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New Year's Clarity
Every time I have a few days off from work, after I'm done sleeping 12 hours a day, I look around a bit and say, "Ooooohhhh...I need to remember this."
My job is ridiculous. Take the bottom-performing .01% of students in the county, put them all together in an understaffed school with very minimal access to therapy and NO consistent discipline ( Read more... ) -
Mr. Grinch
Our principal sent out an email telling us that he expects regular lessons every period of every day up until break--no holiday parties allowed!
I'll spare the explanations of how many of these kids don't get any kind of Christmas at home, how staff is putting together food baskets for our neediest students to take home over break, and how sporadic ( Read more... ) -
#BalanceTonPorc
I like this better than #MeToo, because it puts the emphasis entirely on the person who should be ashamed and embarrassed.
I consider myself to be far more sheltered from sexism than most women. I've designed my life to be that way (which is, of course, it's own form of sexism. How many men have ever chosen a career taking into consideration a ( Read more... ) -
Meetings
One thing all teachers will tell you they love is meetings.
No, I'm kidding. No one likes any sort of meetings. But teacher meetings may be even worse than regular meetings. We have all the buzzwords and "exciting new ideas" that any business meetings have (and here I must wedge in the story of an exciting new idea---back when I worked in sales, ( Read more... ) -
How's your year?
Whenever two teachers get together, someone's always going to ask, "So, how's your year going so far?"
Well, yesterday I had a kid try to poop on my desk.
No, not really. He was just pantomiming. I teach in a special ed school, but not THAT special. Not that we don't have kids who poop in inappropriate places, just that it's not generally ( Read more... ) -
Signal graces
Yet another heartbreaking incident with K. I spent the night having nightmares, or lying awake agonizing, yet again, about where I went so wrong. How is it that we gave her everything we didn’t have as children-stability, a home, a community, two happily married parents, no substance abuse, emotional nurturing, opportunities to develop her talents ( Read more... ) -
Horoscopes
Another thing I always chalked up to woo-woo-crunchy-granola-Woodstock-hippie nonsense...until they started being uncannily accurate. Now I take the same view that I take of precognition, dreams, intuition, energy healing, and all the rest--who cares if it's woo-woo-crunchy-granola-Woodstock-hippie stuff? It works for me ( Read more... ) -
A reminder
I'm sitting here being frustrated with myself because I've just been randomly reading articles on the internet, checking The Oatmeal and XKCD, for the past 3 hours while M and the girls were at a rehearsal. What I should have been doing: exercising, online Christmas shopping, getting groceries, lesson planning, and/or writing a book ( Read more... ) -
What's your excuse?
Maria Kang's 'fitspiration' photo has been causing quite a stir--it's a picture of herself, looking very buff in a bikini with her 3 young sons, with the caption, "What's Your Excuse?" Like many people, I found this insulting and depressing, but couldn't quite articulate why. I spent my last walk thinking about this, and then I read this blogger ( Read more... )