"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action." - Herbert Spencer

Algebra Camp is over!

Been getting supplies and setting up my room this week. After some initial confusion about which room I was assigned, I started getting my bulletin boards papered and gathering supplies. It is so weird having this clean slate. Empty cabinets, empty walls, empty desks, empty halls. An empty school is such a strange place. Lonesome and full of echoes and anticipation. I can't stand the waiting but I'm still not ready for the kids to be here yet. I suspect, however, that there is nothing I can do to ever be truly ready.

If I can find my camera, hopefully I will be able to post some pics of my room. It's nothing particularly special but it's mine and I want it to be a place where some good happens. Maybe not miracles, but something.

painter, teacher, behavioral psychologist, social scientist...

Yay homework! Monday I spent way too much time making up classroom rules, rewards, and consequences. In true New Orleans fashion I opted for a dubloon economy. Still, it took me more than two hours to come up with something that I consider adequate to turn in, even if I’m not entirely satisfied. Next, I have to work on a case study to implement behavioral change. Nobody ever told me that being a teacher involved so much behavioral data collection! Now I am more convinced than ever that any shred of a life I had up until now is gone forever. I’m going to be a lesson-planning, school-obsessed hermit.

Still unemployed. I have not been a diligent job searcher. Have to change that soon.

But doesn’t my paint look bright and cheery? The before pictures are just too depressingly gray to post. I am looking forward to my roommate coming home so that we can start planning for a couch and other fabulousness. I also want to enlist her help with The Great Purge. I’ve ditched many, many bags and boxes of trash but there is still quite a ways to go. I cannot go it alone - I will need a navigator to guide me and my roomie has been much better about the purging than me lately. Thus, she has been commissioned for the task.

To the Bat Tank!

before i was a roller derby girl...

...i used to play softball. four years in high school. was a really crappy outfielder for a couple of years (right field...because nobody could hit to right field) until one day we were desperate for catchers so my friend tobi and i stepped up. playing catcher was way more fun, if hard on the knees (much like derby). i think we may even have been team captains our senior year. not that it really meant anything. our team sucked.

you go ahead and figure out which one i am. based on who was in this photo, i'd say it is junior year, which would make this spring of '99. eight years ago, if my math isn't mistaken. my hair was much, much longer and i was at least 15 or 20 pounds heavier than i am today. i am ashamed to admit that even though there were only 120 girls at my high school, i have forgotten the names of at least a third of the girls in this picture. no, maybe only a quarter.

i am still kind of surprised that this photo exists and that i happen to have a copy of it.