Wondering Wednesday November 26th

Well tomorrow is turkey day so….

If you were on the Thanksgiving table, what would you be? The flowers, the spoon for the mashed taters…

Stole this…

Ms. Diagonally Parked tagged anyone who needed a post with this little game and I thought it sounded like fun. So now, I am supposed to pull up my 6th folder and pick out my 6th photo…. but my 6th picture folder really is this, and I couldn’t just post one so here are a few…

 

 

 

 

Now if you need something to post today, have at it! Remember 6th folder, 6th picture! 

 

There are more pics like this, I’ll post some other time. These weren’t my students, I wish they were at least I would get a good laugh!

Caption This November 24th

 

In trying to match  the high ratings of “America’s Next Top Model” comes “AMERICA’S NEXT TOP STATUE”

Wanna See What I’ve Been Doing?

I am not sure if I have mentioned this before but I am a quilter. A few years ago I went and bought an embroidery machine. These are the towels I made for my brother and his girlfriend and my granny.

allaboutmeinoneword

NO salute today, they really take a lot of time to think up and type up, maybe next week.

I couldn’t even come up with anything original.

 

 

You can only type one word. No explanations.

Yourself: busy
Your partner: ADD
Your hair: up
Your Mother: friendly
Your Father: quiet
Your Favorite Item: books
Your dream last night: non-existent
Your Favorite Drink: Tea
Your Dream Car: VW
Your Dream Home: costly
The Room You Are In: classroom
Your Ex: none
Your fear: bugs
Where you Want to be in Ten Years? alive
Who you hung out with last night: students
What You’re Not: satisfied
Muffins: yum
One of Your Wish List Items: time
Time: where
The Last Thing You Did: click
What You Are Wearing: sweater
Your favorite weather: mild
Your Favorite Book: Anne 
Last thing you ate: Charms 
Your Life: chaotic
Your mood: tired
Your Best Friends: loyal
What are you thinking about right now: sleep
Your car: Dirty
What are you doing at the moment: lunch
Your summer: busy
Relationship status: taken
What is on your tv: knowledge
What is the weather like: burrr
When is the last time you laughed: awhile

 

Now you know more about me, how about you?

Poking out my eyes… Part 3

I just have to tell you msgee over at Rants of a Musical Educator is a friend of mine IRL. We teach in the same school district, the kids she has I might have their older brothers or sisters. We see the same issues over and over. The only requirement that out schools really have for letting kids into Kindergarten is that they are potty trained and I think they even take that rather lightly.

I don’t know if you all remember but I know that before I got in to kindergarten there were a few things I had to be able to do. I remember my mother telling a story about the lady asking me to say zipper and up until that point I had said rippzer. I had to say things correctly and as ms. gee has pointed out some of the kindergartners in our district don’t even talk yet.

 

Today (Friday) I had a kid, Mr. PuffPuff come back after 5 days of suspension (for smoking POT). He wanted me to help him tell him how to do everything that we had done while he was on his little vacation being punished.  This was only 5 seconds after I had told everyone else to get out their books so we could start todays lesson. I know you all think I am Super Teacher Woman and I can do 20 things at once but come on! I told him that he needed to go back to his desk and open his book so that we could start todays lesson and that he needed to work on it so he didn’t get further behind. It took for ever to get Mr. PuffPuff back to his seat but I did and I introduced todays topic, nothing overly difficult. I worked a few examples making sure that I stopped to ask if there were any questions over what I had just done. Silence. So I assigned the homework and off the students went to work (I always give time in class for them to work on homework ’cause well, math is hard and lets be honest not everyone has a math nerd at home that can help them find the equation of a polynomial from it’s zero’s. And I know that most of you are now thinking,  Huh?) 

Mr. PuffPuff does what he always does, nothing and then comes to me wanting help. And how did he come to me needing help? No Book, No Pencil, No Paper. And he wants help not on todays work but the stuff he missed. Sorry Puffy, if you want my help for that you will need to come in and see me before schhol/afterschool/lunch. I won’t spend all of my class time trying to help you catch up, if I do that means students who were here and working on todays assignment can’t get my help. I tried to get him to work on todays assignment and he says he doesn’t understand, he hasn’t even tried. I asked him to mimick the examples I had done and then bring me his work so we could fix what he has done wrong. He gets upset that he doesn’t even know where to start. I asked him why he didn’t ask while we were going over the lesson, when I specifically asked if anyone had questions on what I had just shown them, remember the silence?

