Re-thinking the way we re-think

Seagulls...are they related to this post? Yes. Why? I leave that up to you.

Despite the profuse supply of The Bachelorette video clips and the like, the internet is still a grand source of inspiration and thoughtfulness.

Any savvy consumer of information would have by now encountered kottke.org by now. I stumbled upon this article there and it very concisely phrased what I've been trying to put into words. Granted, the writer is talking about workspace design and working, while I'm talking about technology and teaching. But in essence, it's the same.

I love technology, I really do. But my use of it for teaching is not what will make me a great teacher in the end. I can show endless Khan Academy videos, use those little remote control "voting" things for students to punch in their answer, wear out my (non-existent) SmartBoard and (arrived! or at least my colleague's has; I'm assuming mine is here too since the principal ordered both of ours at the same time, although I haven't checked yet) ELMO, and go through enough cans of Dust Air cleaning my LCD projector and it STILL will not make me a great teacher.

What will make me a great teacher?

~ practice

~ life-long learning

~ bouncing ideas off of colleagues

~ professional respect and trust

~ discovering new ideas in both familiar and surprising places

~ experimentation (aka "making mistakes")

~ time and space to recharge my batteries

So what will make my students great learners? Laptops for all? Fancy phones that can text their answers to the professor's iPad? Olympic-sized school swimming pools? Shiny, new hardback textbooks? I don't know about all that.

I only know that this coming school year, I will fuss less about the arrangement of student desks in my oddly proportioned classroom.

40 minutes fast

Summers are for leisurely made and eaten Greek salads.

Dug up this 2009 article from the New York Times after talking to a colleague about our short lunch times. Apparently, when my colleague (in her 40s) was in school, she had a full hour for lunch from elementary through high school. I remember my high school lunch period being 50 minutes - enough time for me to go home for a decent lunch and get back with time to spare.

My middle school has a 40 minute lunch period, including the 5 minute passing period at the end for students to transition to 5th period. When I worked at the elementary level, I had a 35 minute lunch period.

It sucks in elementary - by the time the kids are all lined up, out the door, and safely under the supervision of the lunch time staff, there's about 25 minutes left until lunch is over. And it was expected at that school for teachers to start going out to the playground by 5 minutes before to pick up their class. My master teacher, Mr. B, taught me the trick of lining the class up at least 5 minutes before the bell so that when it finally did ring, we would be half-way to the cafeteria. This takes A LOT of practice, timing the lessons just right and making the morning sessions as productive as possible. Fortunately, that was my 5th/6th split and they were savvy enough to catch on - if we worked hard in the morning, we got to go to lunch first. And 5th/6th graders love being first.

My colleague, Ms. O, has this theory that kids no longer know what to do with themselves in their free time, leading to more behavior problems, which is why there is a seeming trend that school lunch periods are getting shorter and shorter. I say seeming because I haven't come across any documentation or studies on this. This is the first I've ever heard of Ms. O's theory, but it sort of makes sense.

So here's my first question I've ever directly posed to my blog audience (if there's anyone reading this): Have you noticed the trend of shorter lunch times? What do you make of it?

Poverty

I've been thinking a lot about poverty lately. How it affects learning, how it affects businesses and general economics, how it affects emotional and physical health. No answers to the many questions, but I do have these questions that I haven't seen many people ask:

Would poverty be such a big deal if the other side of the spectrum didn't exist at such extreme levels?

Would people feel the effects of poverty so much if western consumerism and our impulses for immediate gratification wasn't as intense as it is now?

How many people can be lifted out of poverty just from practicing conservative money management and investment?

Are we expecting money to solve problems on a near impossible level? Can we throw cash into the coffers of public education and hope it'll all turn out well automatically?

Why do we expect to have the fanciest luxury items and at the same time hold out our hands for government intervention for our basic needs?

Who else out there is liberal on social issues but conservative on economic issues?

Yobibyte

I think I just found my inspiration for next year's wall display.

The Hunger Games

See what I mean about the cover having a "Nazi" feeling?

It's summer and the start of reading season. The very first book I picked up was The Hunger Games so it's the first book I'm going to review this year. I have to explain the back story of my experience with this book a little, because I'm not going to give away any of the plot here. Because I walked into this book completely blind and I walked out with the best reading experience I've had in years. So if you really want a synopsis, go google it. But try to not google it too much.

