A busy Saturday

What a day! My arms feel like they're going to fall off at the elbows after a rather busy (and typical) Saturday.

My plan...wake up, get the mower running again, get the yard mowed for the first time this season, edge, cut weeds along fence, dig up planter area that has been overrun by weeds, grocery shop, die on the couch. What really happened...definitely not my plan!

Went out this morning to get money for child #1 to go to a renfair, and a diet soda (we are out - that's why I gotta go to the store!). Had to get parts for the mower, hubbie wanted to go shopping for a video capture card, were out till after noon, and my PDA batteries died, along with all of my data. :( I haven't been synchronizing because it hasn't been working on my computer, so all of the data's gone...poof, bye-bye, see ya!

Came home, hubbie gets mower running (yay!), but he wants to go get a haircut, so mowing has to wait a little longer. I'm about to leave to go shopping when friend from Florida calls - gotta talk for at least 30 minutes. Then head out to get lunch at 2:30 and make a couple of stops. Then decide to go home and switch vehicles with hubbie (who still isn't home yet from his haircut - the gal's good but slower than Christmas), child #1 calls and says she's stranded at the renfair (40 minutes away) and needs a ride home. Great! It is now 4:30, and we have't even started the jungle, I mean lawn, yet! I go to get child #1 and her friend (who happens to be stranded in the area with no place to stay), get home around 6:00, only to dicover that in the 90 or so minutes I've been gone, child #2 has only mowed 1/4 of the yard! Grrr!! Hubbie and I give him the "git r done" lecture, and I begin the undaunting task of edging and weed-whacking. By 8 I'm done (thus the sore arms), and even though I never made it to the gym today, I really got a workout! Whew! Hubbie went to pick up the bare necessities to make it through breakfast tomorrow, and grocery shopping will have to wait until then...if only life could be simpler...

Hubbie and I did go out and decide on a few specifics in regard to the next few years - it is so nice to actually see a direction in our lives for once. I remember the pastor of our church saying that 2005 was to be a year of change - I can speak for myself and many others I know by saying DUH!! Many changes to come, and more details along with it.

So far, two trips to the Y to work out and one workout in the yard. My clothes actually do feel a little looser!

Let's try this again!

After a rather long hiatus, I have decided to try my hand at this again. The school year is winding down, the TAKS testing is over, and life is starting to return to normal.

Scott and I are starting to make some changes in our lives, changes for the better. We're going out tonight to iron out some of the details - more to come tomorrow.

One change on the way is a body modification of the positive sense. I am on the way to getting in shape and lose over 50 pounds. We joined the YMCA yesterday and have started going these to exercise. The kids can swim in the indoor pool while we work out...works for us! :)

I have a lot to talk about, and hopefully I can fit this into my busy schedule...more later.

Jill

My vacation is almost over...

My visit from my college roomie fell through :( so I have spent the last three days getting done what I wanted to do before school got underway. Spent time with the kids, helped my daughter color her hair (boy it's weird using red - rinsing her hair looked like a bloodbath!), cross-stitched, etc. Still gotta clean house a little more.

Monday I leave on our final 3-day teachers retreat (final due to budget cuts).

We are going to a resort on Lake Texoma, spending time as a faculty, and getting our inservice hours out of the way. I have been to the retreat every year since I've been in the district (this makes #5), and it has been a lot of fun. Some teachers go just to get drunk at night, but we in the math department tend spend the evenings together and play card games. I have taught the crew the games of Phase 10 and Zilch (played with dice), and we will sometimes stay up until midnight playing. We are a very competitive bunch. This retreat is also great for building comraderie amongst the various departments. The people I work with are some of the closest friends I have. Our department chair retired at the end of last year, so we will have to find someone else to fill in at Phase 10. We will miss her. Our new department chair is a great young man who is actually the youngest in the department. I think he'll do a good job.

I really do love the people I work with - someday we may have to move, and I hope that when that day comes I can find a school where my colleagues can also be my friends, because I know they are rare.

I'm not surprised

The American Federation of Teachers just announced its endorsement of John Kerry. Another reason why I refuse to join a teacher's union.

I'm Back!

Hello all!

After a long but well-worth-it week in an AP conference, I am back home for my last week of "freedom" before the wheels of the new school year begin to grind. I have many irons in the fire - I am currently sorting and dating all of our family photos (the ones that are actually printed), I am helping hubbie decide what to do about continuing his degree this fall, I am filling out paperwork to begin my masters degree in mathematics (with a possible goal of teaching at the college level), and trying to give the house one good last cleaning before the chaos hits the fan. My college roomie (whom I haven't seen in almost 15 years) is coming for a visit at the end of the week, so I am having to cram all of my "stuff to do" into about 2 1/2 days. Zandra is a great gal - I broke my leg the weekend before my senior semester was set to start at Baylor, and Zandra became my friend/housekeeper/cook/roomie. She was more of a help that semester than she will ever know, and I can't wait to see her.

Got my "running around" done this morning (thank God for a daughter who is old enough to babysit), and am about to begin the stuff to do here at the house. I do not have the time as my hubbie does to sit and surf and find neat links to post, so today it is just a little home spun story. Hope you liked it.

Administrivia

Jill is at an AP Calculus teachers' conference this week. She is such a nerd. (But she's my nerd!)

So she likely won't be posting very much, if at all, this week. I just wanted to put up this note so no-one would think that she'd abandoned the blog.

