treats

I am full of … tamales. You have to understand that I absolutely love tamales, but the usual source of tamales is ladies in grocery store parking lots. There is a source at school, and I know one of the teachers it goes through, but I don’t know who her source is. Yes, the tamale business appears to be a lot like drugs. So is the affect, the pure joy of eating one, or two, or three. So earlier this week the teacher got green corn tamales from her Source, and she kindly shared them with me and another teacher. They’re not my favorite kind — my favorite is carne seca — dry beef. Still, I was delighted. Then yesterday afternoon a student left when her mom picked her up, and then came back to the room — with six tamales — carne seca!!! Droooooooooooooooooool! So I had three for supper and the other three for breakfast. This is one reason I can’t do drugs — the whole moderation concept is lost on me, as is the thought of postponing gratification. Now really, I’m 50! It’s not like I have another 40 years ahead of me! Well, OK, actually I probably do. And those years should be filled with tamales!

Our book this week in reading was From Cows to Ice Cream. One of the extra things provided by the SFA staff was an ice cream recipe and questions to answer about it (functional reading). So I told them that they ALL had to behave — and demonstrated how to accomplish that — and if so, we would make the ice cream on Friday. I do these things because I’m insane. I also had the best class ever on Thursday! Thus I had a lot of running around to do. You take a huge ziploc type baggie (oh, look — 2 trademarks in one sentence!) and put in ice and rock salt. They say to do this first. We should have done this last. Then in a small one you put milk, vanilla, and sugar. If I remember correctly it was 1/4 teaspoon vanilla, 1 tablespoon sugar, and half a cup of milk. You SEAL THIS SMALL BAGGIE VERY WELL!!!! and then put that in the larger bag and shake for five minutes. We did this outside, after we started in the room. Vanilla drips. There was vanilla on the floor and rock salt residue on the doorknobs and ramp railing. Those who didn’t seal the baggie well had nasty salty stuff, but some people’s came out great! I encouraged them to share. Years from now they’ll have no clue who I was, but they’ll remember making ice cream! I also sent them home with the recipe in case they wanted to make it at home as well. Oh — we at the ice cream out of the baggies with plastic spoons. In case you’re dying to try this at home. Or in your classroom.

To Margie (because she’s the only one who’ll know who I’m talking about): Remember that CD I gave you by John McAndrew (http://www.johnmcandrew.com/) — Like We Were Made of Gold ? He sings Program sort of songs. Really nice stuff. Last night I got to hear him in person!! He came to town for some event for Addictions Counselors, and I have a couple of friends in that category. Actually, Del said that I’m the first person she told who knew who he was! He came for whatever thing they had yesterday, and then last night was part of a concert. That’s what I went to. First there was a folk group sort of, who talked about how songs reflect and influence culture. Now I wouldn’t know John McAndrew if he came up and bit me, but he was warming up and testing the mikes and I instantly knew that voice! He didn’t sing my favorite song (the title song from that CD, but he did sing a bunch of others including one that hasn’t even been recorded yet!  He was followed by a group that was very loud, and I left after the first song.  The room we were in was a small conference room at the Westward Look resort — not really the right sized room for music that rattles your ribs.  There also wasn’t a huge audience — maybe two dozen people.

After I’d parked my car at the place and was walking toward the hotel, I saw a snake on the sidewalk!  I tried to take a photo of it, but camera phones don’t have flash.  It was skinny, two feet long or less, with coral and black markings.  But when I look it up on the snake web site, there are a a few different kinds that look like that.  Anyway, I stood there and watched him cross the sidewalk and go into the rocks.

today

I just saw a commercial that reminded me of the drive home. Normally I carpool, but the person I ride with was going to work late this morning so I drove myself. Coming home I waited in line at the corner of Ajo and Park, waiting to turn left onto Park. Normally I cheat and turn from the left lane across into the right lane, but normally things are going the way they’re supposed to. Not today! I was the fourth or fifth person in line turning left, and the arrow is AFTER the traffic going straight has had their turn. Nevertheless … a truck decided that the red light (which had been very red for quite a while since all of the going-straight Ajo traffic had already had its turn) didn’t apply to him. He ran the reddest red light I ever saw, plowing through in the lane next to me. However, if I had turned into that lane instead of the one closest to me, I would have been T-boned. I can’t begin to imagine what he was thinking!

The Cubbies!!!! Yes indeedie, they are the division champs! It’s only been a hundred years since they won the World Series…

Work is exhausting still. I love my first period. I do math plus, writing, and science, plus library and OMA are that period. I got the little keyboards, which are totally awesome. Now my students are typing their writings. I send it to the computer and it prints out along with a little checklist for them when they edit. Editing is easier, of course, and so it’s easier for me to teach the basic mechanics because all they have to do is fix, not rewrite. In science, we got our second kit last week. Our first was weather, but a mini kit and really not much. Now we’re doing the electronics one, which is a lot of fun. So far this week we’ve lit bulbs with batteries and wire, and made a buzzer buzz.