I had seen it around campus, in the hands of many of my students - from the best and the brightest to even DG, The Boy Who Would Do Nothing. The very first time I saw the cover, back in November (during DG's parent/teacher conference no less), I thought it was a historical novel about WWII - the cover seemed to have that "Nazi" feeling to it.

I put it out of my radar for the next several months. I've read enough WWII novels in my pre-teen and teenage years to know what they are generally like, at least in the YA category. If it's not a carbon copy of Anne Frank's story, it's bound to be something like Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan. It's one of the reasons why Inglorious Basterds was so interesting, because it told a different story.

It blipped back onto my radar around spring break when I saw PP (unfortunate initials, seriously bright student) lugging the book and it's sequels around. PP is the kind of kid whom teachers always keep an eye out on - you know, the one that doesn't necessarily stick out in terms of behavior or personality, but I just had to be observant of because he walked around like he belongs in another dimension. If he was older, and if his personality were less sweet, he could be described as having a stick up his butt. But he's just a kid, a really sweet kid who enjoyed my class and let me know that he enjoyed my class often, so I kept a lookout and snuffed any hint of teasing or bullying that came his way. That, and his mother turned out to be an incredible ally during a time when I was battling with some other parents over grades and whatnot.

Not that I would take special observations of a kid solely because his mother is helpful and kind and respects education and educators the way I believe education and educators should be respected. Just saying.

I asked PP how he was enjoying The Hunger Games one day. He said he was enjoying it a lot. I asked if he recommended it. He said he did.

During Open House in the spring, my school has this thing set up with the annual book faire where teachers can request books and the visitors to Open House can buy the books for us. It would only work at a school like mine: the many donations I've seen this year wouldn't have happened in the Title 1 schools I taught at before. Although, if I were a very bold admin, I would set up something like the book requests during book faire time.

Most of the books at the book faire are your usual Scholastic stuff - filler for SSR bookshelves. I knew long before I got the keys to my first classroom that I would not fill it with cheap fillers bought at yard sales and thrift stores. I wanted my shelves to be select, with the goal of quality over quantity.

So I didn't intend to request anything. But I spied The Hunger Games nestled on a top shelf when I went to peruse with some other teachers right before Open House. I remembered what PP had said about recommending it. A kid like that doesn't recommend things lightly. I listed my request, and later that night, when Open House was ending, PP and his mother came back to my room bringing The Hunger Games for me.

I thanked them, and wrote a nice note to be mailed later, and then promptly put it on my classroom bookshelf because it was the middle of May and I was going crazy with the pile up of year-end paperwork, and the only other teacher who teaches the exact same subjects as me broke her water on Open House night, and we had to scramble through a series of subs as well as a horrific grading fiasco.

Once that was all over though, and my advancement and check-out duties were over, I went straight home and plopped down with this book and a bowl of kettle chips.

I didn't let it go until 3.5 hours later when I was finished with all 374 pages. An adult flying through more than a hundred pages an hour gives you a hint as to the difficult of the language used. But oh, was this book sure dense with meaning.

I also immediately bought Catching Fire and Mockingjay on Kindle, and read one each day for the next two days.

Maybe it's because I was over saturated with anime during my college days, but its books like these that strike a match in my imagination and illuminates something I didn't know was there before. It's what all YA books should aim to do, considering the target audience. Well, it's really what all books should do when it comes right down to the heart of the matter.

I can tick off on one hand the number of authors who have hit so deeply in my imagination, and influenced so much of my writing ideology: Philip Pullman, Joan Aiken, Natsuki Takaya, and now Suzanne Collins. Coincidentally, the first four are also young adult novel writers (of sorts). They - plus J.K. Rowling, who leans more towards classical rather than unconventional themes, thus didn't quite rock my literary world in the same sense as the others - are the ones I've turned back to, over and over again in re-reads, whenever I want to escape something in the real world that I don't like.

As a kid, I really believed that poster propaganda saying "you're never without a friend when with a book." I used recess time to read, I held books clandestine-like under my desk during classes, I never leave home without one, and when I am at home, there is always one within arms reach. I didn't have much to escape from as a kid - your usual drama of course, but overall a pretty happy childhood. However, more and more in the grown up's real world, I find things I want to escape from. People I want to escape, because their words and actions infect the space around them with something gross and sticky.

The main character is described, at one point in the trilogy, as "pure." She's definitely not innocent, but I understand what he meant. Katniss, either by nature or circumstance, doesn't let other people's words and actions infect her with their gross stickiness.

