The Sound of Silence

As you may recall from this post, I have a tendency to lose my voice.

Anytime I get introduced to any sort of virus, it immediately takes up residence in my throat, causing my voice to disappear for weeks at a time.

It has been the same, very quiet story for the past seven years: winter shows arrives, my voice departs. Last year, my voice departed for six long, tearful weeks. SIX WEEKS!

You'd think that, after a traumatic incident like that, I would have learned the importance of avoiding viruses. Unfortunately, I have not yet "become one" with the hand sanitizer despite the wealth of warnings posted around my school

And because I didn't pay enough attention to these signs...

...I had to spend the day teaching with these signs.

When my voice gave out after 2nd hour's play rehearsals, I knew I had better get my cute but silent backside into the doctor's office. Once there, I used what was left of my voice to beg for some sort of miracle cure. What I got instead was a prescription for some very nice steroid pills and the advice to take the rest of the week off from school and remain silent for as long as possible.

I took the prescription, but not the advice. I mean, I couldn't miss today. Today was the state writing test that I have been prepping the kids on for months. And missing tomorrow isn't an option because it is my last chance to rehearse my communications kids in the three plays that they will be performing for assorted peers and parents on Friday. Those com kidlets have been memorizing lines for a month. Calling in sick is NOT an option.

So after picking up my little pack of pills, I picked up a not-so-little, yet still portable white-board and spent the day teaching via low-tech-twitter in short status updates.

I used it to communicate as I helped to proctor the state direct writing assessment...

...and then to lead a class discussion about the test. Granted, it wasn't a discussion that featured a lot higher-order questions, or any higher-order questions, but I think it was still productive.

Later, I used the white board to answer questions as the kids filled out their study guides for the big, hairy, slobbery, fanged semester final that they will be taking week after next.

I even used it to check for understanding while the kids listened to a CD read them the next chapter of our novel.

Having to resort to brief written responses for an entire day really made me realize how many of the same questions I end up answering over and over, class after class, day after day.
But there were also a few new questions too.

By lunch, I was very tired (and quite possibly a little high from dry erase marker fumes) and started to feel a little frustrated. But my mood brightened considerably when I returned from my lunch-time bathroom break and discovered that one of the kidlets had used the white board to write a note for me.

And you know what? I did feel better. Briana's sweet show of concern gave me just the boost I needed to pick up that white board and get back to work...right after I edited Briana's sweet show of concern for capitalization mistakes and spelling errors, that is.

My voice may be gone, but I'm still an English teacher... until 2nd hour. Then I'm the director in charge of 30 7th and 8th graders in three plays.

Maybe I'll take those sick days after all.

Why I Will Never, Ever Be Hired By Sports Illustrated

Taking photos at wrestling meets is hard.

Really hard.

I mean, they move so stinkin' fast, and the referees are always darting in and out of the shots. And our gym is really old and dark, so that doesn't help with the photo quality.

Plus, I'm just BAD at it.

Really, REALLY BAD at it.

We only have one home wrestling meet a year, so that means that the yearbook Jedi and I only have one shot at getting photos for a two-page spread. I probably took a couple hundred shots that evening, half of which were unusably blurry.

But by the end of the night, I actually preferred these blurry photos to the clear shots.

"Why?" you might ask.

Well, I'll tell you why.

Spandex. It is not flattering on anyone, especially 12 and 13 year old boys.

Plus, due to the nature of the sport, most of the clear photos involve wrestlers grabbing each others backsides. I am afraid that pose, and various other physical situations that may be perfectly natural on the mats during wrestling season, might cause the guys some grief six months from now when the yearbooks are distributed to the masses.

Several times during the course of the meet, I found myself trying to avoid what I considered to be awkward moments by photographing the gym ceiling. And as I have reviewed the photos taken that night, I decided to make a yearbook advisor executive decision. Instead of a two-page wrestling spread, we are going to have a two-page tribute to the gym ceiling.

In the long run, I think that will just be better for everyone.

Oh What A Day It Has Been!

Aliens have invaded my classroom. More on that later.

But first we must discuss a few items of greater importance, such as the heating system in my classroom.

Or, rather, the LACK of a heating system in my classroom.

You see, way back on Thursday, October 29th, the heater that is supposed to supply my classroom, the kitchen, and MY CLASSROOM with heat, abruptly ceased all heat-related activities.

I wasn't too worried about it at first. I mean, this is a really old heater that we are talking about, and when it has taken a powder in the past it was always an age-related issue. The poor old thing was just being sort of senile, not malicious. Unlike my sworn enemy, the homicidal overhead screen. Talk about malicious. Dude! That thing wants to kill me. Really.