Mary P’s right — this is priceless! Gotta go! (Letterman)

Monday

One of today’s headlines:  No-hitter is first by a Cub in 36 years.  Really, how embarrassing is that???

At faculty meeting last Wednesday, they said we needed the list of conferences that need translators to be turned in tomorrow.  So this afternoon shortly before time to leave, they announce that they need them today!  So I write out my list of times, and hope that the parents who haven’t turned their appointments in yet are able to come at their assigned times.  I take it to Mr. Coronado’s office … which is no longer his office.  He’s moved across campus to a classroom.  So I go there to turn in the paperwork and one of the people there says “Where are the names?”  Huh?  She said that they might want to sit in on some of the conferences if it’s students that they have (I’m guessing for either SFA/reading or the Avenues program.  I should know this??  So I pointed out that all we were told was that the forms were due tomorrow until the sudden announcement.  No one said that we needed to list names.  Geez.  This is after having a crappy SFA class earlier in which I kicked like seven kids out and sent them to different rooms for talking during the reading test.  It left me a bit cranky!

I’m glad I’m done with my first U of Px class because tonight I have to do like 13 “wiki-skippies” as Angela calls them.  They’re two different forms that are long and have to be done on-line and then printed out and signed by the parents, principal, and me.  They are for kids who failed any portion of the AIMS test (if I remember correctly) and list what our corrective actions and goals are for that student and who’s going to do it.   They’re a pain!

I got home and went to the mailbox, which is by the pool.  (I remember last year what a hard time I had finding the mailbox!)  The pool is locked again, and looks nasty.  It looks like someone took one of those styrofoam coolers, shredded it, and put it on the pool.  It’s been windy so it’s possible that a whole lot of something blew over the fence and into the pool, but it’s not OUTSIDE the pool or anywhere else, just IN it.

Del downloaded the Groove program, which does take a while to set up.  But then we made a space that we’re both connected to.  She put a flyer in there for a concert that I’m going to on Friday the 26th.  The space has a lot of other options as well, so I activated the calendar.  Our birthdays are on there, other relative and friend birthdays.  It also makes it possible to keep track of which weekends we’ll be at Blue Willow.  For example, I already marked that I won’t be there the Sunday that John and his family are here.  I also already added the Christmas Eve dinner at my house.  Nothing like planning ahead!

Fourth Grade

In theory, this is the last of three updates!

This past Monday we finally started the Avenues program. That means that ten of my children, who are still listed as English Language Learners, are sent to one of the three Avenues classes that my students are assigned to. There are more teachers, and some classes have smaller groups. I have 27 students, so that’s nearly a third of my class! So when they leave at 8:00, I get four students from Mr. Ramirez. For my own organization, I just call this Period One. I have them from 8-10, so they go to Library and OMA (violin lessons) with my remaining students. When we don’t leave, we have Math Plus (review, etc.), Writing, and Science. I can’t begin to tell you what a huge difference it is!!! I can do things now that I couldn’t do the previous four weeks because of the language difference as well as the functioning difference. By functioning difference I mean that I have maybe 4 students who would be way behind even if they were born into and raised in an English-only household. The language difference isn’t their real problem. But I love my morning class! I only have two computers in my classroom but with this class I can actually have students write on the computer. Two did and I printed out their drafts (after spell-check) so they can make edits, and I have another two working on theirs. At some point I’m supposed to be getting a set of word processors for my class, but I haven’t seen them yet. Then again, the teachers are each supposed to get a laptop and those haven’t appeared either!

Second period is SFA (reading). These are the fourth and fifth graders who are reading at a beginning third grade level. We also do a half hour of intervention. The whole school is required to read twenty minutes each night, write about it (like a sentence or two), and have their parents sign it. One (S.) of my fifth graders (who seems to be approximately seventh grade age range) hates being there (of course). For homework she’s reading Frindle. Although it’s famous, I never read it. But — it was offered in book orders for a dollar, so I bought a class set. I told them that if they want to keep it they need to pay the dollar, but they don’t need to if they don’t want to keep the book. So we are using it as part of intervention. For example, we’re using it for a story map, comparing and contrasting, and dictionary skills. S loves that we’re reading this book, especially since she’s ahead of us and knows what will happen. I read the book aloud, so she’s understanding it more. So far four of the 20 students have paid for the book. At the end of the year, the school has a book exchange. Students bring books to trade, and can get that many books in return. So I reminded them that if they bought the book they could always trade it at the end of the year. J spent a few days on in-school suspension, so I didn’t see him. The first day he was back he was great for the first hour because he had a head-ache. After he came back from the nurse, he was his usual self.

