Me, on top of the world...

This is me, on top of the world. I'm with Bushwhacker, a guy who seems to set out on the AT every year. I wonder if he's going this year. I imagine M is the one taking a photo. I look tough there because I was tough. And maybe my physical strength has faded with time, but the mental lessons are here to stay.

Today the theme of my lecture was "confusion is part of the process" - but it was really about not giving up when something gets hard. My students mostly give up. When they don't know how to solve a problem, they work madly to look as if they are thinking, but are really just avoiding eye contact with me.

I called them out on it today and we worked through a stupid word problem about the rotation of a baseball. They should have known to just use the formula for a circumference because it was on the same worksheet with a bunch of problems about circumference. It concerns me that they struggle with navigating worksheets. If I was going to write a math textbook, I would take all the word problems and mix them up, so you would actually have to think about it, but Pearson is on the predictable side.
However, much of school, and life, is not about really thinking or problem solving, it's about knowing what to do automatically by reading the cues in your environment.

They get mad because I make them write about what is confusing. It's not enough to say I don't know. You have to say why, you have to pick apart the little things you didn't know you knew, but are there, just under the surface. You have to share your ideas. Tell me where your Knowing stopped and your Confusion started.

Much of school, and life, is about perseverance. Sucking it up and powering through fatigue or pain. Trying and failing and trying again. I'm twice as old, so I can't get mad at them for not having had the opportunity to push themselves. But sometimes I still get mad.

At 14, I was playing soccer and taking Ray Peter's Geometry class. My dad had just started working, and my brother and sister and I were on our own for a few hours after school. I had to do chores and cook dinner sometimes. I honestly can't remember doing homework. Did I study after school? I know we generally didn't watch tv at my house, but I loved to sneak and watch the Guiding Light before my brother and sister got off the bus. I didn't know M yet, but he was around, our circles of friends weaving in and out of each other.

M is baking again. Check Flickr later for another picture - I'm sure he'll take one. Here's a secret...he sucked at baking a year ago. Many of his first attempts were barely edible. But he's good at taking his confusion or his failure and figuring out what went wrong, and turning it in to something right. And now he churns out artisan quality bread once or twice a week.

That's what I want my students to take away this year. I want them to say "I hated math in August, but now I know what to do with a two step equation. And I want to try a three-step."

On Parenting

My parents brought down this yellow and orange Little Tikes plastic picnic table that anyone in their 30s will remember having as a child. I've been yearning for a little table for Laurel ever since she started getting obsessed with "writing". I'm also tired of wrestling her into the high chair twice a day. She has this way of stiffening her body so that I can't get her legs in. Also, she has mastered the ability to somehow stand up in the high chair, even with the straps securely fastened. A baby in the 75th percentile for height and the 25th for weight makes for a highly capable escape artist. I imagined that we could begin to have civil meals, without the yelling, screaming and near falling, while Laurel would sit nicely at her pint-size place setting.

However, I must say, eating dinner at the little table is not without its downsides. Right now I'm looking at an utter catastrophe of smashed cheerios and dried up kale leaves littering the living room. I definitely should have moved the table into the kitchen before the meal started. Laurel liked eating at her little table, but she lacks the attention span to actually stay sitting there through the three bowls of potato soup she demanded. (Not being in the high chair meant that she could march her bowl into the kitchen and hold it up, yelling until I poured her more soup.)

The ear infection is fading, and we're sort of getting back into the routine. She's still waking up a couple of times a night, but I'm confident that she'll be back to sleeping through within a week. And as always, she's quite agreeable at bedtime...she flips the switch on the light, throws her baby in her crib, and curls up in a little ball. No fuss, and utterly pleasant for me. So, here I sit, staring down a mess in the kitchen and a stack of math journals to read.

Naturally, I'm going to pour myself a glass of East End beer screw around the on the internet. East End comes in growlers and won't stay fresh for very long...I really have no choice.

I used to be a pretty die-hard advocate for stay-at-home-parenting. But in a theoretical way. I had stay at home parents and it worked fine for me. I didn't really know anybody who used daycare when I was growing up, and I guess I always imagined it being much more dreary and jail-like than it actually is. My image was more in line with a Romanian orphanage than the average licensed child care center. And besides, why would you not want to raise your own kids, I heard myself say on more than one occasion. When I picked her up at daycare today I had a sudden realization that daycare is not the problem. Laurel likes her daycare. She likes the teachers, she likes the kids, she likes the toys. The routine works for her.

Still, it's not without its drawbacks. Juggling who has to stay home and calling in favors from your relatives when your kid is sick for an entire week. Having to go to work on very little sleep some days. Finding a spare moment for yourself when laundry or food prep or cleaning the toilet is constantly, urgently needed.

