Friday, October 26, 2012

Halloween begins!

We had a party at the church tonight.

Noah was a Blue Man.  Aubrey got him painted all up, and she loaned him a blue swim cap.












Zack was a baby penguin.


And Savanna decided to be me.  She said all she needed was a ruffly skirt and a cardigan....I guess I should mix it up a little.

 We also got to babysit Riley tonight, which was awesome.  Everyone was fighting over who got to him him next.


Then she decided that I should dress up like her.  So we wore the same basic outfit, but just in the other's style.  She picked out my outfit...


Monday, October 22, 2012

Boring

Today I am at Boring Middle School.  Really.  Those of you locals know that it is a real school.  Those of you reading this from places far away might think I'm kidding.  It's real, and it's a great school.

Today is anything but boring.  It's The Declaration of Independence.  I think the kids think I am absolutely insane for being so enthusiastic about it...but I love it.  I have about 10 books about it...about the signers, the wives of the signers, the events leading up to the declaration, etc.

So of course I kicked of today as any true child of the 70s should--with Schoolhouse Rock.

But first period at school was actually the middle of my day.  I was at the dental office at 5AM this morning.  I saw on Facebook Friday that some other business owners on our street posted that their power had been off for about 6 hours.  I thought, "Wow!  It's lucky we aren't open on Fridays."  And I left it at that.

This morning a little voice in my head woke me up and said, "HELLO, JILL!  DON'T YOU KNOW THE SERVER'S UPS ONLY LASTS FOR 3 HOURS?" I realized that all of the office computers would be down.  I jumped out of bed and got in the car.  I just had to make sure that the server had shut itself down as it was supposed to when the power remaining was getting low.

Turns out the server had entered a self-destruct mode.  There was a BIOS screen up saying it could not boot, and the computer didn't even recognize that it had a hard drive to boot from.  The screen was saying it was August of 2004 and the server had no hard drives!  Heart attack!

I quickly kneeled down and prayed to know what to do.  This was way beyond me.  I instantly remembered a time a similar thing had happened a few years ago after replacing a battery on the motherboard.  I remembered how to enter setup and tell the computer it had a RAID 5 configuration.  When you do this, you see a warning and the words DATA LOSS WILL OCCUR and you have to say YES 5 times to verify that you want to do that.  So scary!

It reminded me of a hymn we sing that says, "Ere you left your room this morning, did you think to pray?"  Well, I had jumped out of bed and driven to the office, and I did not think to pray. I thought I was just going to turn things on, and I was in a hurry.  On my own I was in big trouble and didn't know what to do, but when I slowed down and asked for help, it was given.  Another line of the hymn says, "Prayer will change the night to day. So when life gets dark and dreary, don't forget to pray."

Night turned to day.  The server came up, no data was lost, and I got everyone else turned back on and running.  I had 10 minutes to drive home, put on clothes, brush my hair and get in the car for school.  I'm not as cute as I planned to be today, but the office is open for business, and that is all that matters.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

more teacher stuff

When I sub in a middle school, usually the teachers have in the plans for me to have the kids work on something they were given yesterday (like an assignment or a worksheet packet).  It NEVER fails that when I try to get class started, I hear these three excuses from kids for why they do not have the assignment on their desks.
1). I left it at home.
2). It's in my locker.
3). I already turned it in.

The last one is my favorite, and I love to confront the liar.  I push back.  "Oh, yeah?  It just was assigned yesterday, and the teacher is absent today, but you already turned it in?  Do you want to change your story now, or after I give you a referral for lying to a teacher?"

When any of these three excuses comes up, I tell the kids that they can get the assignment out of their binders/backpacks, or I can get into their binders/backpacks and get it out for them.

The assignment magically appears.

This week I have been lucky to be in high schools.  It is my favorite.  I love teaching math, and I love teaching Spanish.  Every single Spanish class I have had makes the same joke about my name.  They look at it on the board, and the because they are in Spanish class they immediately jump to DORA.  They think it is funny to call me Mrs. Dora the Explorer.  It has never NOT happened in a Spanish class.  At least it's not a "Jack and Jill" joke.  Last week I did social studies, foods and and English language learners class in my favorite high school.  It is fun to be able to interact with the high-schoolers, and to not have to spend as much energy as middle school kids demand from me while trying to manage their behavior.

