sufficient

it's official

Well, I've told all my students and put it in my Facebook status, so I guess I should post it here too. I've quit my job and have 16 days left in my secondary school teaching career. Lord willing, this summer, I'm moving to Nashville, to pursue my doctorate in Education Policy at Vanderbilt, with a research focus on teacher quality.

Labels: education

posted by CP @ 10:55 PM 0 thoughts

a poem for spring loosely in honor of my recent travels

Home- Thoughts from Abroad
Robert Browning

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England-- now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops-- at the bent spray's edge--
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower--
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

posted by CP @ 12:31 PM 0 thoughts

they got me good

But I retaliated in kind:

Last period today, I walked into my classroom and all of my students were sitting in the wrong desks. Someone did something to make sure I was aware of this fact and I told them I did not care that they were not in their correct seats. One child responded something to the effect of "I can make you care," to which I responded, "You better not do anything to make me care."

So then, I call someone's name and someone else responded, which slightly confused me, until I called another student's name and the student sitting in that student's seat responded. Then I figured out what they were doing with the name-switching thing and they carried on for the remainder of the class period, with me playing along, calling on the person they were impersonating.

Then, I asked them to get their copies of As I Lay Dying out. And they all threw them in my general vicinity (not so much at me...). So I picked them up and distributed them to their impersonators-for-the-day. This elicited a great bit of angst as many of them had not annotated the assigned pages for the day and therefore were afraid of the grade they would get. Instead of checking their annotations, I gave them a quiz: 1. What's your birthday?  2. What's your address? 3. What are your parents' names? 4. What is your class schedule? 5. Where did you go to school in 4th grade?

And they eventually conceded defeat.

Labels: teaching

posted by CP @ 3:51 PM 4 thoughts

autopilot?

For some reason, I really like April Fools jokes. Not the horrible ones that really embarrass you or make you look stupid, but the clever, witty ones that Google and many news sources come up with.

The first time I remember paying attention to them was in high school- the front page Lifestyles section of the paper was full of them: the only one I remember was about a pair of blue jeans painted like the American flag that came up to your waist. (They've probably made jeans like that for real now.)

Here are some I've enjoyed today:

Gmail Autopilot
Expedia flights to Mars
The Guardian's Twitter updates
NYTimes Jell-o Molds
Wikipedia's featured article
The iToaster
The Economist's theme park

posted by CP @ 10:56 AM 0 thoughts