And I like that.

Summer plans

This is about all I want to do during the summer. But I better do other things as well. Like reading, or learning, or networking, or lesson planning, or studying, or inventing, or writing, or some such productive nonsense like that.

But I'll definitely do some of this. It would be lovely. The end of the school year is probably my favorite time of year.

So goes life

It's the end of the school year and I'm wrapping things up. Perhaps it's because I have my eye on next year, but there are so many things floating around my head, bouncing through that space like little lightening bolts. The constant thought I have throughout the day is, "Oh, that would make a good blog entry."

But of course, can't blog through the great school firewall. And I can't be attached to my email all day with 160+ young people waiting to react to what I do and say. So the ideas wait. And then I forget about them the moment I get a second to write something proper.

On a different note. I'm beginning to hate those old non-digitized scantrons - the ones where you have to bubble in your own name and ID number. Mainly because I told my class to bubble in their ID number left-justified when it should have been right-justified and now I have to go through 33 scantrons by hand and fix them myself. Idiot.

Spring fever

Blue and gray skies.

I've been getting lazy as the weather warms up. Well, I guess I've always been lazy - just even more so now.

I still get work done.

I still spend hours grading every day.

I still plan and prep and organize and discipline and hold students to high standards.

But I care a little less about work than before spring break.

...

My attitude is more carefree, less stressed out. Which is kind of the opposite of what should be the norm. CST season is upon us here in Cali and the pressure to not fall down the program improvement plan steadily increases.

Yet, I'm rather detached from all that right now. I don't know if it's because I really don't care how well my students do on the CST, or if it's because I know they'll do decently ok so I'm free to not care.

Or am I deceiving myself into a false sense of security?

Stamina - gotz none

Oh yeah, also at this delicious burger - my first one in ages!

This has always been in issue with me. I don't have much stamina - never had. I could sprint the 100 meter dash in the top 5 of my PE class, but I was always dead last when it came to running the mile. I can beat anyone in my tennis group - as long as the match is under 2 hours.

So thus, I am rounding the corner of the 4th and final lap of the school calendar and I. Am. Exhausted. Running on fumes. Beat.

Took two days off - my first official mental health days of the entire year so far. 4 sub days total - not bad, considering. And the first two were because I was sick and had lost my voice.

I foresee at least another sub day before spring break. Spring break! Lovely thought! It won't be a mental health day though, I plan on using that sub day to observe the other math teachers around campus. Whoever is willing to let me swing by and watch for 20 minutes or so.

It'll still be an easier day than a regular teaching day.

And I guess it could be worse. I'm usually in bed, asleep by 9pm. I leave work in the classroom. I exercise and eat healthy things. I read, and cook, and hang out with friends, and journal, and get sunshine (albeit, there has not been a nearly decent drop of sunshine to be had in the past three weeks - maybe that's why I'm a little gloomy) But there's nothing like a long yoga session to make me realize I haven't been breathing right, or holding proper posture, during school hours.

Without all these things, I would be a zombie.

Even with all these things, I'm still more wiped out than I am comfortable with. ::shrug::

Ack! No! Let's think of positive things! This cloud of negativity is horrible. Things I enjoyed during my self-declared 4-day weekend:

- delicious eats like strawberry shortcake, red curry bisque, dad's home cooking, chili baked potato, pineapple baos...
- reading without a time limit
- hanging out with cool people like P Jeh
- sleeping in past ::gasp!:: 7am!
- playing animal crossing like crazy
- buying myself new shoes
- finally getting a chance to watch Avatar all the way through (one LONG movie, but actually pretty good)
- enjoying gifts from my favorite place to get gifts from! (heavy duty Thermos with folding spoon, 0.3mm pencils, 2.3mm erasers, black raspberry eye cream by skin food [the korean one, not the weda one], chinese fashion magazines, korean movies)

Just thinking about the good things has made me less stressed out for tomorrow. Oh tomorrow, you will not beat me!

Notes and keys

Been giving myself a lot of excuses lately. NO MORE!

Reality is reality. Make a change, a little at a time. Reality will still be reality, but some parts can be a dream.

Practice dignity and restraint. Students are watching and every moment is a teaching moment.

Be persistent.

Be consistent.

If you're tired, take a break. A proper break. Not a "crash-and-space-out" break that makes you more tired than before.

Come back stronger.

A teacher's wish list

It's the 7th month of my 1st year teaching middle school math. I am enjoying the experience. I am learning a lot.