Yesterday was the most fun of all.  2 classes of AP Calculus and 4 classes of Algebra 1.  I was in nerd heaven.  The kids thought I was crazy, but they laughed at my stupid jokes.  It was a great day.

Today I had my own kid in my class!  He was proud to show off his nerdy mom, I'm sure.

This week I did 4 full days, which has been absolutely crazy as far as things that need to get done at home.  Tomorrow will be a busy, busy day.  Lots of yardwork and housework for everyone tomorrow.  I sure they will be delighted that they have the day off of school.

I have decided that the subbing thing has been my way of dealing with the emotions the changes in our family.  Abram is off to college, and Zack is in 1st grade and gone all day.  I don't have to face a big, empty house all day by myself if I am subbing.  And then when I am home on a day, there is so much to do to take care of the house, yard, laundry, shopping, that I don't have time to think about how much I miss Abram, or how grown up my baby Zack is.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Are you smarter than a 7th grader?

Last week I subbed in a social studies 7th grade classroom.  The kids were working on an assignment using an atlas.  It was about basic atlas-reading skills--nothing fancy at all.  I was horrified by the frightening lack of basic map skills in these 12- and 13-year-olds.  It almost made me cry.

It made me think about a quote from To Kill A Mockingbird.  After she gets in trouble in 1st grade for already knowing how to read, Scout reflects and tries to remember when she learned to read.

"I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church-was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills To Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

This is precisely how I feel about map reading.  I don't remember anyone purposely teaching me about maps.  Just as Scout absorbed reading from her dad, my own father did the same thing for me with maps.  I have always known how to read a map, and it is all because of my dad. I remember watching his finger running over the map as he showed me the state of Utah, and also as he spun the globe teaching me all about our world.  He taught me the directions, what all the lines, dots, symbols and numbers meant on maps.  When we would go on a road trip, my dad would give me a map and a marker to cross out the exit numbers as we passed them.  When we went on a trip, there was nothing much interesting going on inside the car (aside from 5 kids and lots of great '60s hit music), and so I looked out the window to see what all those things that I saw on the map actually looked like.  To this day--or night--when I travel in a plane, I must have a window seat so that I can see the earth below me and guess where I am based on what I know from having studied maps all my life.

I feel like I have always known the names of continents, oceans, states and mountain ranges.  I am a map freak.  I can sit and stare at a random page in a world atlas for hours, trying to memorize everything on the page.  I'm a geography freak.

The 7th graders I taught last week did not share my passion for geography.  They were stumped by basic questions in their assignment.  For example, when looking at a map of North America, they were supposed to answer the following questions: What are the two largest countries in North America?  What is the southernmost country in North America?

The had no idea what the difference was between a city and a country.  Their most common answer to the first question was---Texas?  And the southernmost country?  Well, that had to be Miami, right?

As I walked around the class answering questions as they worked, I can safely say that 90% of the kids raised their hands to tell me they did not know the answer to the above two questions.  It made me sad. I was heartbroken.

By the time I was in 7th grade, I knew every state and its capitol, country on the globe and its capitol, and every county in my state and the county seat.

I came home and asked Savanna if she knew the answers.  Of course she did.  She is a map-loving girl like her mom.  Then I asked Zack.  He also knew the answers.  He loves maps.

And just to make myself feel better that the future is not entirely in jeopardy, I got our big floor puzzle map of the world out and asked Zack to do it with me.  He knew the names of the continents.  He knew the names of the oceans.  He found Belize.  He found China, Russia, India, Hawaii and Madagascar--all on a map with no country names on it.  Then I taught him a few more just for my own sake.  Ask my kid where Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico or Mongolia is.  He will show you.  He is six.

Just don't ask a 7th grader at our local middle school.

Culinary arts and costumes

Today I got a dreamy sub gig. CULINARY ARTS at my favorite high school. It was a fun day, even though there was no cooking involved. Hopefully I will be back at that school more often.

On a different subject, Halloween is coming soon. I was trying to figure out how many costumes I am making this year when Savanna let me know her intentions. She wants to be ME!

She told me to make a ruffly shirt, and she would just add a cardigan to dress like me. So June Cleaver is known for doing housework in heels and pearls. I guess I am known for my ruffly shirt and cardigan collection.

The other guys are planning a Scooby Doo.costume theme and they are upset that Daphne has abandoned them to dress up as me.