Tuesday the 29th

My sweetie and her little brother went down to the game last night; it was the '84 Reunion game complete with live performances from Chet Lemon, Alan Trammell, and Jack Morris and a replica away jersey giveaway. Well, the rain moved in and didn't go away so by 7:15 i think the game was called and rescheduled for noon to-day. We will watch it in the classroom while we prepare for our tests later this week. Checked the weather down there and it looks clear.
Well, we didn't watch; I listened to some and had to read about the ending. I'm sick and just want to sleep. Suckass stupid suckass. hit the #(@^#&%^&^ ball.

Marvelous Monday

Back to work on a rainy day; the morning drive was oh-so dark and the deep deep freeze did not approach as foretold by the meteorological seers. The second hour scholars are working on their bar graphs and I have already to-day dutifully entered all the math and science network meeting dates into my MS Outlook 2003 calendar, soon to be synced with my Palm V Connected Organizer (i'm a digital misfit).

The weekend was fun and eventful.

Wonderful Wednesday!!!

Oh you can see my Avatars on the page here; my 7th hour geometry scholars are creating their own right now and having a ball doing it. It's about 7 minutes till the bell rings for the end of the day and even if it's cloudy i'm ok with that. Thank you, LORD, for carrying me through this day; in spite of my sickness, YOU are strong.

Praise to the LORD, the Almighty, the King of creation

Thank you, LORD, for a new day; thank you for the restful weekend, thank you for helping me get through this time of bodily ache and dismay. You are King of kings and Lord of lords, forever to be praised!

With very few weekend responsibilities I got to sleep off this current 'cold'; I am very possibly quite ready for another Monday! Papers are all graded, birthday video is all lined up, great lesson plans are mapped out in my mind, and successful students are even now on their busses preparing for the mathematical fountains of wisdom they will be endowed with! Glorious rainy morning here in Manistee County; we haven't had rain up here for quite a spell. The photo i borrowed from the 'Web. :-)

Wonder Grace of Jesus...

Got out the old hymnal yestreday after school and played some of the favorites from my Baptist years. Nice tunes, great harmonies, faith-filled messages...

OOOOOOOHhhhhhhhhhhhh it's a great sports day, yes it is!!! Tigers on the national stage against the Twins(with our own HotRod Allen doing the color commentary); the mighty University of Michigan Wolverines have already tattooed their little sisters the Eastern Michigna Eagles; and MSU has a 1-point lead over Notre Dame going into halftime. AND it's sunny and warm AND I got alot of homework done already to-day AND i think it's time for pizza and beer.
Episode 1 of Survivor 19 was pretty cool. A couple of mean characters will ensure great ratings. The word is this will probably be the next to last season for that show.

God Bless Us, Every One

Thursday evening and it's been a crazy week. Class load keeps me busy, the workday seems to just fly by and the evening paperwork never ends. We had our first fire drill of the year to-day, got to go outside with 8th graders at 8:35. Cool air woke us all up!
Survivor Samoa starts tonight at 8:00...I will watch.

4:11 ante meridian

...am, in the morning, as in early. Coffee is tastin pretty good and my mind is beginning to function. Woke up with low blood sugar and ate like two bites of a banana. Bananas are great food, but they contain alot of sugar. So I waited about ten minutes and tested again and it was already 20 miligrams per decilitre of blood higher. Waited another 15 minutes and it hadn't gone up much anymore but now i know how much a banana can affect blood glucose levels.
This coffee is real good.
1st Hour: Pre-Algebra - Collect the written summaries from Friday. Do a few examples from a worksheet and assign the rest as homework.
2nd Hour: MS Fundamentals - Go over order of operations practice. A few logic exercises to-day would be most welcome.
3rd Hour: Stats - Pass back homework; average rate of change, stemplots and double stemplots.
4th Hour: PreCalc - dunno yet
Lunch - eat
5th Hour: Advanced Algebra - Collect the homework and talk more about functions.
6th Hour: Algebra - Correct the homework, let the darlings practice their graphing.
7th Hour: Geometry - Points and lines in Euclidean geometry...yes!
This coffee is great.

Survivor Samoa

This Thursday at 8pm Eastern will begin the 19th season of the only show I watch on television. And even now, cuz i don't have cable, i'll not be able to watch on television; i'll have to watch at cbs.com yeah.

Weekend attire

Just got back to Onekama after the four hour drive in my trusty Ram; gorgeous day, Tigers won, Lions...well...um... ... ... it's a gorgeous day! Had a great time with my sweetie: we hung out Friday night then shopped all morning Saturday then went to Brighton for the Smokin Barbecue and Blues fest which was indeed smokin. Lots of folks out on a nice day and the smells from all the bbq were tantalizing. Got back to the truck in time to hear that CMU had just beaten MSU in comeback fashion and got to watch some of the other big college in Michigan's game with Notre Dame. THAT was a good one; too bad the Irish couldn't hold on at the end.
Thank you, Father, for safe travels and for a great weekend.
Up at school to get some work done and myself ready for the week. I like wearing baggy cotton shorts, a ripped t-shirt, and my stinky slip-ons and i will as long as i can into the late months...winter will be here soon enough!

Remaining Algebra 2 HSCEs are PRE-MME

Does every trade have it's own secret code? Are there acronyms as numerous in other professions as we have in education? Golly gee wiz...the title above was from a document that came from the state which discussed a softening up of the expectations for our high-stakes test. Yessss!
But A3.6 (rational functions) is now pre-MME whereas it used to be post-MME.

