Happy Ceramic Tree Christmas to you!
By my count this will be my third Christmas with Mandu, cream and brown spots, and Chingu, the tuxedo terror. I'll be spending Christmas Eve with my sister and her family. No airports, just a short drive!
I hope you have a great Christmas as well, wherever you may find yourself!
Substitute teaching is going pretty well. Half of the game is signing up for gigs at schools that are run well or, of course, avoiding the bad ones. It gets easier over time, and I've dipped my toes into things like P.E. and Special Education and enjoyed them greatly.
This last week before Christmas break a young elementary student threatened to kill me though. Per training, I called the Behavior department four times and they didn't even answer.
Again, avoiding the poorly run schools is part of the game.
"Of course, he's right, your dear old dad:
The world is poor and men are bad.
An earthly paradise might be arranged
If this old world of ours could but be changed
But that can never be arranged.
Your brother might be fond of you
But if the meat supply won't do
He'd cut you down right where you stood.
(We'd all by loyal if we could.)
Your good wife might be fond of you
But if your love for her won't do
She'd cut you down right where you stood.
(We'd all be grateful if we could.)
Your children might be fond of you
But if your pension would not do
They'd cut you down right where you stood.
(We'd all be human if we could.)"
-- Bertold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
"Here, stranger,
here in the land where horses are a glory
you have reached the noblest home on earth
Colonus glistening, brilliant in the sun --
where the nightingale sings on,
her dying music rising clear,
hovering always, never leaving,
down the shadows deepening green
she haunts the glades, the wine-dark ivy,
dense and dark, the untrodden, sacred wood of god
rich with laurel and olives never touched by the sun
untouched by storms that blast from every quarter --
where the Reveler Dionysus strides the earth forever
where the wild nymphs are dancing round him
nymphs who nursed his life."
-- Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fagles
"In first grade, these 'independent reading' hours were torture for my kids, who, I would eventually learn, were among the roughly half of all children who, research shows, will likely never read well without explicit instruction in sounding out words. My kids’ reactions to being expected to sit quietly each day pretending to read ran along stereotypical gender lines. My daughter silently berated herself for not being able to read; my son acted out, once attempting to push over a bookshelf."
The whole thing is downright amazing. All I have to add is that graduate school education programs struggle to justify their own existence every ten years or so by developing entirely new paradigms and approaches, even when existing ones seem to work pretty well. That's true for other departments as well, but only Ed Schools use children as guinea pigs.
Anyhow, I teach a fair amount of reading intervention classes and phonics and blending are definitely back. I guess I didn't realize they'd ever gone away.
So the right-wing president of South Korea thought he could declare martial law and rally some support to a sinking presidency?
I emailed my former boss, a political moderate, and he told me Yoon "lost his mind."
It's cold in Maryland!
Happy Thanksgiving and belated Chuseok!
Tomorrow I'll be visiting my sister and making the garlic mashed potatoes and fresh bread.