But since I hadn't received any intelligence updates that led me to believe that the heater had sworn its allegiance to that dastardly screen (although I am beginning to think that my desk chair may have gone over to the dark side), I cowboy-ed up, broke out my deep-winter sweaters, and went about my educational-related business.

And then it got really cold and I resorted to teaching in my bus duty coat and gloves.

But wait. Let me just go back for one minute to the sweater I was wearing in the sweater-related photo from a moment ago. I love everything about that sweater... except for the the very long draw strings that get caught in my desk drawers, on the backs of desks, in doorways, and even in my art supply tool box. Those drawstrings get caught everywhere!

EVERYWHERE!

Deep breath.

Ok.

I'm fine now.

Thanks for listening.

Now, back to the story of my heater less existence.

I told our wonderful head custodian about my classroom's new arctic climate that very Thursday, and he immediately called our sweet, yet overworked maintenance staff who showed up on Friday.

Not the Friday right after that, of course, or even the Friday after that. But last Friday, after about 15 teeth-chattering days, a very nice maintenance man climbed up into the ceiling and then climbed down and told me that the heater was broke.

Even though I told the principal that I wasn't in a huge hurry to have the heater fixed (the kidlets spent the first five minutes in class fascinated by the fact that they could see their breath inside the building, and then only got about ten minutes of real complaining in before they went numb and just sort of spent the next hour or so whimpering quietly to themselves) he had our school custodians and the district maintenance staff round up a bunch of heaters for me.

Those heaters made a world of difference...until I tried to run the overhead projector at the same time and blew out the fuse that powers the back half of my room.

So then I decided that we really didn't need the two heaters in the back. The two in the front of the room would at least take the edge off.

And they did.

Until I tried to turn on the TV to show a School House Rock video and blew out the fuse that powers the front half of my room.

Which brings us to the alien invasion I mentioned earlier. Every flat surface of my classroom is currently covered in alien descriptions and art work that resulted from a descriptive writing activity that we did last week.

The activity is usually one of my favorites because I get maximum effort out of the kidlets with minimum annoyances (mostly in the form of unfamiliar herds of kidlets touring my classroom before and after school to comment on their friends' efforts).

And I enjoyed the activity this year too... right up until the kidlets pointed out that ancient heating units surrounded by walls covered in highly flammable aliens was probably NOT something the fire marshal, or the school's insurance carrier, would approve of.

Of course, their concern only lasted until the heaters were turned off long enough for the cold to creep back in. Then, suddenly, the thought of being surrounded by white-hot flames became a lot less terrifying and a bit more appealing. But I didn't turn the heaters back on. Instead, like so many great adventurers before me, I adapted to my new environment.

And now if I can just get everyone else in the district to adapt to being able to read emails that I attempted to type while wearing puppet gloves, life will be good.

At least until the overhead screen strikes again...

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

I changed my classroom bulletin board this week.

With Halloween over, I decided to go with a fall/grammar-ish theme and was pretty happy with how it turned out.
When I set out, with die cuts in hand, to change the board, I told myself that, "This time, the board will be THE ONLY THING I decorate."

I had to tell myself that because I have this, uh, problem with bulletin board decorating. Well, actually the problem isn't so much with the decorating of the board, as it is with what comes after the decorating of the board.
You see, I can never stop with just decorating the one bulletin board. I just keep going until my entire classroom has been swallowed by whatever theme my sleep-deprived brain has decided to fixate upon.

In this case, it looks like an oak tree has barfed all of it's autumnal refuse over every surface of my classroom.

As I was pinning and stapling leaves to various and sundry pieces of classroom furniture, I kept thinking about the essays I could be scoring and the PowerPoint presentations I could be building. Deep down I think I was hoping that a beautifully decorated room would somehow carry over and make me a beautifully prepared teacher.

But while my room may look different than it did last month, the teacher inhabiting that room is just as behind on grading and lesson planning as always.

And my classroom decor isn't the only thing I changed this week.

On a strange Thursday morning type of whim, I decided to flip my hair out instead of under.

That could have wreaked some serious havoc in my classes that day, but luckily the fashion-forward seventh graders deemed it an acceptable change.

In fact, 97% of my seventh graders rated the different style as "cool" and/or "better than before" while only 2% claimed that the change had a negative impact on their ability to learn while in my class. The remaining 1% threw up on my shoes, but I am hoping that had more to do with the piggy flu than with my hair style.

I also made a few changes to my school wardrobe this week and attempted, for three out of the five days, to actually look like an education professional. I thought I had made some serious progress in the "grown-up" department for a while there...

