The Week in Review

This post requires subheadings.

School
This week at school has been a rough one. Nothing bad happened, really, but my students just were over-the-top annoying. I love teaching--I really do--but this was just one of those weeks. We all have them.

The seniors have finally finished reading the novel Grendel. (They are writing an essay about it still, but at least the reading is over.) This was the first time I had taught the novel, and I'll be honest--I don't think I did a very good job teaching it. I can be a bit hard on myself about my teaching sometimes, but one thing I have learned to do is just to accept that sometimes things just don't go as planned, especially when it is the first time attempting something. The major problem with teaching this novel is that I assigned it for my "regular" seniors , and it was too difficult for many of them to read on their own. ("Regular" at my school just means they are not AP, so regular includes many levels of students, from very capable "should be in AP" ones to some who probably won't graduate.) I had to revise my schedule so that we were reading much of it in class, and let me tell you, after reading a chapter five times a day for twelve days...I'm so over Grendel.

The upside is that some of the students liked it (mainly because of details like "blood spurting like a geyser"). I don't know--if I want to do this in the future, I just need to rethink how I'm going to do it.

The Pre-AP 10th graders are good. Silly, but good. They are definitely a bright spot in my morning. Both my 1st (seniors) and 2nd are good classes, so I like starting the day on that kind of note.

Enough school talk.

TV
I have a good bit of grading to do this weekend because I took some time over the week to watch some of the new TV shows. My guilty pleasure is Dancing with the Stars, but I'm just not enjoying it as much this season. I don't think the celebrities have as much charisma as in the past, and some of them I haven't heard of.

I loved The Office. I think that show has quickly become my favorite.

I'm now watching Grey's Anatomy with the rest of the world. I find the main character, Meredith, a bit whiny, but I like the show overall.

Thursday night, I couldn't sleep, so I watched the last half of ER, and all it did was remind me why I stopped watching this show three seasons ago. Seriously, can anything good happen to any of these characters? Spoiler alert: Luka (who long ago lost his two kids and his wife to a bombing in Croatia) and Abby (who has a bipolar mother and has struggled with alcoholism) are excited about the birth of their baby (finally, some happiness!), but when a gunman opens fire on the ER (yeah, okay), Abby falls on the floor, which somehow causes her to go into early labor. Of course, she has to have the baby early. Of course, the baby is extremely tiny and may not have full brain function if he even survives. Of course, Abby can't stop bleeding and must undergo a hysterectomy. I know life is hard, but c'mon ER! Can't someone on this show be happy for once?

And in closing...
I didn't mean for this post to be this long. I guess I just had a lot built up inside me, just waiting to be vented through a post. While I'm on it, can I also say that if I hear the song "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield (sp?) one more time, I'm going to pull out my hair? That song gets so much airplay it is ridiculous.

The end.

Food and Football

This weekend was filled with a lot of both. Unfortunately, this was not a good football weekend for us--LSU's loss to Auburn followed by FSU's loss to Clemson. (I cared more about the first one, Darryl more about the second one.)

We did have some good food to console us, though. I made Chicken Parmesan from a recipe that had five stars from FoodTV.com, and it was really good. Then I made apple crisp from a random recipe I had stuck in my recipe file. It was delicious also. I've really been trying to eat better and exercise more (I went to the gym three times last week and went jogging on Saturday--go me), but I kind of let it all go this weekend.

Oh, well.

This sounds unpleasant

Darryl and I were driving around our neck of the woods the other day and passed this sign outside a doctor's clinic. We thought we read it wrong, so we circled the block just to make sure. Nope, we were right:



Isn't that something that you just kinda know? Is it really something that has to be screened? And what is that screening process, exactly?

Gross. But funny.

9/11 and "Babylon"

Over the weekend, my Pre-AP English 2 students were assigned to read Stephen Vincent Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon." Just in case you aren't familiar with the story...it is a story of a young boy growing up in a post-apocalyptic civilization that is quite primitive from the way we live now, and he takes a journey to a sacred city--now demolished--that is believed to have belonged to the gods. At the end of the story, we find out the sacred city is New York.

The story was written in 1937, before nuclear threats, before terrorists took over planes and crashed them into skyscrapers. But in this passage, the young boy has a vision of what happened to the city of gods:

I have seen men die. But this was not like that. When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the Destruction. They ran about like ants in the streets of their city--poor gods, poor gods! Then the towers began to fall. A few escaped--yes, a few. . . . I saw it happen, I saw the last of them die. It was darkness over the broken city and I wept.

Wow...the power of words.

Fortunately, the story ends with a message of hope: "We must build again." I'm not really sure what I was expecting on this fifth anniversary of 9/11. I've seen the video coverage of the appropriately reverent memorial services conducted in various parts of the country, and my school--probably like many schools--observed a moment of silence. But in many ways today, life went on as usual, and perhaps that is the most appropriate 9/11 tribute of all.

Labor Day Weekend

I enjoyed my grading-free Labor Day weekend. Leaving the Canterbury Tales projects at school was a good idea; if I had lugged them home, they would have just sat there, unattended, while I was consumed with guilt for not grading instead of watching TV. By leaving them at school, I was spared the guilt. Nothing but a clean conscience here!

I did get some class prep done, and I cleaned my house more thoroughly than I planned--I actually pulled out the mop.

Other weekend highlights:
--I went shopping and ended up with two shirts.
--I saw Little Miss Sunshine. I thought it was funny, but Darryl thought it was horrible. I like dry, dark humor, though, and Darryl does not. (Darryl also dislikes The Office. How can someone not like The Office??? And he told me this after he saw one of my favorite episodes--the one with the drug testing. Sigh. I'm just telling you this so you'll know how seriously to consider his opinion of Sunshine.)
--I caught up on my fake Tivoed Project Runway episodes.

Ah...why can't long weekends last just a wee bit longer?

Plans for the weekend

After grading, grading, grading every day for the past week and a half, I've gotten my stack down to just Canterbury Tales projects, and that's amazing. I made the bold decision not to bring those projects home, so I'm not doing any grading this long weekend. So there.

I do need to get a jump ahead on some class prep, but I'm waiting until Sunday or Monday to do that.

Today, I'm going to take it easy. Darryl plans to watch football, and I think I'm going to clean up around the house (not a major clean, but a "straighten up" clean) and then maybe go to a movie this weekend. I really want to see Little Miss Sunshine.

Thanks to TimShady, I've also gotten into the show Project Runway, and I have a couple of those TiVoed. I'm watching some of the earlier episodes of the season.

So yep, I've got a big day of movie/TV watching ahead of me. I'm excited.