And I think I have finalized my classroom wish list.

This is no ordinary wish list of donations like tissue boxes and reams of copy paper. This is a professional wish list, and it goes something like this:

Wish #1: I would like one full teacher work day for every 10 days of instruction. By "full teacher work day" I mean no meetings, no training sessions, no students, no parent conferences, nada. Just me, in my classroom, prepping. Period.

Wish #2: I would like a week of non-school for every 10 weeks of school. I've already discussed this before, but it never hurts to reiterate it. Seriously, over-work is no-good for anyone.

Wish #3: I would like to watch someone teach MY subject in MY setting to MY students every so often. I would like to hang around to observe, side-teach, etc while this occurs. And I would like to discuss the lesson with this someone.

Wish #4: I would like to be observed by someone every so often, and discuss this observation in relevance to MY setting only. No "what ifs," no "you should do these things." Just "this is what I saw happen, the good and the not so good; do what you will with this information."

Wish #5: I would like to teach some demo lessons in a colleague's setting, to THEIR students in THEIR subject. With chances to repeat with the same class/subject/setting later in the year.

Wish #6: I would like to involve my students in the community, and vice versa.

Wish #7: Tied to wishes #3-5 in a way, I would like to share the observation/demo lesson findings in an academically systematic and journalistic way to whoever would like to know about them. I would like to see the observation/demo lesson findings of other teachers in an academically systematic and journalistic way. I would like to see this happen at local, state, national, and international levels.

When I was 6, I wished for a dog. I got a dog when I was 7.
When I was 14, I wished for a car. I got a car when I was 16.
When I was 17, I wished to study and live abroad. I studied abroad when I was 21. I lived abroad when I was 23.
When I was 25, I wished for work that I liked and my own place to live. I got both when I turned 27.

I've been pretty lucky with my wishes. I'm going to work hard to make that luck happen with these wishes too.

Why on earth IS Geometry inserted between Algebra 1 and Algebra 2?

Maybe only mathematicians and math teachers would understand this but it still might be a good read if you are at all interested one person's opinion of why American mathematics education is full of crap.

I would take it with a grain of salt though. It IS important for students to know math facts - just as important as the discovery of mathematical relationships. I don't know any math person who can't tell you what the square root of 144 is. Instantly - off the top of their heads.

This same math person should also be able to explain, in simple terms, why the square root of 144 is 12 too.

And thus, the conundrum.

4-day weekends should happen more often

Sometimes, it's better to rest than to work.

Sometimes, it's healthier to relax than to stress.

Sometimes, it takes a lot of reminding to remember that it's ok to turn your back to all the demands (i.e. from students, parents, admin, the world, yourself, etc) and just face the sun.

Because the sun doesn't demand anything out of you.

In terms of grading

I give myself a treat every so often, like the one above, too.

Several weeks ago, I caught a glimpse of Dept. Chair's grade book on her monitor and was kind of shocked to notice that over a third of one of her classes were getting Fs. She had more F's in one class than I had F/D students in ALL my classes.

I thought it was me - I didn't organize my class rigorously enough, I was being too easy on students, I wasn't properly teaching them.

But I knew that can't be right - at least not completely. I require a lot out of my students. They need to have excellent math syntax, they need to use the vocab correctly, they have a lot of homework, and their tests are the same as Dept. Chair's tests.

Still, it didn't occur to me that something else was going on until I had my mid-year review with my principal. He said that I was among only three 7th/8th grade math teachers with low D/F numbers. Which, to him, is a good thing. He didn't think I was being any less rigorous with grading and academic expectations, but there wasn't a lot of other commentary on it either.

So I took some time to analyze it myself. Here's the break down:

Algebra 1
Period 1: 1 F only, out of 35 students. This kid was absent for an entire week. I have every confidence that he'll catch up.

Period 2: 2 Ds only, out of 33 students. Both students do well on tests, however they have refused to turn in any sort of homework assignment since the first week of the 3rd quarter. I attribute their grade to their own choices, which are well deserved, especially since I allow late work and have been reminding both of them to turn in their stuff.

Period 6: 1 D only, out of 32 students. Kid was absent for a week and a half; is catching up and I'm making sure of it.

Algebra Readiness
Period 3: 1 D+ only, out of 33 students. Also due to many absences. Future absences predicted, since mother informed me this kid has a high chance of being in and out of the hospital in the near future. Preparing material for student's independent study.