After lunch is “period three” or math. That’s when I have my whole homeroom together. On the plus side, I put dry erase boards on my school shopping list (what gets ordered from the warehouse) and so these are great during math. Students are willing to write down problems to solve them because they get to use the boards, and I don’t waste paper. When we were rounding, I’d have them write numbers and give them to someone in their group to round. Etc. They love doing that, and they all participate then.

We have parent-teacher conferences this week. There is early dismissal on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. We stay late Thursday night (last appointment listed as 7 p.m.). We also have to list which appointments need a translator. I scheduled everyone for Wednesday and Thursday, which is what most people do. If I remember correctly, no appointments on Friday means you get to go home early! We got the AIMS score sheets for students who were at this school last year, so that’s one of the things we need to cover. Another is getting paperwork signed. I have to do a ton of these forms nicknamed Wiki-Skippies so that those parents (those whose children get one) can sign them. I keep forgetting!!!!!

This week we had a PBIS meeting. I’d talked to some teachers earlier, and things that bother me about the school bother them as well. These came up in the PBIS meeting! There is one day each quarter that we don’t have the sacred SFA class: the day before we do report cards. So we’re going to try to schedule events then, such as a winter and spring program!!

U of Px

My first class ends on Monday night and my second class begins on Tuesday. I have all my work turned in, though, so going to the site is not necessary. That’s good, because I’m behind on grading papers!

This weekend’s assignments were two group assignments and my group evaluation. The group assignments were a paper and a PowerPoint about the paper. The second seemed immensely stupid to me, but apparently recent undergrad’s are used to it. The idea I guess is to pretend you’re presenting your paper to an audience using a PowerPoint, so you have bullets on slides and speaker notes which are pretty much a paraphrase of your paper. I think it’s incredibly stupid, but I looked and can’t find any e-mail from the University asking my opinion on whether or not it was a good idea, so I did it. Actually, I did my part and Walter’s and some of Charlie’s and some of the generic parts that others could have done but refused to. That’d be the way a lot of things went. One member did exactly her part in each assignment, but only a couple of times did more. Walter did very little and eventually left, so guess who did everything that Walter didn’t do? Charlie designed the PowerPoint but didn’t put his part on. So sometimes he did his part and others he didn’t. Guess who did? Are you asking yourself why I did? Because without the projects I turned in yesterday, my grade in the class is 99.something percent. Even that is only because I did some of their work. If I only did my part, it’d be much lower. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me if the group project brought my grade down. I got tired of editing after asking over and over for people to edit and make sure they did their citations right. The teacher will look at it and immediately know which part was originally mine! That’s because she’s already commented that I understand the APA format and use it correctly. I know how to cite and write their version of a bibliography. But I did say what I wanted to say when it came time to do the group evaluation!

Tuesday’s class is entitled something like Business Systems I. The nice thing about it is that it isn’t all brand new stuff. I took business courses at Pima 15 years ago, and I worked in an office. I not only know how to read financial reports; I wrote the stupid things for 7 years! A lot of the other parts are review, but necessary of course (since 15 years ago IS a long time). It’ll also go deeper no doubt.

Except for the two books for writing papers, we buy no other books for the school. Instead, they have e-books and you have access to only those chapters you need. For example, for this next class I read maybe 6 or 7 chapters from one book and I think 3 from another. I already have them downloaded into a file, so I don’t have to go hunting for them when it’s time. I made a file that says Class 2 and within that are folders for each week. For the last class I printed out the articles I had to read and forgot to look at the e-book (which was a book on writing).

The school’s main page once you log in has all these “offers,” some of which are programs you need in later courses. This old laptop only has Office 2003 on it, so unless people save things in that format I can’t open them. They had a sweet upgrade offer at a VERY reasonable price. At least, it seemed like a regular upgrade, so I got it. Well: It was much better than I thought, and I used it to upgrade the Office on the other computer as well! It isn’t just the usual things in Microsoft Office. It includes other programs as well, and I’ve fallen in love with one of them: Microsoft Office Groove. It would have been SO handy if everyone in my group had it this term, but it is also useful for me alone.

To digress, my portion of this weekend’s paper was about Virtual Teams, business teams in which members may be in the same office but also may be anywhere in the world. This Groove would be perfect for that, as well for team work in the class. Here’s the old way: Charlie creates the PowerPoint basics, saves it, and posts it in the team forum as an attachment. The other two members and I (in theory) open the attachment. Sharina changes the framework a little bit, saves it, posts it as an attachment. Each time someone does something, in theory they save it and post it as an attachment. (In theory they do something!) The same with the group paper and other group projects.

With Groove, it’d work this way: Charlie creates the framework, saves it in Groove, and invites Sharina, Walter, and I to that file. We only have access to what is there in that section, not anything else that Charlie has. But that file space can include a number of different things in different formats. So when Sharina makes the changes, everyone else is automatically updated the second they log on. There is no posting to forums as attachments, no hoping that everyone has the latest version. They do automatically! Same with papers: As each person makes changes or updates, everyone is updated!

