To Answer your Question

I am so ready to be done with this school year. My students are driving me absolutely crazy. And from the looks of it, I'm driving them crazy too. The freshmen are especially displeased that unlike their past nine years of schooling, this one will not conclude the year with parties and field trips, but with exams. Welcome to high school! I think we all agree that summer is long overdue and are unsure how to get through the next three weeks (seriously, there are THREE more weeks?!) without killing each other.

My personal coping strategies revolve around revised classroom management strategies. After about 32 weeks of resisting temptation, I finally sprayed a girl with my overhead projector spray bottle when she wouldn't stop talking. When kids say something obnoxious or stupid (yes, there are stupid questions and stupid answers) I've been responding with complete and full-on sarcasm. Did you miss anything when you were absent? Nope; we canceled class when we realized you were gone. Oh, you don't like it when you have to graph? Well I don't like it when you whine, so I guess neither of us gets what we want today.

Then I realized that I might be slipping away from funny-sarcastic to just-plain-mean-sarcastic. I had to think of a new way to let kids know how ridiculous their complaining is, but in a less abrasive way. And what is the least abrasive thing I can tell them? How much I love them. So that is my new response to everything.

"Why do we have homework?" "Because I love you."
"Why are you giving us hard problems?" "It's because I love you."
"Can we just do nothing today?" "I love you too much to let that happen."
"I hate math." "That's too bad because math loves you."

They're not giving me a lot of reasons to love them these days, so I have to take every possible opportunity to remind them--and myself--that the love is still there.

Living Well

What would happen if you took a whole bunch of factors that I don't care about and used those factors to rank the top towns/cities in the United States? Well, according to Forbes magazine, you would find that my current location comes in at #10.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/04/towns-cities-real-estate-lifestyle-real-estate-top-towns_slide_17.html?thisSpeed=15000

Turns out Sarah and I made a good decision to move here if we want to "live well." Indeed I thank my lucky stars on a daily basis that Visa International and Sony Computer Entertainment America are right in our backyard (or at least I will begin to be thankful for this now that I actually know about it). And now I know that the reason I always feel so inventive when I'm home is that Foster City is in the top five for patents per capita. Score! Unfortunately, I don't quite meet the Foster City "live well" criteria that put us on the list in the first place, given that I don't even make half of the median income. Maybe because I haven't come up with that patent yet.

I do have to take issue with Forbes' assessment that the City "offers few restaurants or cultural institutions." If Rickshaw Corner, the "Chinese" place down the street doesn't fit both those criteria, I don't know what does. Take that, Boulder.

Singing a New Tune

I happened to have observers in my classroom today as we were doing a review activity for our quadratics unit and one asked me whether I'd taught them a quadratic formula song. Obviously that was the only way I know how to teach it (this year my 4th block was even treated to an R&B remix courtesy of another math teacher).

Then the observer had a brilliant suggestion. He noticed the Michigan shirt I was wearing and asked if I'd taught the QF to the tune of the Michigan fight song. How did I not think of that earlier? Indoctrinate my students into math AND blind athletic fanaticism at the same time? This is definitely happening next year.

X equals opposite b (Hail to the victors valiant!)
Then plus or minus square root (Hail to the conquering heroes!)
B squared (Hail!) minus (Hail!) four A-C (to Michigan)
Allll over two (the champions of) A (the west!)

On the other hand, I actually do want to raise little wolverine fans, so I'm not sure I want them to associate something so completely un-fun as the quadratic formula with something so awesome as U of M. I can only imagine some poor student attending a Umich sporting event--or enrolling in school there--and spending the entire time with the quadratic formula running through her head. It would ruin football season in a way that I don't want to be held responsible for.

On the Bright Side

Things lately have been, shall we say, less than ideal. Yeah my new car is fun, but not as much fun as if it had been purchased out of necessity. Finding a new job is also fun (okay, that's not true at all), but once again the whole necessity thing adds a damper.

