I Feel Like A Dog

So, good thing my hair turned out looking alright, otherwise I think I would have literally killed the girl cutting my hair! But she thinned my hair without asking, and I know, it looks okay, as witnessed by these pictures, but wow. This was not the normally thinning with the little tooth-like sheering scissors, she grabbed chunks of my hair up along the crown of my head and just chopped! I have about 10 or so little globs of hair that are only 1/8th of an inch long! You can feel them through the top of my head, and the only comparison I can come up with is that my head feels like a recently clipped dog head! It is so bizarre I can't stop touching it! I am going to develope a really weird idiosyncrasy if my hair doesn't grow soon. People will think I am scratching for fleas! Great, now on my list of things to look for in a man I need to add, *doesn't like to touch female hair*, because my head feels like a dog on top! The worst thing is, I will have what my family affectionately calls a "Utah-Bomp" in a few months when the top of my head grows out and I will have a lot more volumne on top than on bottom! AHHHGHHGHGH!

I thought about trying to photograph one of the little bits of hair becuase you can see them! But that would have been going too far! Feel free to come feel my hair if you want to. *sigh*

Sibling Rivalry

It's a good thing I decided a long time ago it was futile to compete with my older sister! It is fairly common for siblings close in age to feel competitive with one another, and my sister is only about 16 months or so older than me. However, she left me behind almost 9 years ago when she got a husband, now she has four of the most adorable children I have ever seen, has lived in Europe for the last three years, and now she gets one of these! *sigh*



So, a little jealous, yeah, but not really. I feel so far behind her now that I have just stopped worrying about it! I am happy right where I am, doing exactly what I am doing. Although, it would sure be nice! Congrats to my sister and her family who are making the trek back to the United States. In the mean time, I will just keep living my single life and be spontaneous and go with some friends of mine in the ward to California on Saturday and spend a week doing nothing but soaking up the sun and forgetting about all of the papers I have graded this year!

My Announcement

So, I never tell my kids about dates I go on, or who I think is cute because it is none of their business. I think it is just because I am a young teacher that they are fascinated with my love life. They are constantly wanting to set me up with brothers, cousins, nephews, uncles, and the one single male teacher at the high school. So this "wedding announcement" I found on my white board this morning when I came to work, is not anything new per say, but just cute and funny. Apparently I need to be looking for a man who wears black short shorts and and carries an umbrella! I left it on the board to be funny and all morning my kids are asking about who my man is! :) Apparently his name is Herman? jk.

My Poor, Poor Students

So complicated being a woman! Hormones affect women is so many different ways! I was laughing with my sister yesterday becuase she says when she is hormonal she is annoyed by every man in sight, and I react just the opposite. All I want right now is to be held in somebody's arms instead of grading research papers on my prep-period. I get vulnerable feeling and just want to be taken care of and cuddled with.

But that is not the only thing that is wrong right now. My poor students! When I'm hormonal they seem to score a lot lower on tests and papers...My honor's class just received an average score of 78% on their To Kill A Mockingbird test I just graded. At moments like this I wonder if I should just give them all a little extra credit to make up the difference because I full well know why they all scored abnormally low on this test! Question is, how would I label that in the grade book? LOL.

My Layers are Sticking

To my body. It is living heck in my classroom. 87 degrees with the swamp cooler on. (They never put *water* in the swamp cooler) So sitting under the cooler is like sitting under a blow-dryer. We keep it on because it creates air flow. Who wants to learn about The Great Gatsby in this environment? NO ONE.

Suddenly I am onery too, reminiscent of the days in grade school when NO school I went to had an airconditioner, and all you could do is day-dream, talk out of turn, and stare out the windows. Only in my room there are only three litle windows, so the heat and the noise and the inevitable accompanying smell of 1 1/2 hour long classes of 36, 17 year olds, reverberate off of the faux-wood paneling and orange carpet. Misery.

Suddenly my classroom is the jungle. Choose your battles. I am just as miserable as the kids.

Thank you President Bush

All I can think about is summer vacation. It is always on my mind and only 2 1/2 weeks away now! How can I stand waiting until then! How can I keep my mind from running over all the possible summer schemes that I have and I don't have?! How can I keep my head in the game for 2 1/2 more weeks until delicious freedom? And now, thanks to President Bush I have a compounded problem. Now I want to think about the $600 from the government that I forgot I was getting--and now can think of 150 million ways to spend it. It will probably end up in my savings account, but for now, I am dreaming and schemeing of the wonder of unexpected money spending ability. Should I go somewhere? Buy something? Who knows! But it sure does give me one more thing to think about other than work! Oh, my. How are you going to spend yours?