His mother teaches here at the high school with me and I’ll bet you all a dollar that she either calls or emails me so “we” can work out a way to help him. Any takers?

This is how people keep from poking out their eyes

I was out blog wandering and I found this. Am man named Robert found the article and typed up his remarks.

“Texas A&M International University in Laredo fired a professor for publishing the names of students accused of plagiarism.

In his syllabus, professor Loye Young wrote that he would “promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating or stealing.” After he discovered six students had plagiarized on an essay, Young posted their names on his blog, resulting in his firing last week.

“It’s really the only way to teach the students that it’s inappropriate,” he said.

Young, a former adjunct professor of management information systems, said he believes he made the right move. He said trials are public for a reason, and plagiarism should be treated the same way. He added that exposing cheaters is an effective deterrent.

“They were told the consequences in the syllabus,” he said. “They didn’t believe it.”  ”

Young was fired for violating FERPA. Young, and some of the commenters at the original article, don’t seem to understand the idea that a syllabus is not a legally-binding contract, and a course syllabus cannot overrule Federal law. So it doesn’t really matter whether he had this public humiliation clause in the syllabus or whether the students read it. Choosing not to drop a course does not amount to acquiescing to the syllabus policies if those policies are illegal. You might as well say that cheaters will be shot on sight and then claim immunity from assault charges for putting a cap in a plagiarizing student, because after all the student knew the consequences.

There’s also a sort of moral issue here too. Young lost his job because what he did violates FERPA. But if there were no FERPA, would it be OK to publicly humiliate a student who had been determined — let’s say beyond a reasonable doubt — to be guilty of cheating?

 

I am laughing my tail off about this! I say humiliate away! If I could humiliate my students maybe that would motivate them to do something. They take no issue in humiliating me. They are not worried at all about their grades. They don’t care about the consequences that they might face if the fail (ok honestly most of them don’t have any) and they certainly don’t care that I might be held responsible for their failure. Our Big Chief (head principal) is always really worried about numbers. If your passing rates are low then your tail is on the line it doesn’t matter that you can justify each of those failing grades.

I would just like to applaud this man for holding students responsible for their actions, so many people don’t.

Poking out my eyes… Part 2

If you love to hear complaints of others so maybe your day looks not quite so bad, Read on. If you hate when people complain and want to tell them to quit crying, well then move along this is not the place for you. Don’t get me wrong I know there are worse things that are happening in the world but if I don’t get this out there I am going to poke out my own eyes. (Anyone ever notice how poke looks like puke, yep feel that way too)

Recently our dear chiefs (administration) have found that gang members have been tagging the bathroom. There solution was that we can’t send any student to the restroom unless it is an emergency and when they do I go I must keep a log of when they leave and when they comeback, how many days a week they go to the restroom, is there a pattern, is it too often.

I don’t know about you all but I don’t know of any degree that certifies a person to do this. I know that I did not got to school full time, some times year round so that I could keep track of when some one goes potty. And not only that I have too keep track of attendance, and tardies, and grades, as well as teach, grade 130-260 papers every day, attend IEP meetings, call parents, meet with parents, plan lessons, create tests, attend seminars and focus group meetings and because I am human find time to eat and sleep for a few hours but now I have to keep track of potty breaks and find patterns in their frequency! Come on people get real! 

The kids have gotten upset, and because I am Ms. Most Likely to Follow Rules I took this seriously and haven’t let my students go. This has really ticked them off and they get all up in arms about their rights and “you can’t do that”. They even went so far as to get out their student handbook and look it up. Let me tell you they didn’t find a darn thing that said I had to let them go but they did find that it was suggested that they use the restroom in between classes. Ha!

It has been a week full of cry babies because they can’t go potty! I told them if they stopped in to let me know that they were going to the bathroom that I wouldn’t mark them tardy. Some have caught on, others wait until 5 minutes after the bell to ask and then still get upset because they can’t go.

Where is my pencil??? Let the poking commence!

I am going to poke out my own eyes…

because I swear it would be less painful than teaching.

Thank goodness I have pre-posted so much or you all might have thought I dropped of the face of the earth, and at this point if I could find the place where people “fall off” I might just go there and jump!

I teach Geometry, 3 sections, all afternoon. I have taught 3 sections every year since I started at this school and while I enjoyed Geometry as a student as I teacher I hate it’s very guts! In order to take Geometry in out school you must have passed Algebra 1.

