Last night (2 hours) I dreamt I was teaching Kindergarten. Naturally, a few of my charges died. God, the paperwork. I was pretty healthy and wearing trainers, though. (Well, wearing socks and looking for my tennies, but that was a subplot.) Does this mean I should drink more Starbucks? Like I did today? With a "crispy marshmallow square"?
Tonight I dreamt that I had to take a class I used to teach. I kept trying to tell "them" that I used to teach the class and should probably be exempt, and never mind the weirdness of teaching high school while being expected to attend it, but you know how "they" are.
RAW!
Last weekend I shot RAW for the first time. Does Photoshop not know what a .CR2 file is? Do you have to rename it? Anyway, I found it all very overrated. Yeah, RAW format is a fundamentally good idea, especially if you're like me and forget to adjust your white balance sometimes, and RAW+JPG covers everything, but post-processing the JPGs yielded the same results as post-processing RAW, at least for my humble purposes. I'm still into getting more shots per card than having total control. I'd like to say I'll regret it all later, but I've got that apathy thing going, so, maybe not.
Tip: Canon's Digital Learning Center has some excellent tutorials on things like exposure - things you can safely ignore when you're into good snapshots, but will have to eventually bother with if you're going to ever go to the next level. And when I say "excellent" I mean "really accessible, pretty, and in highly useful bite-size chunks," not "incredibly overwhelming."
That Apathy-doo Like You Do
Meh. It's apathy. To explain it would be to relinquish it. It involves a lot of not thinking. So far the only way it affects my teaching is if I rip up someone's quiz (for talking), I just shrug and wish the student better luck next time. I don't get mad. And if the class talks over me, making it wearying to start a good discussion, I shrug again and assign an essay. Whatever. Writing is good for you. There you go. Maybe it's the penalty for encouraging so much liveliness and discussion at other times. Who cares?
Tomorrow's an "observer" day. Sigh. Whatever. Watch me throw 900 worksheets at small people because they either won't talk (morning class) or because they will (afternoon class). I don't think I even remember all the stuff I used to want to teach the world. Daily encounters with the vocal minority (?) of kids who (honestly) want to know when we're going to stop reading/writing/discussing/presenting/making projects and just watch movies or sleep or sit around and talk (no, really) is b.o.r.i.n.g.
Maybe this is what sick leave is for. I do seem to be getting my period, for those of you who've been following that story arc. No... miss one day and I'm not sure I could gather enough momentum to go back again.
I should've done a degree in science. People hate English class because they reckon they already know enough and everything else is busy work they'll never use. I try to tell that, if nothing else, they'll get more jokes when they get older and life will be much more fun, but of course it's hard to sell them on jokes they don't get now.
Labored Analogies: "It's funny how one insect can damage so much grain."
Wouldn't Elton John's "Empty Garden" make a good example of an extended metaphor to share with the class? Mike had to point out the above line to me because all these years I, uh, thought it was, "it's funny how one instant can damage so much terrain." At least I was sticking to theme.
But of course I'm not going to foist Sir Biddy on a bunch of people who were born in 1992. Would they even "get" a tribute to John Lennon? This is a generation that thinks "rock" is an archaic subgenre, perhaps as subdued as "folk" was to the mainstream in 1986. Not that "Empty Garden" is part of Elton's "rock" catalog, but any easy listening that doesn't involve Beyonce singing scales is doomed.
Mike's Up
So I'll leave off. I'm reading (well, finally finishing) Stephen King's On Writing, and this is truly a great book. I don't stomach the Master like I used to, and I don't agree with everything he jots here, but most of it is shiny platinum dust worth collecting.
Anyway, Mike went to an apiary in Gingin this weekend and met a little joey girl. The joey's mother was shot and the apiary owner took in the baby kangaroo. She follows the owner around and sleeps in a sack hung up on the door. You know Mike never gets around to blogging, so I'll share his photo:
now, if THAT ain't a reason to move to Australia, I don't know what is. HOW CUTE!!!
Apathy, eh? I am so.grateful.for.maternity.leave.
I never ever want to go back to work! Of course, I would enjoy a day that involved more than feeding baby/changing baby/feeding baby/changing baby/check email while baby "naps" for 10 minutes. But not MUCH more.
Hang in there, Shari!
They say things get better the THIRD year.
*fingers crossed*
Posted by: heather in emmaus | 18 September 2006 at 07:44 AM