...then I ended up buying these shirts, the one on the left for me and the one on the right for my English teacher mother. So not only was I NOT progressing, I was actually causing my mother to regress. Sorry mom.

When I made a quick trip back to my parental homeland this weekend, other changes were in store. Literally, the "store" being Winco.

Normally, I take my almost 3 year-old niece Kenna on a gummy run whenever I come into town. The tradition continued Saturday morning, but this time we included Kylie the monchichi baby in our candy crusade.

I think that it will be a change that sticks from here on out. Of course, at some point we are going to have to explain to the monchichi that she has to wait to eat her gummies until after they have been paid for...and taken out of the plastic bag. And we will get around to teaching her that someday, right after we finish trying to teach her daddy the same thing. ;)

The biggest change this week has brought, however, is the one my home ward went through today when my dad was released as their bishop.

After spending so much of of the past few years going to meetings and visiting ward members and working with the missionaries and going to meetings and presiding at funerals and performing weddings and going to meetings, I thought that the change would really throw my dear old dad for a loop.

But yesterday, as we continued our long-standing tradition of daddy-daughter Christmas light hanging, he told me about his new calling and I realized that he is going to be just as busy as ever. He will have plenty of meetings to attend and will actually have the opportunity to spread his inappropriate behavior over a wider swath of people than ever before.

Which just goes to show you, bulletin boards, hair styles, and gummy runs all may change, but the list of words my father is not allowed to say from the pulpit will be around forever.

(It will just get longer and longer and longer....)

Happy Haloween!

This Halloween was full of tricks (someone else bought my Heyburn house) and treats (a temple trip and an amazing fireside with Elder Uchtdorf) and it pretty much lasted the whole week.

"Halloween" began with our branch FHE/party on Monday.

Seeing as how it was a Church-related event, I decided to go the scriptural costume route and dressed as the very first Sister Missionary: Abish .

We had a costume contest and played some fun games, one of which involved rewriting Christmas Carols to make them Halloween Susans....get it? Christmas Carols & Halloween Susans......Never mind.

After each group had some time to rewrite their chosen song, they sang us the new version. We enjoyed the sweet strains of "Harry the Scarecrow was a big and frightening beast, with a great straw hat and bib overalls and two legs made out of sticks...", sang along with "The people are really scary, the people are really scary, the people are really scary, but the candy is good. The witches will fly and goblins will growl. The vampires will BITE and the werewolves will howl. Now give me some yummy candy, now give me some yummy candy...", but the serious favorite was "The Five Days of Halloween" with the "five flying ghosts, four screaming witches, three trick or treaters, two black cats, and a pumpkin in a dark patch."

Halloween continued at school all week long as the kidlets read the script for a classic Twilight Zone episode and then watched the real thing in all it's black-and-white glory. Wednesday afternoon was spent turning my classroom into a haunted-cemetery-maze for our school book club party. I tried to take some photos of the freak-tastic maze that the yearbook jedi helped me create, but the dark room-strobe light combination wasn't really conducive to photography. I did, however, get a shot of me in my other costume for the year...Harry Potter...along with one creative kidlet who decided to dress up as my favorite HP character: Sirius Black.

By the time the "real" Halloween rolled around, I was ready for some Halloween excitement that didn't involve destroying and reassembling my classroom. Thankfully, Krystal decided to throw a Halloween shindig at her house, so all I had to do was dress-up and show-up.

Actually, we all dressed up. Krystal went as a wonderfully frumpy old lady, Emily was a scarecrow, Zealanda dressed as Alice from Twilight, Katie was a purrrrfect cat woman, and I decided to do a repeat performance of my Harry Potter impression.

And since it is no fun to dress up if nobody is around to see it, we decided to do a litle trick or treating of our own. We stopped by Emily's "Sweet Momma's house" (who is, by the way, very sweet, despite the fact that she is not Em's "Momma"), then headed over to harass the Jones before stopping by Eric's house to drop of a card and sing a very pathetic version of "Happy Birthday." Then we were off to the Barlows and then to the Barkers where they let me answer the door for some of their trick-or-treaters ...which may not have been a good idea considering three of my kidlets saw me there. I tried to tell them I was just visiting and didn't actually live there... but I do take full responsibility for any t.p.-ing that may or may not happen at that location in the near future.

After our adventures in rural trick-or-treating, we went back to Krystal's for some delicious Halloween-themed treats...

... and a few rousing games on the wii, which I have absolutely no talent for whatsoever.

It was a great evening, full of food, friends, and fun. But then, as the proverbial icing on the cake or cherry on top, a perfect Halloween was made even better by the end of daylight savings time.

As much as I love dressing up and hanging out and visiting around and eating between, SLEEPING IN is still my most preferred prepositional activity.