Algebra Camp: Day 3

I can see how teaching can quickly become exhausting. During camp hours I am ON at all times. Who needs help? Who needs separated? Who's got a pencil? What are we doing? How do we keep them under control? Are they keeping up? Are they bored? How do we make it better? Who hasn't had a turn yet? Who went to the bathroom? How many copies do we need? What if we have too much time to kill?

And that ON feeling stays through my drive home, during which I spend the entire time thinking about tomorrow's lesson and my kids' assessments. But when I get home and I get a snack and I sit down I suddenly burn out and turn OFF. It is so nap time right now. But no, no time for naps.

Going to the Zephyrs game tonight with my dad to watch them play the Tacoma Rainiers (go r-bos!). Tomorrow evening is the first night of derby bootcamp which continues Friday evening and all day Saturday and Sunday. The only free time I have between now and Monday is a little bit of time to do school work in the mornings tomorrow and Friday. God, I'm tired. But the kids are still great and I still love what I'm doing and I still think that being a math teacher is going to Rule the Skool. My kids are are not at all what I expected from Day 1 in a lot of ways. I love trying to figure them out.

20 minutes until I have to catch a ferry to meet my dad. Maybe just a quick nap.

bruises and baseball cards

yesterday i got motivated to do some more cleaning. tossed out many boxes and a couple more tons of trash. the sewing room situation is much improved. and i changed out my air filters again, although that get a little ugly. this is what happens when your house tries to eat you:

that line across my stomach is the bruise i woke up with this morning on account of falling into the gaping hole that is the floor vent for my a/c. i decided it would be a really good idea to try and walk over it when the vent cover was off and because of that my house tried to eat me. i escaped. now if only i could blame that bruise on derby instead of my own stupidity. my current derby bruises are more painful but less obvious

but moving on. i found a number of super awesome things while rooting through the junk pile yesterday. including the newspapers that my parents bought on the day i was born (new york times, new york post, and the stars and stripes). looking over the headlines has lead me to believe that the world has always been a violent fucked up place, we just pretend it used to be less awful back in the day. plane crashes, bombs, kidnappings, hostage situations, military coups, natural disasters in far off 3rd world countries - plenty of those all over the headlines on the day i was born. same as any other day.

i also found lots of baseball cards that probably aren't worth anything. i don't recognize any of the players but i did find a couple that caught my eye. lou pinella managing the reds. i came to be a pinella fan when he was with the seattle mariners and i continued to love him when he went to the devil rays and i still like him now that he's in chicago. i think he's the baseball bees knees.

also found 'the big unit' when he was with the mariners (i was and still sort of am a huge mariner fan). i was told that randy johnson was supposed to be over his hey-day when i started watching him play in the late 90s but he is still plugging along. he played some awesome games when i was watching and then he went to arizona and helped them win big and i still had quite a bit of respect for him as a pitcher. but, as with so many of the mariner greats, the big unit proved that he too could be bought for oodles and oodles of money and turned to the dark side. as soon as one of my favorite baseballers signs with the yankees, well, they are as good as dead to me. fucking yankees.