It was with these thoughts that I stumbled upon a couple of book reviews and blogs. Getting to 50/50 and Equally Shared Parenting are two books that grew out of blogs that grew out of several entrepenuerial women making their husbands do more housework. I grew momentarily excited over the Childraising Equality Scale, where you can sit down with your partner and see who does more "toy assembling" and who does more "toilet training" and make sure everybody's doing their fair share. I could not imagine spending my precious increments of adult time with M by discussing those issues. I do the bulk of the weekday childcare because I have a job that lets me out at 2:40. I'm home when Laurel is awake. No use in having an argument about that.

But then, I stumbled across a blog post called "Is your life interesting or happy?".

The test items themselves were edited in a tongue-in-cheek way by the blogger and they don't really bear any real relevance to my life. Still, it could be telling.

For instance, I was not particularly happy as a child. I was raised Catholic. I spent many formative staring down a life-size crucified Jesus from the front pew of our church. So, there's a minus one for me in the happy column.

And no, I did not even know that $200 jeans existed. I guess I assume that everyone buys jeans at Old Navy for 39 bucks and the frugal among us wait until they go on sale. Don't even get me started on the eyebrows.

However, at the end of the day, this is the question that lingers in my mind.

There is no doubt that my life is interesting (I plan to audition for the Moth the next time they have an open mic locally with my "Pants-less hooker steals a pair of socks" tale...really, it's hard to top that story). But can one's life be both interesting and happy?

You tell me, along with any insights about how two working parents juggle the responsibilities of a work and home.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

Yes, the weather is still frightful, but my reference is actually to the drink the M is mixing us up right now, as we prepare to watch the Social Network. Yes, life has come to this...OnDemand movies and pajamas at 9:00pm.

Laurel is on the mend from a very unpleasant illness which was finally diagnosed as a double ear infection. We went up to visit M's parents today and had fun eating waffles and playing with toys and seeing dogs and looking at the bird feeder. There is still a lot of snow up at their place, but it felt too damp and unpleasant to go outside, especially with a fire roaring in the living room.

M, of course, did some baking today. Our house may look a little messy right now, but it smells awesome.

what??!!

Judgement day is on my birthday. Plan accordingly.

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How We Roll....

Sometimes I wish for a confessional blog. You know, a place where I could rant and rave and confess my shortcomings and drop the f-bomb. And say things I'm hiding from my husband. However, this is not an anonymous blog. Most of you know who I am in real life. But, if this were an anonymous blog, I might just confess the fact that I misplaced my debit card. Again. And several weeks may have passed. I might describe how this is a rather frequent occurrence for me and that usually I blame (and rightly so!) my 14 month old daughter, who somehow knows the difference between the used up Victoria's secret gift card that I keep in my wallet to distract her, and the actual debit card that represents my actual hard-earned money. I might then tell you about how we searched up and down, high and low, every time Daddy went out for a run or was late coming home from work. And then I could write excitedly about how we found it tucked in the pocket of a red blazer I hardly ever wear. Whew.

Laurel spent the afternoon occupying herself by pushing her toy school bus off various surfaces. It's fun to hang back and watch her entertain herself from time to time. Not from too far a distance, as she is a bit of a daredevil and also seems to have a complete lack of understanding about the dangers of glass. She took a break from the school bus every now and again to page through a book. And then she switched to pretending that an old iPod of mine is a cell phone. Watching toddlers figure out imaginary play is hilarious.

Only part of what I wanted to accomplish by Sunday night is actually done. Do I have too high expectations or am I just bad at getting things done? I was on track to be in bed by 9, but then M sliced his finger in the kitchen and he probably needs a stitch but is toughing it out because nobody wants to sit in the ER for six hours on a Sunday night. And he's fine, nobody worry. We just need new knives. We are people who cook, from scratch, at least once or twice a day and we have the most god-awful, dull, cheap knives. We cooked for ages on beat up, hand-me-down aluminum pans, but eventually got around to buying a nice Le Creuset pot and a cast iron frying pan. So we'll get around to the knives. Perhaps sooner, rather than later now that the knives have actually drawn blood.

Now I'm waiting on the last load of laundry and I just don't want to open up gmail because there's a million to-do items buried in that inbox and Monday seems like a much better time to deal with them.

Tomorrow I'll wake up at 5 and then the next thing I know it will be Friday. And so on and so forth until summer vacation and then maybe I can decide what the heck I'm going to do with the rest of my life, because I'm going to need a change of pace from this. There's one thing to be busy, but it's quite another thing to look down and realize that you've put your shirt on backwards or there's baby snot in your hair.

Wheeee!

