I have a brain, and I know how to use it! To prove it, I share a post on Connections Education’s national blog. Enjoy!
If I Only Had a Brain – oh, wait, I do!
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School Board Elections – or not
It happened – or didn’t happen- in Hagerman, New Mexico. There were three open seats on the school board. There were three candidates. No one voted. None of the candidates received any votes. None. Zero. Zilch.
Now what?
Here in the cold Midwest, we rarely get news from Hagerman or even its more famous neighbor, Roswell. Here in Wisconsin, we do take our public education seriously. When my fair city holds elections, people vote. If there’s an open school board seat (or two, or three), we’ll usually have a primary election to narrow down the candidates. Then we’ll get out the vote.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin voters did not vote for education last November. Our governor is poised to make massive cuts in public education (Kindergarten through High School) and proposes devastating budget reductions on our University of Wisconsin system.
I haven’t actively volunteered since the 2012 presidential election. I’ve made donations and signed election papers and blogged and spread the word, but I haven’t stepped up and given of my time – yet. I blame my health.. I also blame issue fatigue. One troubling law after another, and eventually I had to focus on the one issue that matters the most: doing my own job well and keeping my family fed.
Folks, I predict a rise in activism in Wisconsin. I predict letters to the editor of the paper, facebook groups, blogs, and more. As you’re waiting, look for green lights: green porch lights and outdoor lights. The weather may be too cold for yard signs, but the green lights will quietly send a message of solidarity.
Support public education: K12 and the University of Wisconsin.
Potter Returns
Harry had never even imagined such a strange and splendid place.
What makes a book or series worth re-reading? A good story, believable and likable characters, a unique world so strange and splendid it can’t be imagined – unless described by a brilliant storyteller. Harry Potter is one such series.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has a special magic. The shortest of the seven, it introduces Harry and his readers to a whole new world: a world of magic. Witches, wizards, a sport played on flying broomsticks, owl post, powerful potions, and more incredible yet believable things exist in this parallel world. In The Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry first learns of his family and his wizard identity.
Readers can share his awe as he learns that his new school has its own train that leaves from platform Nine and Three Quarters at Kings Cross Station. Somewhere between platforms nine and ten, he encounters the Weasley family, asks them for help finding the train, befriends Ron, and the rest, as they say, is history. Mythology? Legend? Wizardry? Ghostology?
I enjoy rereading The Sorcerer’s Stone because of JK Rowling’s genius. The settings are magically unique, but she describes them in a matter of fact tone so that we readers know this is only the beginning. When she describes the staircases at Hogwarts’ School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, all 142 of them: “…wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday…” it’s simply in a paragraph about Harry attempting to learn his way to his classes.
And the classes! No Intro to British Lit here. Harry takes History of Magic (taught by a ghost), Herbology, Charms, Transfiguration, Potions, and the cursed (literally, but we don’t know that until a later book) Defense Against the Dark Arts.
The “strange and splendid place” in the first line is the Great Hall as Harry sees it on his arrival at Hogwarts. In his limited upbringing by his neglectful Muggle (non-magical) relatives, he had never even dared imagine a world so wonderful.
Thankfully for all readers, JK Rowling did imagine such a strange and splendid place – a world nearby, yet far different from our everyday Muggle existance. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone stands on its own as a wonderful story and sets up the reading world for an adventure that begins – and ends, several books later – on Platform Nine and Three Quarters at Kings Cross Station.
This is an encore post. On a Saturday night in the cold Wisconsin winter, Chuck and I settled down on the couch to relax, and the first movie in the series came on TV. We enjoyed the details and reminisced about our own Potter-related memories.
Almost an encore
The cold weather and snow storms got me thinking about spring. Of course I thought about planting. Doesn’t everybody?
I had some help preparing the garden plot last year. Here’s one of my helpers with her pink shovel, a shovel that belonged to La Petite when she was about this size.
Have shovel, will travel!
