Life and Stuff

So my husband calls me last night on the way home. He hangs up after I growl, “Hello? Hello?!?” a few times.

He calls back. I growl at him again.

“Is this Kim?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Sorry I hung up. I thought I accidentally called a nursing home. You sound like an old man.”

“Love you too, dear. Bring home soup.”

“Ok. Love you too, sir.”

[Hangs up.]

So then during my strep test today, the PA goes through her list of questions. “Do you have a fever…does it hurt when you eat or drink…are you experiencing hoarseness or change in voice tone?”

I give her the squirrelly eye. “Do you seriously think I always sound like a goat?”

She literally fell into her chair laughing. “No, I guess not. Suppose I ought to think before I ask these questions, huh.”

“S’ok. I’m having fun answering the phone, ‘Grandpa’s House of Snuff.””

Y’all have a good weekend.

That’s how I feel today: springly. Break is coming in about nine days (not that I’m counting…the hours….) The weather has been close to perfect after a few days of not-so-perfect (but needed) thunderstorms. North Carolina, as has much of the South, been in the grip of a sustained drought for about a year now. It doesn’t get much press because droughts aren’t press-friendly. They’re the slow, impending sort of disaster that no one wants to hear about. They’re merely inconvenient and quite dull. That is, until a 70-year-old woman runs the faucet for a glass of water, and nothing comes out. Her well has run dry.

It is only then that the news crews are called, an example is made, but nothing can really be done. The television station can’t fill the well, and they can’t make it rain. For awhile last summer, a lot of people in my neighborhood were still smugly watering their lawns, posting handmade signs that read, “Well Water.” Well, those wells began to sputter, while those following city water restrictions (for now) are saved that worry.

Despite recent storms, I don’t think North Carolina can take our water for granted anymore. I personally find it ridiculous that anyone would water a lawn that isn’t freshly sodded and trying to take. You put plants in your yard that are designed for the idiosyncrasies of your part of the country–if those plants require an abundant amount of water that doesn’t fall from the sky, they don’t belong in your yard.

This seems like a “derrrr” point to me, but what do I know. I’m just a gal who likes to drink water and bathe regularly.  I’m optimistically putting some hardy bulbs and seeds in the ground this weekend, and I suppose we’ll see what happens this summer. We’ll see if they really belong there.

In other news, my jewelry site is up and running. More to come on that later; I’m adding items daily right now, and Mother’s Day is coming, so…yeah.

My students are gazing blankly at me; they’re finishing a pretty long, brutal test and plotting my demise. I suppose I should take those up now.

Hey everyone! Yeah, it’s been a month of awesome, culminating a period of me waiting on pins and needles to get back a test score.

Right. I’m the teacher, but I’m still taking tests. And paying for the privilege to do so.

I’ve been deliberating for a few months on whether or not to add to my teaching license. I’m at the point in my teaching career where I try to do something “big” each year. Last year, it was writing curriculum units for a neighboring district. This year, it was going to be either an add-on in gifted education or high school English. I chose to go the high school English route for a couple of reasons. My current principal has stated on a couple of occasions that she could someday see me as a high school teacher or professor. So have some other folks, even though I thoroughly enjoy and am quite capable with each year’s crop of eighth graders.

A person, after all, needs to keep things interesting and keep growing if the kids are to benefit.

I paid my money to take the two required Praxis licensing exams; English Language, Literature, and Composition: Content Knowledge, and Composition and Pedagogy.

Mighty darn glad I have an English degree. I don’t see how anyone but the most devoted literary nerd would have a fighting chance at these tests.

The first exam was a 120-question behemoth that quizzed me on world literature from 1400-now. And it wasn’t packed with questions like, “Is this a haiku, or not?” I wish. No, I was asked questions such as:

1. Which of the following is the name of the assistant to Macbeth witch #2?
2. Which of the following grammatical rules are the reason that the below statement is correct?
3. Two of the following poems share a rhyme scheme with poems from which of the following British Neoclassical epics. Identify those.

Are you KIDDING ME! All I could figure was that if I even passed this thing, I need to consider a career as “Jeopardy Contestant Number Two.”