Period 4: 3 Fs and 2 Ds, out of 33 students. 2 of the Fs have been getting themselves suspended every other week since January. 1 of the Fs has been in school only on Fridays - literally, her other teachers and I now call her Our Girl Friday - since December. Both Ds are boys being distracted with everything under the sun - with girls, with drama, with girls, with the fact that they won't be at this school next year, with girls, with rivalry with other boys, with girls, etc. Have yet to find a solution outside of suggesting to their parents to send them to a monastery, which may not even work that well for these two gentlemen.

Me thinks it to be fair and awesome, if my two classes with the solo Ds can pull themselves up and out, to reward them with a treat for working hard and letting the hard work pay off. Perhaps brownies would be suitable.

Values, part 2

A perfectly valid reason: being able to put food on the table.

Awhile ago, I commented about wanting to perform this experiment on my Algebra Readiness students.

Well, this past Friday, I did. A mini version, that is. Most of the quizzes we give fro Algebra Readiness are written by one of my co-workers, who is an excellent teacher. She likes to put random "Starter Questions" for students to answer in the space directly under where they are supposed to write their names. Some sample questions from the past quizzes this year were:

What is your favorite color?

Pepsi or Coke?

What is your favorite candy?

Where would you like to travel?

The students like answering these questions - or I assume they do, since nearly everyone always writes something down pertaining to the Starter Question. It's pretty fun to read them.

The quiz this past Friday was an unplanned quiz that I ended up doing because the math instructional consultant for my school district asked to do a demo lesson for me on Thursday, and she mentioned a quiz to the students. I hadn't told her we would be doing a quiz. I think she just assumed because the lesson she demo-ed on was a mid-chapter review. However the current chapter is so short - only 4 sections - that all the AR teachers just agreed to skip the quiz, even though we all did a mid-chapter review lesson.

Anyway, we had a quiz. I didn't want to back out on that since I had the time and it was a good idea to quiz them before moving on to the next section's material anyway. Most did decently well, which is good.

But since this quiz didn't exist in the first place, I had to write it up myself. As I was writing it, I also took the opportunity to make my own Starter Question.

That is how the story finally comes full circle and relates back to the Scientific American article about students and their values. My question was:

What is your reason for doing well in school?

I did a little number crunching while grading these quizzes. Out of the 49 students who took the quiz, here were their answers:

3 said I don't know

3 said they just wanted to work hard/liked working

3 said they were doing it for the grades

4 wanted good jobs/money

4 wanted to be on sports teams and go to field trips (which require a certain GPA, as well as other things, at my school)

4 said they wanted to succeed/be somebody in life

5 said they wanted to please their parents OR to get their parents off their backs

7 said they wanted to go to college

If you are counting, that's 33 students with one of those above answers so far.

The remaining 16 left it blank.

As I said earlier, nearly all students write something when it comes to these Starter Questions. It's rare to have more than a handful who don't write anything at all. So why 16?

Possible reason #1: They don't know what their reason is, so left it blank.

Possible reason #2: They felt rushed on the quiz (I only gave them 15 minutes on 10 questions - unplanned quizzes are rushed, that's a lesson for me) and skipped it.

Possible reason #3: They don't really care about doing well in school, which is similar to the "I don't know" answer.

Weirdly, most students finished the quiz well within the time limit. So for the purpose of my experiment, I'm going to assume that these 16 blank answers are "I don't knows," making a total of 19 "I don't knows." This assumption may or may not be valid. Further study needs to be done - quite possibly in a more systematic and scientific way than this little mini experiment turned out to be.

19 out of 49 of my 8th graders say they don't know their reason for doing well in school. That's almost 39%.

Wow.

Tiger teacher

Yeah, yeah, it's a lion, but that's the closest photo I have.

No, I haven't read the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It sounds interesting, but it's not at the top of the my To Read list. Maybe because I had a Tiger Mother, and so the story would be old news to me.

The commentary surrounding the book is more immediately consuming for me, particularly two quotes from Nancy Gibb's essay in Time.

First:

Their [what Gibbs calls "Choppers" aka helicopter parents] fury at a bad grade is more likely to land on the teacher than on the child.

And this one:

I suspect one reason the book has touched such a nerve is a suspicion among the Choppers that an excessive fear of failure guarantees it - that if you don't let your kids get clobbered now and then by a tough teacher, they'll never have the resilience to thrive as adults in a competitive economy.