We put her in charge of uprooting the dandelions and feeding some of them to Buttercup. Bunny was very happy.
Random Truths
Actual words of wisdom and words of lesser wisdom heard and seen in my world:
“You never know how bumpy a road is until you drive on it when you have to pee.”
Work related memo (not mine!) – “The meeting is cancelled. We are sorry for any incontinence this might have caused.”
Actual experience: the office supply store doesn’t stock bookmarks. Nope, not the old fashioned kind that goes in an old fashioned book. I had to go to a school supply store and search through the cutesie ones until I found something suitable for my fifth and sixth graders – something colorful, but not childish.
Meanwhile, I’ll reread Charlotte’s Web to make sure I’m ready to teach it. Bring on the tissue box!
Newfangled, Old-fashioned, Cooking
The trend in kitchens has been swinging in this direction for a while, away from mixes and pre-made frozen foods, back into cooking from scratch. Once in a while, when I’m just not capable of cooking (for whatever reason) we’ll go back to the old frozen pizza. Most of the time, though, we make the effort to put something good on the table and into our tummies.
To put supper on the table, sometimes we resort to a fully cooked rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. For side dishes, we can reach for some frozen corn (frozen last summer when it was fresh), a small container of frozen red and green peppers, and toss all of this into the steamer to cook. Somehow, even as wrecked as we might feel, we manage to put a decent meal on for supper.
Later on, we attack the leftovers. All it takes are the bones from the chicken, the veggie water from the steamer, and a couple pieces of onion to make a chicken broth. I usually have to be in the kitchen making lunch for the next day, so I might as well get a broth simmering.
A broth like this will look and smell thick and tasty. When I’m tired and running almost on empty, sometimes I make the best use of my time. When everything is said and done, I can relax and go to bed knowing I’ve put in a good effort to feed the family and we didn’t even need to resort to frozen pizza – yet.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This post originated a few years ago after a somewhat wild weekend for Chuck and Amigo. I don’t remember what I was doing, but it led to one of our pantry raids, supplemented by a rotisserie chicken. When life is rough, we manage.
Dear Clinic; Communication. What a concept.
First came the voice mail on the home phone suggesting I call and make an appointment.
Next, I attempted to make an appointment through the messaging system. I hear you laughing already. Here goes:
Me: I received an automated voice mail suggesting that I make an appointment. Is this necessary?
Clinic Messenger: Yes you are due for a annual Physical in July and medication review and renewal then also.
July? It’s now January. Okay, I’ll try to plan ahead. I’ll fill out the form and ask for a morning in July.
Scheduler: What is the reason for the appointment? Please list any symptoms you are having so we can give the providers some notes to better prepare them for your appointment.
Me: I received a voice mail saying I was due for an appointment and I should call. It turns out the only appointment I’m due for is a physical in July. Perhaps this was an error in the system? No one seems to be expecting my request.
Scheduler: I looked in your chart, and in our auto-matted phone system and it looks like they were calling about your Hyper-tension-HTN, if you are on medication and are going to need new scripts, you may be due for a Medication Check. That is what they were calling for, not the Physical. If you would like to schedule a appointment for the Hyper-tension please let us know a date and time that will work for you and if you fast for your medication checks. Thanks.
Me: ?????
Dear Clinic That Shall Not Be Named: Your right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. That’s all.
With all due respect,
Daisy
Trivia! And tradition!
An encore post from 2010 – really? It’s 2015 now, and the Trivia contest is celebrating its 50th anniversary. I’m listening to Alumni Hour, an hour full of throwback questions and Contest History. Amigo and Chuck are down at the station answering phone. Enjoy the story of this wild and woolly tradition!
Long ago, when I was a teenager, and great woolly mammoths roamed the high school campus, I listened to a radio trivia contest one weekend a year. I enjoyed the crazy music that ranged from bad to worse, the mock advertisements for ridiculous and irreverent products, and of course, the trivial questions. (Who were the fairies in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty? Flora, Fauna, and Meriweather. Come on, ask me a hard one.)