The second test was a little bit less obnoxious and more straightforward. You’re given a list of eight to ten works of literature (hoping to God that you’ve read just one on the arbitrary list,) and you must write four constructed responses that would comprise your lesson plan. You’re then given a sample of student writing to which you must respond. The toughest part of this test is knowing that you have one hour to construct reasonably-educated responses, in handwriting that doesn’t resemble that of a stroke victim on meth. My handwriting is questionable to begin with. Speed me up, and it’s virtually unreadable.

I would not advise any teacher to walk into these tests cold. I purchased and studied the Cliffs preparatory book for these, and was thankful to have been prepared for the test format. The questions, either you know the content or you don’t. But the format is tricky, so it’s worth a person’s time to learn it.

Sooooo, anyway. I had to wait a month for the results.

I got them last week. On the first test (the multiple-choice monster,) I earned a perfect score on the thing. Like, didn’t miss any. Combined with a most respectable score on the latter, I earned my high school teaching license with plenty of room to spare.

The question is, what to do now? Like I said before, I like my job, my kids, all that. I’m not going to just randomly cast myself out there, but might carefully look at a high school or two. Or stay here and perfect the art of eighth graderly-ness.

I dunno. I suppose it’s just good to know I’ve got some other options.

I never did finish telling y’all about London!Ok, so Lug and I are museum nerds, and really looked forward to visiting the British Museum (of history.) Of course, we wanted to see the highlighted stuff, such as the Rosetta Stone and Parthenon goodies. But, being the British Empire, we figured they’d collected a cool item or two.

We were not disappointed, as long as we didn’t think too hard about the origin of said cool items.

The thing is, there aren’t a whole lot of British things at the British Museum. In fact, the featured exhibition was a Terracotta army found in China. And then, you know…stolen excavated. For history.

Who am I to talk, right? America, land of the freely-acquired through rough tactics. Yeah, I know. But any conscious person can’t help but enter the British Museum and think about all of these world treasures packed into one building. Nonetheless, it was extraordinarily cool to walk amid the Greek items. A few thousand years before we had to “rediscover” perspective and other artistic techniques during the Renaissance, the Greeks were creating more advanced art than many people now. Check out Socrates with three of his philosopher pals:

What astounded me about the Greek and Roman artifacts is the enormity of what we lost as a culture during the Dark Ages. Especially artistically. If you’ve ever compared art from the 1200’s to the 1400’s to that of the Greeks, it’s almost impossible to understand the steps backward, the loss.

Of particular interest to me, also, was a prints and sketches exhibition. How many times does a person get to see Michelangelo’s rough drafts?

They were so fragile that the display was rather dimly lit; some even had user lights that a person could temporarily activate while viewing. We thoroughly enjoyed these.

Then, of course, there was the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and Trafalgar Square, and countless things a person can read about in any travel book. So, I won’t bore you with them. We were tourists. As many times as I’ve been to London, I’ve never really had a chance to be one, so it was great fun. I must say, though, that the National Portrait Gallery is a can’t-miss. You CANNOT leave London without seeing those old Tudor and Elizabethan portraits. They were just about worth the entire trip, as was the National Portrait Prize. It was hard to believe that some of them were photographs; some looked like paintings.

Our second night there, we had the pleasure of taking in a West End show–”Lord of the Rings,” in which they were somehow able to get the trilogy into one musical. It was fantastic, just huge, with stunning special effects that I’ve never seen before in live theatre. Think people literally disappearing into thin air, fire on stage, and characters breaking the fourth wall and visiting audience members. Lug and I were thoroughly entertained, surrounded by cool people, and had pretty decent seats once we climbed the ten or eleven flights of stairs to our seats.

If you hit lastminute.com, I highly recommend them for great dinner-theatre packages. If your goal is to have a great experience without being too particular about having a hoity-toity dinner or front-row seats, and you want to get a deal to boot, definitely bookmark this site. For eighty American dollars, we enjoyed a three-course dinner at Sway (yum) and “Lord.” Not bad, eh?

What else…oh, yeah–we saw the last public exhibition of the King Tut before it heads back to Cairo! That was interesting, and Lug had been wanting to see it since we were in Chicago last year. It took place at the O2 that monster concert arena that also has a full-service mall and two Starbucks within 500 yards of one another. I don’t know a great deal about Egyptology, so this was eye-opening and even more engaging than I thought it would be. How archaologists could determine that *this * was Tut’s chair when he was a kid, and *this* was what he wore when he became king…that was fascinating. The household items–beautiful. It was a little unnerving, you know, being amid so many items that were meant to be funereal. Generally, we tend to prefer that the dead rest in peace, so we had a few moments of, “Is it really right of us to be looking at this?”