Now I know that math is hard and people struggle but this has just gone to far! I sit in a room with 30 kids who have passed Algebra 1. And I STILL see things like 3x -5 leading to 2x. Which leads me to want to run from my room screaming that you. can. not. combine. unlike terms. How had is the concept that only the x’s go together. How many of you have heard the old expression you can combine apples and oranges. Which is a total lie because you do and  you get fruit salad, so I always say you can’t combine dollars and socks 2 totally unrelated things (Please don’t leave a comment stating you put your dollars in your socks when you were a kid instead of a wallet, trust me been there, heard that). I had a student come to me today with the equation 2x = 3x -5 which led him to 7x = 3. Where do you even go with that? I had this kid in Algebra 1, 2 feakin’ years ago and I promise you that I am not the one that passed him! We still do the Algebra step by step with the explanation as to why, COME ON, LEARN SOMETHING! These kids start solving simple Algebra equations in like the 5th grade now. Sally if 2x = 14, what does x equal. So now 6 years later I am still answering questions about stuff that they learned were supposed to learn while P0Keman was still cool!

Then not 30 seconds later I have a kid ask me how he is supposed to find the length of segment HK. When I just looked at him dumbfounded that he had even asked that question and then slowly pointed to the rather LARGE diagram RIGHT. NEXT. TO. THE. QUESTION. that had segment HK CLEARLY labeled as 27. Then he gets mad at me because he couldn’t be bothered to LOOK at a PICTURE!

Ohhhhh, I am so tired. I still have 2 sections of this crap lesson to teach today.

Lord, help me please!

Bail Out

I found this on my mother’s CLL forum and posted it over at ms. gee’s . No matter your political views I think you will agree.

I’m  against the $85,000,000,000.00  bailout of  AIG.

Instead, I’m in favor of  giving $85,000,000,000  to America in a We Deserve It  Dividend.

To make the  math simple, let’s  assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens   18+.

Our population is about 301,000,000 +/-  counting  every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a  fair stab at  adults 18 and up..

So divide 200  million adults 18+  into $85 billion that equals $425,000.00.

My plan is  to give $425,000 to  every person 18+ as a We Deserve It Dividend.

Of course, it would NOT be tax   free.

So let’s assume a tax rate of   30%.

Every individual 18+ has to pay  $127,500.00 in  taxes.

That sends  $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle  Sam.

But  it means that every adult 18+ has  $297,500.00 in their  pocket.  A husband and wife has   $595,000.00.

What would you do with  $297,500.00 to  $595,000.00 in your  family?

Pay off your mortgage -  housing  crisis solved.

Repay college loans… what a   great boost to new grads

Put away money for  college -  it’ll be there

Save in a bank -  create money to loan  to entrepreneurs.

Buy a  new car – create  jobs

Invest in the market -  capital drives  growth

Pay for your parent’s  medical insurance -  health care  improves

Enable Deadbeat Dads to come  clean -  or else

Remember this is for every   adult U S Citizen 18+ including the folks

who lost their jobs at  Lehman  Brothers and every other company that is cutting back.  And of course,  for those serving in our Armed  Forces.

If we’re going  to re-distribute  wealth let’s really do it…instead of trickling out a  puny  $1000.00 ( “vote buy” ) economic incentive that is being   proposed by one of our candidates for   President. 

If we’re going to do an $85 billion  bailout,  let’s bail out every adult U S Citizen  18+!

As for  AIG – liquidate  it.  Sell off its   parts.  Let American General go back to being  American  General.  Sell off the real   estate.  Let the private sector bargain  hunters cut it  up and clean it up.

Here’s my  rationale. We deserve  it and AIG  doesn’t. Sure it’s a crazy idea that can   ”never work.”  But can you imagine the  Coast-To-Coast  Block Party! 

How do you spell  Economic  Boom? 

I trust my fellow adult  Americans to know how  to use the $85  Billion 

We Deserve It Dividend more  than I do  the geniuses at AIG or in  Washington DC

And  remember, The Birk plan only really costs $59.5  Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle   Sam.

Ahhh…I feel so much better getting  that off my  chest.

Kindest personal   regards,
Birk
T. J .  Birkenmeier,  A Creative Guy & Citizen of the  Republic

PS: Feel  free to pass this along to  your pals as it’s either good for a laugh or  a tear or a very  sobering thought on how to best use $85 Billion!!