Or Wii. Somehow I wrote a grant that was convincing enough to get me a Wii for my classroom. Today we bowled. If this was an education blog, I would go into greater detail about how and why this is a valid instructional strategy. However, I'm finding it difficult to write realistically about life as a teacher, while maintaining the confidentiality of my students.

This week in the lunch room somebody said "It's only Thursday? This is the longest week ever!" and I thought "It's Thursday already? Where did the week go?". The weeks never seem slow to me now. The days march by with an even, but quick tempo and I look about as good keeping up with them as I do keeping up in Zumba, which is to say, it looks awkward and I never make the right move at the right time, but I mostly manage to have fun with it.

In some of my previous teaching jobs I can remember being desperate for the weekend...constantly counting down days until the next break. I never do that now.

Maybe because a day "off" isn't as much of a break as it once was. I have about 12 minutes to decompress after I leave school, minutes that are quiet and belong to me. When I get to daycare, all the kids shout "it's a mommy!" -presumably any time the door opens, but who knows? Once they see who it is, they shout "Laurel! It's your mommy!" and Laurel runs around the classroom pointing at various things and babbling.

She never wants to leave, or rather, she never wants to leave quickly. She wants to show me the play kitchen and the desk and the penguin art projects that are hanging on the wall. Eventually I wrestle her into her coat and mittens and carry her out the door while the kids are all shouting "Bye Laurel Bye Laurel Bye!" Every dang day they do this. Everything is exciting when you are 2 or 3, I guess.

During the last two weeks, I've tried to get together with mamas and babies after school. This has been a very good thing for my soul. Lessons learned include 1. Make sure there are ample snacks, 2. 45 minutes is a perfect amount of time and 3. Plan ahead and have something in mind for dinner.

So, who's coming over next week?

Adventures in Homemaking, Part 1,756

M and I can be patient. Or maybe it's busy. Or lazy. Anyway, something kept us from replacing the sink faucet after all attempts to fix the cold faucet drip failed. For literally the last six months, we've been turning the water on and off under the kitchen sink. Very annoying. (So annoying that some members of the household would forget to turn it off and then we would have a very high water bill. Ahem.) I think M was inspired by the visit from our friends at Restano, who came regarding a different plumbing issue. And I must say, he looks like he means business, surrounded by tools and pipes underneath the sink. I am confident that we will soon have a new, fully functional faucet. And if for some reason we don't, we're moving. I mean it. We're selling the house and finding an apartment.

I just noticed there's a grapefruit on the floor in the corner. I vaguely remember bringing home a grapefruit in my purse. Someone at work gave it to me. Note to self - look for other missing contents from purse. I think the resident toddler may have done a little pickpocketing.

There are 14,000 cheerios on the floor. Lindsay and Teddy came over and there was some excitement over the snacks. As in, Laurel spilled them all, and then she and Teddy went wild...grabbing handfuls and stuffing their little faces. It was pretty hilarious. I thought we cleaned most of them up, but cheerios are one of those things that inexplicably multiply...like unmatched baby socks and parking tickets.

Laurel played lots of hide and go seek with me from behind the living room curtains. She just started pushing a toy car around (I would never have know this was a developmental milestone except Sarah came over on Sunday and "experimented" on Laurel by giving her a language assessment for one of her classes. All of a sudden I am acutely aware of developmental milestones.)

And finally, I just made a brilliantly simple and delicious lentil soup from Vegan Planet. Even if everything else in our lives is mildly chaotic, or sometimes, frankly, just plain weird, at least we can cook. We'll always have that.

Indian Spiced Lentil Soup
2T corn oil
1 small yellow onion, chopped
1 celery rib, chopped
1 sweet potato, peeled and diced
1 garlic clove, minced
14.5 oz. can of diced tomatoes
1t peeled and minced fresh ginger
1/2t ground cumin
1/2t ground coriander
1/4t cayenne
1 1/2 cups dried lentils, picked and rinsed
6 cups stock or water
1/4 cup minced fresh cilantro
salt and black pepper

Directions:
Heat corn oil and add onion, celery, sweet potato and garlic. Cover and cook until softened. Add tomatoes. Stir in ginger, cumin, coriander and cayenne. Add lentils and stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for about 30 minutes. Note - do not add salt to lentils until they are all the way cooked, or they don't get soft. Add the cilantro, salt and pepper to taste.

Children's Museum

Sarah had the awesome idea to go to the Children's Museum today. It was nice to have something fun to do as a group on one of the coldest days of the year. The kids absolutely loved it. They are a little young for a lot of the stuff that's there, but one of Sarah's friends who has a three year old came, and it was neat to see what she was into. We spent a lot of time upstairs in the "nursery" - which had a sand table, a giant Lite Brite, a ramp, train table and fish tank, among other things. We did not venture into the water table room, because even a place as fun as the Children's Museum cannot stave off naptime. I contemplated buying a membership...for $99 you get unlimited admission for a year and $3 parking.