Just because I’m being a tourist doesn’t mean that I can always turn off those tendencies. Que sera.

The only quibble that Lug had with the exhibit–and it is quite a quibble–was that the gold death mask on all the advertisements was not there. Apparently, it had been damaged and was back in Egypt. So, maybe they ought not advertise with that.

London isn’t handicapped-accessible, by the way. You’ll do a lot of walking, and you’ll cram your ass into a lot of small spaces. Many doorways are low, narrow, and places are crowded. Like anywhere unfamiliar, a person needs to be aware, nimble, and pocket the offensive American habits. I think, to some degree, a lot of unnecessary urban myth and scare language goes into tour books, but it is a good idea to have some common sense in London. Apparently, pickpocketing takes place in busy tourist districts; there are also people who slit backpacks and purses, reach in, and grab some goodies. It’s a good idea to have a light messenger bag with water and your map; just wear it in front of you and keep your hand on it.

To our automobile-imprisoned American society, London’s public transport is great. We never waited more than five or eight minutes for a Tube train, and even with service delays got quickly and safely to our destinations. No complaints whatsoever on that. I would strongly advise you to pre-order your Oyster swipe card Stateside, and have them FedEx it to you. For the seven pounds you pay in postage, it is 100% worth being able to get off your plane and hit the ground running. The ticket lines for public transport at Heathrow are long, and you’ll lose a lot of valuable time enduring more frustration than necessary. Have those suckers shipped over here.

Hm…I know I’ll think of something to write later, but I’m taking this medicine for the recent unpleasantness that knocks me out pretty well. Long story short, the unpleasantness is related to some pretty significant food sensitivities. So, I’m eating very simply, in small portions, kind of a seeds and dirt sort of diet right now. It’s not so bad; it actually makes me more creative in the kitchen. Tonight, for example, I sliced a yam and sauteed it with tomatoes and spices, then mixed it with a nice penne made from brown rice flour instead of wheat. It was delicious, as has been the Thai and Chinese close-to-vegan dishes I’ve been cooking.

Lug just kind of smiles and gnaws on his Philly cheese steak, but it’s all good.. He’s a big, strong boy who’s gotta eat his steak.

On Flickr, I read about this:

Ernest Hemingway was once prodded to compose a complete story in six words. His answer, personally felt to be his best prose ever, was “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Some people say it was to settle a bar bet. Others say it was a personal challenge directed at other famous authors.

There is one thing that eighth-graders really need to learn at this time of year, because it such an important skill for high school. It’s brevity. They must learn to verbalize and write complete, persuasive, and powerful thoughts in very few words. It’s time for them to quit stringing together words toward the end of quantity, and shoot for some quality.

It’s hard to teach people that, but Hemingway’s bar bet (apocryphal or not) is a fun start.

Today, as part of a few learning stations, I asked my students to write ten separate, unrelated six-word stories. This was difficult. It’s hard because they tend toward the overdramatic, cliched, and imagistic (”Flowers: tall, colorful, swaying in breeze.”)

For adults to write this stomach-turning, flowery hoo-ha…er, no. Blech. I’m the Englsh teacher who appreciates economy of language more than almost anything. I never demand, “At least five pages! Or else!” I limit my students to two or three, and they’d better shake out the fluff before it hits my desk. My kids know what “clarity” means.

They’re getting it. And they’re twisted. Decline of Western Civilization, exhibit A:

Willy Wonka is diabetic: no chocolate.

The man went to dinner alone.

Sorry, honey. I’m stuck in traffic.

The book fell onto the baby.

He sold his mother-in-law on Ebay.

She didn’t know the cheese expired.

Nothing happens to man. Only everything.

She downed her cocktail in disgust.

He didn’t want her to know.

I woke up with festering sores.

* * *

I was sick, so I’ve not been to the site much. Like, I was whoo-lordy sick. But now I’m on my way to better, so there you go. Heaps and heaps of good stuff going on here. I’ve been creatively motivated, and I’m getting a couple of projects really done and ready to haul out of here. That’s exciting. The feedback on one of them has been tremendous, because it allows me to edit and get it in the right hands. Good, good stuff.