As I Avoid Studying...

Steph is on the phone with her sister right now reminiscing about playing "Boxcar Children". I laud them for the effort of at least going with the original book and roughing it as opposed to solving mysteries while living with Daddy Warbucks.

When did # become hashtag instead of pound sign? Not this £ sign (alt + 0163) but this one #. Really. Is this all Twitter's doing? In the future, when dealing with automated call centers, will he have to press hashtag on our phones instead of pound once we enter in our sensitive information? When stores have 3# of apples on sale, do our youth feel that the store owners are foolishly putting the hashtag in the wrong place if they want people to visit their twitter site? Will the @ sign be next??? Seriously though, it's a pound sign.

On the note of politics... nah, just kidding.

I felt stupid earlier. I was talking to my neighbors this morning, and they were telling me how they hoped some geese would get here soon because they like eating goose, I guess, or at least shooting them. I mentioned that I thought I'd heard one yesterday, at which point one of my neighbors pulled out a goose call and said he'd been practicing yesterday. Wheeee!

And seriously, what on earth is up with people typing 'would of' instead of 'would've'? Have we regressed so far in our own language that we no longer understand the difference between 'of' and a conjunction meaning 'have'? It's not even a space saver, like shortening 'you're' to 'your' (couldn't help it) or 'ur'.

Steph says I'm becoming a crotchety old man and says she looks forward to the day when we have a lawn so I can shake my fist as I tell people to stay off it.

I should probably get back to studying. I say 'probably' to make myself feel better about it, like it's optional. Remember kids, it's stands for it is, and its is possessive. On the note of studying, they've updated the test so I've had to speed up my studying, lest they change over and a great deal of my studying is for naught.

Pictures

Here is a sampling of pictures off my camera. Hopefully, next weekend we can go out with our nice camera and Phil can take some better pictures of our area. Our apartment is messy at the moment, so those pictures will be coming in the future.

Moving

Lucy was not very helpful during our packing endeavors. 

Our stuff. I intended to take a picture of just my school boxes and just our house stuff. I thought it would be interesting to see the comparison because I had a lot of boxes of books and materials. Enough to fill the back of Mom's Yukon. However, moving is crazy and these are the only pile pictures we took. 

 Lake Champlain

We took these crossing the bridge from New York into Vermont. This is Lake Champlain near Swanton, VT. I forget what the town in New York is called, but it is super cute. 

Phil

This was Phil's first shower experience in our apartment and it was too funny not to take a picture of. We have a huge clawfoot tub that we have to step up into. This extra height combined with a very low shower curtain made for an interesting experience for Phil. He practically had to bend in half to get under the shower head. (I'm just now realizing that this is a really long caption of Phil in the shower. Sorry. I do want to add that the ceiling has been redone. It looks pretty sketchy here. We also lost the dolphins and got a better shower head. Moving on now.)

Ben & Jerry's

 We were told by several people about the Ben & Jerry's Flavor Graveyard. Ta-da. It was pretty funny.

Ben & Jerry's- It's entertaining for families.

Today

     It was fall today. We had rain last night and a bit of drizzle today, so everything was extra green. I stopped on my way to the grocery store to take these pictures for you. Enjoy.

This last one is of our backyard. The previous two are across the street. That was all I got before Phil got to the door with arms full of groceries. 

Umm...

I sat down to write an inspired post, but I'm not sure how to follow Phil's.

I'll start with the fact that he is now 31. :) He still hasn't received his gift from me (I have a difficult time planning ahead in my personal life), but he did get several lovely cards and a pair of reading glasses from my mom. This just in- my mom's hilarious. We celebrated with birthday cake after Open House at school and had a birthday dinner of Chinese take-out this weekend. Happy birthday indeed!