Consistant licks

One of my seniors said something to-day deemed worth of writing on the board with quotes around it...in the context of the conversation it was quite funny; the two words together arent' normally associated and as the title above it carries no meaning whatsoever. I cant remember them now (we were talking about how many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop) but I told him i was gonna use them for the title of to-day's episode...

Warm again to-day and spent a little time on the deck in the sun. Seems the sun is going down quicker than it was say, a month ago... must be a northern lattitude thing. Big eye exam after work and even with the fashionable shades provided free of charge upon checkout, I couldn't see a thing...i got the drops almost four hours ago and everything's still blurry. No problems or change in prescription, praise God!

I've only been up here a couple days and i really miss my girlfriend. So, to occupy my time, I get to read little reports entitled "All About Me" that I have the middle school kids write on the first day of school. No editing whatsoever, here's an example:

This Sumer I went erase I got my 360 and a ipod tush. and I got a Jod To IT is good som wert. And I got bust in To. I loke To go Dirt Bike and cut would. And I like To Play foot Ball. Sener and gird.

Yep. Sener and gird.

Tuesday

Worked in my room Sunday and yestreday - both gorgoeous days - and got lots done. Threw out some and moved some, the back of the room has less clutter now. Thank the maintenance folks - they moved everything off the floor and gave me a low k at it? (-8 all shiney clean coated now...
Thank you, LORD, for this new day.

Labor Day work day...

OK, so the classroom isn't all that ready for 136 kids to come through, but i've got tomorrow morning, right? Organized some stuff, threw out some stuff, arranged some other stuff, cleaned the tables, made room for 35 kids in my biggest class, got a couple of worksheets photocopied, put in a purchase order for eight algebra books... ... ... the coffee will be hot and quite welcome in the morning i can tell you. Nice day out, i heard. 82 here when i got home at about 5:00. Did a little bit of paperwork on the deck and since then the temp has dropped ten degrees.

Comfortable sleeping weather yes it is. Supposed to be nice into midweek. I love you, Petunia.

The sudoku bug has left me i think...they're not all that so much fun to do anymore...maybe cuz i end up with a 2 right next to a 2 so often and have to either check the answers in the back of the book (just like the algebra kids) or violently scratch it out and start another one. Watched King Kong on TCM to-day while i was working...more screams than dialogue...check it out and tell me i'm lyin...and the movie guy who wanted to bring Kong back to the states was like a caricature of 1930's voices in movies: talked fast (between doomed soul's screams) and used all the cliches of the era. Good picture. "it was Beauty that killed the Beast". remember it?

Labor Day Sunday

Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you.

Golly i just love that dialogue. That one's for Alban; me and him used to laugh at that line back in the day...

Back up at school, trying to find a couple more Algebra books for my 8th graders, doin seating charts, planning the first couple lessons in each of the six different math classes i'll be teaching, arranging and cleaning tables, actually mostly just trying to acclamate myself in Facebook (don't really understand it too well yet), rejoicing in Inge's 9th inning grand slam...poor Rays.

Come, Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your faithful...

Autumnal sights, sounds, smells on a fabulous Thursday morning. A cool, cool morning greeted me, the red dawn encroaching on my slumber; the truck windows were covered with dew, as was the grass. Just hints of color in the trees (green is beautiful, but 'color' is the highlight, the climax, if you will, of the year) and the late-season perennials are in bloom. Missing yet are the oblong wheeled yellow cheeses: those socially stimulating transportation devices so necessary of our compulsory education system. Soon they too will be out in their masses, and we will know, officially, that fall has fallen upon us.
Ahhhhhh.
Well, events...
Finally retrieved my Ram from New Buffalo. But it needed a battery, having sat all summer without starting. And it was probably going bad yep. So me and my sweetie rented a Focus, drove from Brighton to New Buffalo, paid the handsome remake-the-transmission fee, and followed each other briefly on I-94 until I took the turn northward near St. Joseph. But the guy at the shop said not to turn the vehicle off even when i have to gas up. Hmmmmm. It wanted to die every time I slowed down so I'd shift to neutral and rever up. Until i had to get gas; couldn't hardly pump the gas AND hold down the eggzelerator could I?!? But glory to God it started every time it died. Got to Ludville (about a half hour from my destination) and passed a NAPA and checked the price and it really didn't matter what the price was but thankfully i thought it reasonable (?). The nice guys there let me use their rachets and with a twist of the ignition key and a brief prayer OH did she purrrrrr!. So I'm good now, except for the broken sway bar up front and the shot shocks and the lack of muffler (this, it must be understood, is not really an exception to the 'good'ness, just makes it loud) and perhaps the alternator but i'm probably fine on that since i now have a brand new battrie.
Seven preps this year. [To teachers that sentence means something; for the rest of you, translate "i'm teaching seven different classes this year and for each one i am responsible for planning, purveying myriads of information to children with multiple learning styles and proclivities, coming up with creative assingments and the rubriks to assess these assignments, and returning these assignments in a timely manner, as well as communicating meaningfully to parents regarding the general lack of motivation, effort, or cognitive capacity of their product of love.] Had six last year. My cousing in a bigger district has like 2: Chem and AP Chem. It's all good, they're calling it 'Overload' and paying me extra. It's all good.
Back to work...