Scott

Another movie review...

Today is Friday - the last day of one of the few weeks I have left before we start back to school. Next week I will be attending an Advanced Placement conference at TCU, so I probably won't be blogging much.

Our daughter is at a friend's house and the boys asked if we could go "do something fun" and since big sister will be babysitting all next week (much to her chagrin), I figured I ought to come up with something. Here in the metroplex it is 100 degrees today, so an indoor activity sounded like a good idea. I checked the listings for the dollar theater nearby and Scooby Doo 2 was showing - the boys thought that it sounded great. So off we went.

I have become so spoiled with stadium seating in theaters that going back to the old-fashioned type setup is a little weird. We have not seen Scooby Doo 1, so I hoped that the sequel wouldn't leave us confused. It didn't. It was just what I thought it would be - kiddie humor. A lot of spewing of unknown substances, some bathroom humor, and a good dose of cheesy dialogue. If you've seen any of the cartoons, you'll understand the movie.

On the way home, we hit a traffic snarl. I turned on the radio to catch a traffic report, and Rush was on. Our 11-year old has been very interested lately in politics (we are Republicans and his best friend's family are Democrats), so we have been discussing the basic ideologies of both parties. I asked him if we had ever told him who Rush was, and he said no. You really can't explain Rush unless you first explain media bias, and lo and behold, the movie gave a crystal clear example of what media bias is.

In the movie, Alicia Silverstone plays a reporter. She is doing a story on the opening of the new museum, displaying the costumes of all of the monsters that the Scooby gang has unmasked over the years. The gang, however catches on to the fact that she is a biased reporter, doing all that she can to paint the gang in a bad light. Twice she takes a clip of a interview with Fred and picks one phrase out, to make it look like the Scooby gang thinks badly of the town of Coolsville. I explained to Sean that many news reporters do what they can to make the Republicans look bad, even though it may not be the truth. Michael Moore has done it, many of the major networks have done it, and Rush is the first of a growing list of radio personalities to give a voice to the other side.

Who would have ever thought a life lesson could be learned from a Scooby Doo movie. Before today, I know I wouldn't have.

I have been rather busy today, but once I saw this article linked to by Joanne Jacobs, I got so hot around the collar that I had to share it with you.

Education in America has problems - I will agree with that. From my 14 years in the classroom I have deduced that there are many symptoms, but only one main cause - we are too busy trying to make our students "feel good about themselves" that we are teaching them very little.

I read a long time ago an article that said that American kids scored at the bottom of the list when it came to academic knowledge, compared to much of the rest of the industrialized world. The suprising statistic, however, was that American kids scored highest when it came to how good they felt that they did! We are so concerned about protecting the poor little psyche of our kids in school that we are afraid to let them fail!

From the article:
... spelling tests are disallowed because they supposedly strike fear, do not relate to experience and produce a distaste for language.

Life is full of competition, and our kids need to get ready for it! Their is competition between child and child (as in sports), and competition between a child and himself. This is the only way we better ourselves, to push ourselves to learn new things. We will have fears and pressures to face in the future, and if we don't learn how to deal with them when we are young, we will probably crack under the pressure when we are older.

I taught with a lady once who thought spelling was obsolete because we had spell checkers on our PC's. That's the same mentality that says that we shouldn't have to teach our kids basic math facts because they can have access to a calculator. There is a place for rote memorization in the curriculum: it may be boring, but it is necessary. It is the bottom rung of the pyramid of Bloom's Taxonomy - pull the bottom out and the whole thing crumbles.

Grammar is not taught because it is "dull."

If you are not taught grammar, you cannot write. If you cannot write, you cannot communicate effectively. If you cannot communicate effectively, the rest of the world will think you are an idiot and you will never be able to get a decent job. This reminds me of a few things Bill Cosby said recently...

The disciples of progressivism imply that absolute standards trigger inner conflicts in kids, that they are natural learners who are mentally sterilized by direct teaching.

This sums it all up - absolute standards are evil. Our society as a whole believes that all absolutes are evil as well (murdering an unborn baby is OK, murdering another adult is wrong). We as a nation need to get off of this track and quick! In many areas, there is a right way to do something, and there is a wrong way. In progressivism, if the way seems right to you, then great! If someone doesn't agree with your way, they are just too close-minded. That's why kids today have no problem with murdering or raping another person - "I thought that it was OK to do, so I did it!" There are no absolutes any more! There is no black and white, it is slowly becoming a sea of murky gray.

Absolute standards are what teaches kids where the boundaries are. If a parent doesn't set boundaries, the child will burn his hand on the hot stove or fall down the stairs. Boundaries don't cause any sort of inner turmoil, it actually gives the kid a sense of security to know "this is the limit - you can go no farther." That's why little kids like bedrails on their beds and to hold the hand of an adult; it makes them feel secure.

We've got to stop coddling our kids in school. Parents need to stop making excuses for their kids' misbehavior. There are consequences that follow action, whether positive action or negative action. Kids allowed to get away with everything become adults who believe they can get away with everything. This has to be stopped, and if the parents won't do it, the schools need to. We need to quit trying to solve the problems of education with trying to make our kids "feel better about themselves" and let them realize that learning is like any other important thing in life - it has to be worked at - through blood, sweat, and occasional tears. Let's move back to the way things used to be, when students worked for their grades to a specific standard and discipline was enforced in school. That'll fix the problem a little and make our kids a little more competitive in this world.