You can also have your own computers all in synch. This works with my two laptops, because it’s a pain sometimes if something is on one and I want to work on it on the other one. I have to save it and e-mail it to myself or put it on the portable drive and remember to move it. Now I have three files so far: one for school stuff, including lesson plans and grades; one for the U of Px, although it’s empty at the moment because my new class hasn’t started yet; and one for writing. That’s the important one. I have a lot of stories and things that are merely in progress. Now I can work on them no matter what computer I’m using. This makes sense if you remember last fall when the monitor of this laptop (the Toshiba) died. I didn’t have access to what was on this computer, only what I’d managed to scoot over to the portable drive while the dying was in process. It also means that if I take the Gateway to school, I still have access to whatever I’ve put in that folder.

There’s not a ton of rhyme or reason to whether I use the Toshiba or the Gateway. I’ve moved my desk to the living room, so now I can have both set up at the same time. When something’s happening on one, like I’m running a program that needs to be left alone, I can work on the other. There are also some programs that are only on one of the computers. For example, the Gateway has Vista, so my scanner doesn’t work on it. Anyway, I love Groove, and I’ll even resist the urge to say it’s Groovy!

Anyway, other than group work, which was a horrible experience and totally a worst case scenario, I loved my first class at the U of Px!

And in case you wanted to know, the following is a brief assignment that we had to post in Week 2:

My Personal Code of Ethics:

* share my time, treasure, and talent with those who need it
* inspire and encourage children to have dreams and be able to fulfill them
* cheer people up when possible and help them get through traumas and bad times
* be compassionate, hard working, and trustworthy
* keep learning
* leave the world a better place

family updates

I have a lot of updates to do, so I thought I’d try to do them separately but get them all done today. That’s why I’m starting with the photos: When you get to this page (tomorrow or later today) you’ll know that you have read all of them. In theory.

So: Unless you are my father, you are looking at those pictures and asking yourself “Who are those people?” My father knows, of course, because a couple of weeks ago Mike and Donna spent the weekend at his house. Mike is Dottie’s nephew, and Donna is his wife. They were great fun! They came here by motorcycle. School things prevented me from spending more time with them, but I did get to see them that Saturday and then Sunday morning for breakfast. As you can see, swimming was on the agenda. I’m really gonna miss that pool when it gets too cold to swim! Then again, I suspect that for Donna and Mike there’d be no “too cold to swim.”

I went to Dad’s yesterday, though, and the water really was rather chilly! Buz and I suspect it was because of all the recent rain, because the weather has certainly been warm enough! The pool has a hot tub, though (unlike mine!), so when I get cold I can get in the hot tub to warm up and then get back in the pool!

So I think Mike and Donna came two weekends ago. Last weekend Dottie and I took a shopping day. We haven’t done that in a LONG time! Well, when I had the time, I had no money to spend! I was looking for tops, because I don’t have many blouses that I can wear to work with slacks. Most of what I bought last year is for skirts, which I’ve only worn a couple of times. I tend to wear more when I wear my boots. I’ll wear a couple this week, though, for parent-teacher conferences. Anyway, Dad, Dottie, and I met for breakfast at The Good Egg at 9:30 and got home around 4:30. We went to a few stores all over town, and then hung out at the mall, mostly sitting and drinking iced coffee things from Gloria Jean’s. I also got her into Bookman’s. Dottie’s eyes make it hard for her to read, but she is able to read more than she could before. Both Buz and I thought she’d like Bookman’s, but she wasn’t interested in theory because she didn’t have the right glasses and was still undergoing eye treatments. I took her anyway, and she totally loved it! What’s not to like? The place is huge because it’s a former grocery store. In addition to books they have games, CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks, DVDs, videos, magazines, and sundry antiques and junk. If they had a coffee pot or teapot I’d move in! She looks forward to having enough time to spend a couple hours there. We may have to do that some weekend. No sacrifice at all!

I’m looking forward to John and family coming over Halloween weekend! The Tucson Mall website isn’t looking that far ahead, but I know malls have trick or treating so I think that would be great fun for Betty and I and anyone who wants to join us. Assuming my sister’s here that night, she’d like that too, I think! I can’t say Anthony would enjoy the trick or treating part (although he might), but hopefully he wouldn’t mind going, or else he could stay home with whatever folks are staying home. If I ever get his e-mail I’ll ask him.

That’s about it for the family news portion. Dad and Dottie went to a party at the neighbor’s last night. I can’t imagine squeezing 30 people into their living room! But it was catered, so I’ll have to ask how the food was and if they made any new friends!

PS — the photos were taken with my cell phone because I can’t get my camera to work!