School has started. Tomorrow will be the beginning of the first full week of school. Last week, we had a four day week and our first week was only three days. The school climate is very different than West Grand, and based on my students' behavior, listening in class has not been a huge priority. In an attempt to create a more positive school environment, we are implementing Responsive Classroom practices. The basic belief of this philosophy is having a positive classroom community will result in fewer misbehaviors. Which I agree with, but...there are two sides to every classroom management system: positive and negative reinforcement. Responsive Classroom doesn't really have either. So, I'm mixing in my own management style with elements of RC. I am stuck with giving time outs to my 5th and 6th grade students which makes me feel stupid and is a giant waste of time, but my kids are earning marbles for positive behavior. When they've earned enough marbles to fill an empty pasta sauce jar, we'll have a mini-celebration for the class. One RC practice that I do like is Morning Meeting. Every morning, we circle up as a class. There is a greeting for every student, an activity, and a message from me preping them for the day. On Thursday, we did an E.T. greeting. I showed the kids a movie clip showing E.T.'s glowing finger, and instead of a hand-shake or high-five, we touched "glowing" fingers. Confession: I've never actually seen E.T.

Because not all of you lovely readers are teachers, I will stop rambling and give some basic facts about school. Then I'll be done for a while.
1. My room is still a horrid shade of orange. I've covered as much as I could with bright orange, blue, and zebra print.
2. I have 17 kids in my homeroom class of 5th and 6th graders. In the afternoon, I have 20 6th graders for math. I like my mornings better.
3. There are 3 other 5/6 teachers and after a literacy meeting on Friday, they are starting to realize that I know quite a bit about teaching reading.
4. I don't yet know quite a bit about teaching 6th grade math. Can anyone please tell me a real life example of dividing a fraction by a fraction or a decimal by a decimal? Seriously, please help me out here.
5. One of the 6th grade boys got stuck in the baby swing on the playground while I was on duty. I didn't laugh until after I sent him to time out.
6. School starts at 8:00- sort of. Kids can eat breakfast until 8:15, so I really don't know when I'm supposed to start my day.
7. School ends at 2:45. Thankfully they've started ringing a bell at this time. My classroom clock is about 5 minutes fast and the first couple days were pretty confusing.
8. On the first day of school, our new art teacher played the bagpipes as kids were entering the building. It was pretty sweet.
9. Our school website is Richfordk6.net if you are interested in learning more about the Richford Rattlesnakes.
10. Open House was Thursday, and I had one of the few not awkward experiences of the evening. Apparently teaching a class full of odd ducks for the past four years has desensitized me to awkward situations. I feel that's an excellent life skill.

Another post that could be but really isn't about anything

Motivated self-starter. The iconic resume` cliche. I've never given much thought to the phrase beyond concluding that it doesn't apply to me. I seldom feel motivated beyond fulfilling certain biological imperatives, and for whatever reason, perhaps some integrity I stumbled upon, I don't feel that an urgent need to empty my bladder that will inevitably occur during my time in a company's employ warrants its use in my resume. Do motivated people feel the same way about their job that I feel about eating pizza? It could just be the work I've done, of course. Getting told that a kid has recently ejected his or her half digested lunch all over a bathroom doesn't fill one with the kind of verve that pizza does, even if that recently rejected lunch was in fact pizza. And what exactly is a self-starter? Does that mean you don't need to be told what to do until you do something? Would the opposite of a self starter be considered a disability that could be classified as 'work blindness'? Is simply being motivated but not a self-starter mean that you're like one of those automated vacuum cleaners wedged in a corner, desperate to do work but lacking the AI to prise yourself from that dark juxtaposition of two non-parallel surfaces? Oh dear, it appears I've made the descent into sarcasm-land yet again.

Really though, am I alone in my feeling that the phrase doesn't apply to me despite my motivation to continue breathing and my ability to not only spot work that needs to be done, but to then do it without being told? Sure I have my problems, my need to pause television programs during awkward moments is quite painful for my wife, and my propensity to seldom address topics in a serious fashion has been viewed with disdain often enough throughout my life that I'm tempted to view it as a character flaw rather than a quirk people simply need to accept. But it's okay, because over the last two paragraphs I've convinced myself that I really am a motivated self-starter.

In other notes, a big congratulations are in order for Alex and Jantrey who tied the knot this past Friday. Way to go guys, it's an epic adventure.

Alright, my fantasy football draft starts in 25 minutes and I'm officially motivated to show up and self start by drafting a player... when the program tells me I can, of course.