After the museum, we had the all-too-rare opportunity to hang out at home. Mark and Laurel made egg parathas while I ran out to stock up for the Steeler game tomorrow. One thing we noticed about Laurel this weekend is that her language is developing like crazy. (Note to self...no more cursing!) Today she said "dough", "no", "uh oh", "up", and "nanana" for banana. She is awesome at taking trash and putting it in the garbage can when we tell her to. She is also vastly more cooperative when I'm getting her dressed if I give her directions and let her help. (If you've ever been at my house during bath time you know it involves a lot of chasing a naked toddler around while she alternately howls and hides behind the furniture.)

The other thing she is really into is writing with a pen. I think this has something to do with all the worksheets they do at daycare. Since she's moved up to the toddler room, they have art and activities together with some of the preschool kids. This week they worked on the numbers 3 and 4 and the letter I. She brings home a worksheet that is scribbled all over with crayon pretty much every day. I am reluctant to give her crayons, because she doesn't seem to get the difference between writing on paper vs. everything else. However, she hasn't yet figured out how to take the cap off a pen, so now it's just a lot of pretend writing at home, unless I'm there with her. I know, I know, it's only a matter of time.

Anyway, enjoy the photos of Laurel and her friends at the museum.

Most Shocking Responses to the Midterm

3/4 + 3/8
-741

The sales tax is 7%. Calculate the total if the subtotal was $84.04.
$941.63

If you could change one thing about this class, what would it be?
Give us more homework (from the student who never does homework)

Yesterday was a full-blown clerical day...that is, no obligations, meetings, or trainings. Show up, get a bagel from the cafeteria and work. For a special education teacher, this is pure bliss. I have so many things to do in a typical day - tracking down students and talking to teachers about accommodations, parent phone calls, writing documents for IEPs, holding meetings, etc. Oh yeah, and don't forget teaching six classes a day.

Several of my students are pure slackers. They don't do homework, they lose their books, they complain endlessly and loudly in class, they refuse to take notes. But because they have IEPs it's my responsibility to document all the ways we're helping them to overcome the incredible (sarcastic) strains we place upon them. Bring a pencil. Do the six homework problems I assigned (in the time during class that I give you to work on them. Shut the hell up when the teacher's talking.

Last week, several of these students, independently, said that they weren't worried about their grades because last year they "didn't do any work at all in social studies/science/math/consumer science and still passed" because their teachers were "nice". Cue laughter among students. Hmmm....

I warned them. High school isn't like that. You need credits to graduate. Your grades are a permanent part of your record that will be released to any job or school in the future that requests them. High school teachers will fail you. High school special education teachers bear the burden of documenting all the things we do to help (tutoring, extra time for tests, having your tests read aloud, shortened assignments, preferential seating). But we will still fail you.

One semester down, one to go. I'm putting together a sort of writing/reflection component for our pre-algebra class for the second half of the year. I finally have access to edit my course websites, so I'll be building those. I'm excited about some problem solving activities I'm introducing in my lowest level math class. I got the grant to fund my classroom Wii, so we'll be starting to use that for motivation and team building. I rearranged the desks into group tables.

When you teach lower level math to students who have historically struggled with math, you can easily fall into a trap where you eliminate higher level thinking. Instead of showing how or why a linear equation works, we just say here are the steps for finding the solution. No context. Just follow the instructions. The only question some math teachers ask is "what do you do next?" Last semester, I worked on asking more difficult questions - why does that work? Can you find the error in my work? How did you know you were right? Is there another way to solve that?

This semester, I want to teach them to talk about and puzzle over a problem with a partner or two. All attempts to have students do this to date have utterly failed. They sit there like lumps until I prompt them along. They are afraid to be wrong or to try things out without knowing that it's the "right way". We'll see what happens.

Here's What I Love....

I love when a friend texts me at lunch time and invites us over for cappuccino (thanks Elaina!) and the kids fight over toys and giggle at each other and almost-but-not-quite start a game of chase.

I love a last minute decision to drive into town to pick up M and getting stuck in traffic but the whole family is together for a change and we almost run out of gas and have to stop to fill up the tank and our bellies with Nutter Butters and cheese sticks because it takes an hour and a half to get home.

I love all of us getting into our pj's and reading stories in bed and Laurel insisting that she read the stories now, not us.

And I especially love the announcement by Swissvale police that there is a warrant out for the arrest of one of the bad guys messing with our 'hood. Go away bad guys, you are not wanted here.