(As a side note, California residents would be doing me and the children of our fair state a personal favor if you were to vote "yes" on all propositions in the May 19th special election. I'm just saying.)

So mostly out of fear and avoidance of the real, pressing issues, I've decided to dedicate this post to one of the good things going on. Namely, that I have found evidence on my whiteboard that there are at least three students who don't hate me.

 

I think that R., the author of the comment above, likes me because I let her come in my room during passing period when it's cold outside and she has once again dressed for the weather she wants instead of the weather we have.

 

I.'s message implies that she's something other than the kind, smart, funny, interesting girl I've known since September. Is there something I should know about that would make me think otherwise?

 

Initially I would have taken this as a weird, purposeful spelling mistake from N., but after last week's out-of-nowhere tirade about not doing homework "and you can't make me," I suspect that really she just wanted to let me know about her affinity for shrubs.

 

Then there's this, another one from R., which is so amazing that I can't even think of anything facetious to say about it. Fortunately, some of my other students did not have their hearts warmed to quite the same degree, so they took charge and erased some key words. While it's undeniably true, I'm just not as moved by the statement that "Ms. L. is the teacher I've had."

Knight Rider

I know that there are a lot of things to look for when purchasing a new car. How reliable is it? What kind of gas mileage does it get? Is it safe? After growing up with a safety engineer father, I definitely made sure I paid extra for the anti-lock brakes. The dealers, of course, took one look at the fact that I'm female and tried to sell me on the more superficial aspects. "Can you see yourself in the red one?" "What kind of interior do you think you want?" "Once you get a moonroof, you'll never be able to drive another car without one."

It happens that the new Focus I bought comes with something called "SYNC," a fancy little system that connects my phone and music to the car. This was definitely not as important as the anti-lock brakes or manual transmission, but it happened to come with the one car that fit the more important specifications. But now I'm finding out just how awesome it is. Everything is voice activated and turns on when I turn the car on, so I just say "Phone. Call Mom & Dad" and it calls them. No more headset; I just talk into the air. I can also say "USB. Play Artist Kanye West" and it will start playing the Kanye songs on my iPod.

So it's pretty exciting that I can talk to my car (would've come in handy on the long drive when I moved out to California), but it turns out that it will talk to me too. It will tell me things like when my car needs service and it'll read text messages to me. Hopefully someone will start texting me phrases that KITT, the car from Knight Rider, would say. If this car lets me feel like I'm David Hasselhoff, it was worth every penny.

Teacher Cologne

A: "Ms. L, you smell like my math teacher from last year."
Me: [raises eyebrows questioningly]
A: "I mean... I don't know, I can't describe it. You just have the same smell as my old math teacher."
Me: "It's the math teacher cologne. They give it to us when we get our teaching certificates."
Y: "That's not true, is it?"
Me: "Oh yeah, when I went to that math conference a few weeks ago I got a new bottle."

Little Red Schoolhouse

I'm in Washington, DC right now (obviously), so yesterday I took a little time to do some sightseeing. I was planning a full on Oppressed People's Day (National Museum of the American Indian followed by the Holocaust Museum), but on the way to my first destination I stumbled across a necessary pitstop.



What, you may ask, is the bright red thing in the middle of all the depressing drab and bureaucracy? Is it a bright spot in our otherwise bleak American education system? Um, sure, it's something like that.



Seriously, whose idea was this? Dear Margaret Spellings: just because John Ashcroft had to change his office building to cover up the Justice statue doesn't mean you had to do something stupid and tax-wasting with yours.

On the other hand, the poetic justice of it all is pretty phenomenal. Notice that the NCLB schoolhouse is empty. Even better, those doors to the office building behind it are locked.

I stuck around for a few minutes hoping for a good Arne Duncan celeb sighting, but no luck. So I moved on away from the schooling system and on to the pre-planned oppressive/depressive parts of my itinerary. All in all a good day.