Is David Archuleta for real?

Okay you American Idol fans, David Archuleta says he is not serving a mission. “Music” can be his mission. And I want to know what you think. We were discussing this last night with some friends and the situation was compared to the Osmonds, who apparently were told music could be their mission. My question is, is David Archuleta as “big” as the Osmonds? I don’t think so, at least not yet. Is 15 minutes of possible fame worth breaking a commandment? A million things jump into my mind like, well, think of all the “Mormons” who went into the media and lost their Mormonism, can David Archuleta stand it? What about Amy Adams from Enchanted, and Aaron Elkhart, and the very attractive Paul Walker, and other LDS people who are big-ish but not BIG; hardly anyone seems to be able to hold onto their LDS standards and pursue Hollywood.

People can justify and argue until the sun goes down on people like Steve Young who didn’t serve a mission, and Larry King’s millionth wife who is LDS and does not have a temple marriage, and on and on and on. I’m not trying to judge them per say, as much as wonder if David Archuleta is that good? I don’t think so. He is good, and gets a lot of fan base here in Utah because he is from Murray, but really? Does he have what it takes to make it big? I know that people can still be wonderful people even though they have never served a mission, like everyone else I have people in my extended family who are good Mormons and have never served a mission, I’m just afraid he is going to have to lose his good-boy appeal to make it big, but maybe I’m totally off the mark. And all of my high school girls who have crushes on him and are “so proud” of him for being in the media and a “good Mormon,” and a “great role model” are going to be sorely disappointed. I'm I too much of a skeptic?

Floaties

Apparently, the reason people all got sick in the swimming pools of Utah last summer was because moms didn’t buy the right size of swim diapers for their babies. Yeah. Do you think buying the right size is really going to keep little poopies from floating out of the diapers in public swimming pools? Lets be honest—any sort of paper-ish swim diaper is going to deteriorate and not hold waste-water after an hour in the swimming pool. Band-Aid sized solution I say.

KSL did a gross feature on the news last night where they actually filmed, FILMED pieces of poopies and filmy-brown water floating out of swim diapers and swimsuits of little kids. I was disturbed by the filming of it, and the “test-group” who were filmed in fish tanks, almost as much as by the fecal matter itself. Sadly, it’s always happened, it always will, and if you say you have never gone to the bathroom in a swimming pool in your life, face up to it, you are a liar. But should this stop fun summer memories of being a kid in the pool? No. So keep taking your kids to the public pools in the summer, but just don’t film the poopies. Ignorance is bliss right?

Teaching Has Changed Me

You have bad days, and yesterday was one, you have good days; thankfully today was one, and so-so days, but good days remind me why I l-o-v-e being a teacher. After school today I talked to one of my honors students about her writing potential. I explained to her how I tear her papers apart because she is so talented, and has the potential to get better and better. She appreciates it and it is fun to work with her on her writing and really work on fine-tuning it. This is one of the reasons I like teaching honors classes because they care about their work and the work you put into critiquing their work. I love helping students get better.

I equally love working with my low-acheivers because when you get through to them it is even that much more rewarding. Today was an all-around good day, my regular kids gave some of their best performances today as well. Days like today often make me think of the ways being a teacher has changed me, and here are a few:

1- I am infinetly more patient (and yet I am not nearly patient enough)

2- I have infinetly more empathy and compassion for other's weaknesses than I had before.

3- I have had my eyes opened to the amazing amount of hardship and struggle these kids have to deal with in their lives.

4- I have become a pencil-pincher. No matter where I am I pick up stray pencils and pens off of the ground to put in my pencil jar (vase actually) :D I am scaring myself actually--I cannot stop picking up pens and pencils off the ground and taking them to my classroom!

5- I don't get out as much as I used to. More nights including weekends nights than I should admit are taken up by grading papers, just a reality of teaching.

6- I am becoming a worse speller by the hour! Reading all of the misspellings I read everyday has made me start to memorize the mis-combinations of letters in words!

7- I accidentally pick up, and discard, every now and then a few colloquialisms, for example, I caught myself saying the other day, "Start shuttin' down your computers, packin' up your things and headin' back to the classroom." Atrocious!!!

8- I am picking up a bit of a high school sense of humor--I can anticipate what they will think is funny and then I will laugh first. Oh well, laughing is good, right?

9- I get a lot less sleep.

10- I am happier. I love working with the kids and my life has infinetly more joy in it than it did before.


(No--my student did not have permission to take this picture)

I don't think so.

Someone offered me $12 to kiss them yesterday.