Don't Fear the Reaper

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Recession, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Budget Cuts, and shun

The frumious Unemployment!"

---Adapted from Lewis Caroll's "The Jabberwocky"

Well, sooner or later, the Recession comes for all of us. This morning it came for me. The good news is I will not be asked to take on a before or after school yearbook program--which I was dreading. Yearbook is enough stress and work as a full class. The bad news is that I also will not be at my current school any longer. Despite my principal's best efforts not to cut math or English, and he's cut every single department so far, he is still one position too high. So he looked at cutting half a math and half an English, and the halves would do half time at another school. But split schedules like that are as stressful as most forms of torture, and the other schools actually need whole positions, not half. So, it looks like I'll be teaching at the next junior high over.

Given the current economic climate, and the budget cuts, I'm very grateful to be guaranteed a job in the district, and, as it is, this looks like the most workable transfer possible. I'm still a little bit in shock, and I'll be devastated to leave my school, my classroom, the yearbook I'm just barely learning how to run, the English curriculum I finally have worked out, the staff and administration whose names and quirks I know, and the school where I'm slowly building a reputation with the students. But, all things considered, I have much more to be thankful for than I do to grieve over. I have a steady, guaranteed, full-time job, benefits, and my new school will even be a mile closer to my new apartment.

They were born under wand'ring stars

The mind of a junior high schooler is a curious place. I'm serious. It's full of random roadblocks, suddenly strong opinions, and whole marshes of exaggeration where a fact or story could get lost and never find its way back out. For example, a week or two ago, I told the story to my students of Dr. Mengele shooting a woman and her child when the woman protested being separated when entering Auschwitz.

When this story showed up in one of my student's papers, it contained some entertaining conclusions and embellisments. I don't have the exact wording with me, so I will do my best to recreate it. The original topic was "Should the Jews have fought back against the Nazis?"

Plus, there were like 20 Nazis for every 10 Jews. I heard this story once where a woman tried to hold on to her baby, and the Nazi pulled out a pistol sized shotgun and blew them both away.

If this how a straightforward story emerges from the maze of their brains, you can only imagine the entertaining political analysis I hear; part I-heard-it-on-the-news-in-passing, part my-parents-said-that-somebody-said-something-sorta-like-this, and part I-just-thought-of-it-but-am-suddenly-willing-to-swear-its-truthfulness.

I ot Angry!

Once upon a time, last school year, I wrote a blog about how I rarely let my students see me angry, even when they probably needed to see it. I think I've either grown more Chutzpah or become callous, or both, but I think the problem is getting solved. The beginning of class today was a bit chaotic because we were turning in projects and I was besieged by nearly a dozen students with problems that needed solving. I turned from helping a student one on one to find my B4 class chatting merrily, as if I hadn't clearly written instructions to read silently on the board, and as if I hadn't already told them twice to stop talking.

Suddenly my voice was loud and full of acid, and I was prowling up and down the aisles. "Why are you still talking? I don't care if I didn't have the time to yell at you to be quiet. You know you need to be reading. If I am unable to babysit you, you need to take responsibility for yourself."

A year ago, I had no idea how to give a speech like this. And I never would have been able to maintain the level of anger and disappointment and danger that dripped from my voice for more than a few seconds. Now it just rolled out so naturally I didn't have a chance to stop and question my authority or my right to say such things. Neither did they.

Now, I'm not advocating being angry all the time, yelling at students, or even lecturing them on a regular basis. But I believe that when they're in trouble, they should know it and feel it. Otherwise, they don't seem to notice that they're in trouble until you call them up after class and nicely explain to them they've got detention.

"This To Shall Pass"

This is, without question, the coolest of these sequences I have ever seen.

And hopefully the url are works this time. Ok... Good.

Discovering the Blogosphere

Recently I attended a literacy conference in Salt Lake for teachers. While there, I went to one particularly convincing presentation that, among other things, showed me how to do all sorts of nifty things online. So, I took the presenter's advice and have been expanding my blog reading list beyond blogs belonging to the people I actually know. This eventually led me to the thebloggess.com, which is proving to be hilarious.

Today I read a story she posted a few days back about Read Write Web's article about Facebook. Their article came up on the google search for "facebook login," and suddenly scores of people were arriving at their article. These people took one look at the red borders, the advertisements, and assumed that Facebook had simply changed its layout again. They then proceeded to leave numerous angry comments begging to allowed to log on and talk to their friends. RWW even posted a banner on the article alerting users that they were not at Facebook, but it was largely ignored. Two days RWW wrote another article entitled "We're Still Not Facebook." Even that article still got comments from confused visitors searching for their pics and their farmville.

For a good laugh, go through the original comments and read a few. It doesn't take very many before you start laughing.