated), and I still am on holiday overload. Valentine's day is just six weeks away, my birthday just eight, and maybe then, I'll be able to rest again, at least until Summer.

Knife

I imagine most people don't stop to think about carrying a pocket knife. Some people carry a knife. Some people don't. I would be one of the former, but, obviously, I can't carry a knife at school, so I quickly get out of the habit. Then, on vacations, I put my knife in my pocket and forget that I have it. If you don't know you have it, it really doesn't do any good.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!
I'm not one for resolutions, but I do like to take natural opportunities for reflection. This has been a big year, with a lot of changes. Next year promises big things, too - more progress toward bigger and better goals. Returning to working with middle schoolers has been better than I expected but the challenges are different than I anticipated. I feel like I'm just getting the hang of relating to these kids again. I hope I'm getting the hang of it, anyway. I must admit that I miss my students. I won't wish away my time, especially not much-needed vacation time, but I'll be glad to see my kids again when vacation is done. Perhaps I won't rush off to find a high school job after all. I like this school, too. I count myself lucky to have found a community interested in working together to help students, and lucky to have found as many students with such big hearts.