These two quotes basically sum up my week. It's the end of the semester, and I gave some low grades to students who can do better than what they got but didn't, because they didn't turn in assignments on time, or showed little-to-no effort, or were just making some jerk wad choices. I clobbered some of my students because I expected better from them.

And the backlash from certain parents towards my choices have been overwhelming. Not just the parent of T, by the way. There are more.

I know I can't give up being a tough teacher. I can't let myself allow students to slack off. I can't slack off myself. It really is a tiger battle with my students. And the path of least resistance is one I don't want to take.

But sometimes, a tiger needs a quiet place sheltered from the battle to lick its wounds.

An email with humility and sincerity

Dear Parent of T, I hope your day went well.

Here's an update on what I did for T today:

T came in to see me from around 3-4pm today. She was able to copy the original notes from sections 5.1 to 5.2. Unfortunately, another student had borrowed my 5.3 notes and have not returned them yet, so T did not copy those original notes. However, I did give her an impromptu lesson on 5.3 without the notes anyway.

Then, T took a different, abridged version of the 5.1-5.3 quiz. She was able to get a 100% on it. I put it in the grade book and it does not seem to affect her overall grade significantly - it is a B+, the same as before the retake today.

I would also like to reiterate that re-teaching happens in-class. If students would like more individual attention, they need to see me during my drop-in tutoring hours. I did give the quiz to T right after she returned: it would have been unwise to give her instruction on the quiz material while the rest of the class were sitting in the same room, taking the same quiz. That is why I instructed T to try the quiz anyway: test taking is also a method of learning, and she would be doing the same thing her fellow classmates were doing. I also told her to get a copy of the notes, either from a fellow classmate or from me after school, and to take home the 5.1-5.3 quiz for her re-take. The quiz that I had was the only quiz in my possession in her file, so I assumed she had turned in her re-take. If it is still the first quiz, as you believe it is, then I suppose T never turned in the re-take - of which I am certain I gave her. She was not the only student who was absent, and thus missed the quiz, so I had plenty on hand for them. I do toss out the old quizzes in order to keep the paperwork under control. Perhaps I should not do that anymore.

T never showed up during my tutoring hours to get the notes, so I assumed she was able to find a friend to copy the notes from. This, I also admit, was my fault. I do need to do more binder checks with all students in order to keep them accountable for their note-taking. T was doing well with in-class activities (albeit a little distracted, which is normal after coming back from such a big trip) so I decided to push forward. It is very difficult for students to catch up, as well as keep up with the current material, after a long absence. Pushing forward together with the whole class and doing review daily was a better choice, in my opinion, than holding T back because she had missed some material. I hope you understand, even if you don't agree with, my methods.

I feel the need to lay out my case, and hold that I did everything in my power to help T bridge the gap from her absences, even before today. I do not like the fact that I can't shake off the feeling that T's retake today felt unfair and unjust - not to T, but to her classmates. Although it's probably not your intention, I do not like how this situation feels as if I was being attacked for not doing my job. I am generally flexible with second, and third, and fourth chances. I am also flexible with giving extra time to students to turn in missed work. I do not, and will never, intend to disregard student needs and I hope you do not think I disregarded T, or her learning. I do my best with the time and resources that I have, both of which are limited in supply, so at some point there has to be an end.

I know you may not agree with me, but I still hope that this end is satisfying to you. I have really learned a lot from this event.

With humble regards and sincerity,

This Child Left Behind


**I've already pressed the send button, but on hindsight, it might have been better to swing this by my principal, or dept. chair first. whoops. oh well.

Cleaning out the closets

I did a bit of cleaning/reorganizing/redecorating in the classroom over winter break. It's kind of nice that students notice it, and like it, and are interested in what's on my walls.

Now all I need to do is find the perfect formation of student desks in my oddly too-long room.

Singing Sewermen

Would be a good name for a rock band too.

Also, it would really be nice if every workplace was like this (yeah, like a sewer). People who take their job seriously, but not themselves seriously. It would be nice if my students can do the same too.

Not my problem

Had the most impossibly horrific teaching dream last night. I don't quite remember the details anymore, but it was one of those dreams where I was being pulled in all different directions, trying to solve everybody's problems and, of course, ending up solving nobody's problems.

Which isn't even my job! Solve your own problems, students!

Ugh. I've never been hung over, but woke up today in a way that I imagine being hung over to feel like.