Then I joined a Trivia team. This was still in the prehistoric times; rotary dial phones! We’d use the tip of a pen to dial the numbers so that our fingers wouldn’t get blistered. Really. Books, encyclopedias, and almanacs were our main sources for information that we didn’t already possess in our ever-evolving brains. (The hotel in Psycho? Bates Motel, of course. And Janet Leigh hid the money in a folded up newspaper.)
I played for this team until I transferred schools and began attending classes on the very campus that hosted the contest. By then the phones were push-button types, and the woolly mammoths had moved to less populated areas Up North, but our main information sources were still print books. (Winnie the Pooh lived in the Hundred Acre Wood under what name? Sanders.)
Fast forward several years, through contributions to a few more trivia teams, a marriage, and two kids. We now hosted a team in our home. It was a smaller team, not a top three finisher, but we held our own. Proudly, we invited people to share our home with the bunnies and the books and the new technology: cordless phones and Internet access. We still used a radio boom box, a white board for keeping track of team scores, and a spiral notebook for writing down questions. The woolly mammoths had retreated toward Canada in search of glaciers. (In the movie The Blues Brothers, what is the license plate number of the Bluesmobile? BDR529)
Telephones and radio have changed, but the Trivia contest continues. The radio has gone Internet only, which has actually expanded the contest to people in faraway locations that might still have woolly mammoths. Chuck and I no longer compete for the worthless prizes (the prizes have to be as trivial as the questions), but Amigo plays on his own. He listens to the Internet broadcast, searches for answers online, calls them in on the cordless phone or borrows my cell when the cordless’ batteries go dead. He and Chuck take a shift at the radio station answering phones to take people’s answers — each team that plays finds a way to make a contribution like this to keep the contest running smoothly. (What was the original name of the Popsicle? The Epperson Ice Pop, or the Epsicle)
Trivia (it needs no other qualifying details; all other contests pale in comparison) is a crazy and fun weekend with no equal. Some people take off for warmer climates in January; we’ve always stocked up on knowledge, coffee, hot cocoa, and phones. It keeps us warm. (When Frank Zappa was in ninth grade, he won a Fire Prevention poster contest. What did his poster say? “No picnic. Why? No woods. Prevent forest fires.”)
I still kind of miss the mammoths.
The rest is just details.
An encore post that stays relevant, not surprisingly, in the NFL or here at home.
A coach from a nearby NFL team talked about three ways to face adversity. He suggested that most people react in one of these ways:
- Remain oblivious
- Crumble
- Embrace it
This philosophy applies to public school teaching as well.
1. I once worked with a principal who remained oblivious to adversity. When faced with challenges, she would spout her buzzwords of “differentiate” and “test scores” without ever answering the questions we raised. She thought she understood, but she was clueless. Simply clueless. And everyone around her knew it.
2. It’s far too easy to crumble as my workload grows and the pay doesn’t, while public support continues to fade. I may react initially with a feeling of failure and hopelessness, but eventually I manage to keep up and cope.
3. I work with a group of teachers who embrace challenges. The pressure wears on us daily, but we hold each other up and look for ways to meet the challenges.
With a week off between Christmas and the New Year (my equivalent of a Bye week), I rested and got myself psyched for going back to school. I brought home a little work, but not a lot. I decided to be realistic and not overload my schoolbag. I’ll log in and grade tests and quizzes, but I’ll leave the time-consuming portfolio assessments for my return to my desk.
Minor injuries? In teaching, that’s more likely to be illness. I had my flu shot, and so did Amigo. It’s the season for keeping hand sanitizer on my desk and water bottle with filter by my side for hydration.
Not So Super
We cheered. We yelled. We danced the touchdown dance around the den.
We wailed. We shouted. There may have been tears (more than one of us, too).
And in the end, we still wore our green and gold.
Aaron, win or lose, you rock.