Saturday, September 29, 2007

Scottish dancing season

No, you can't shoot the dancers. Although as poorly as I've been dancing lately, it might be considered merciful to shoot me in the foot!

Today was just a show. The best thing you can say about my performance is that I fully embraced the old maxim about being confident in my mistakes. My sweet husband told me, "Unless somebody knew what the right way to do those dances was, they wouldn't have noticed any mistakes." Unfortunately, he does know how those dances are supposed to look when they're done correctly.

Must practice more. In spare time not taken up with 1) obsessing over my not-quite-spotless house but not actually doing anything to clean it, 2) grading student work that's backlogged, or 3) catching up on much-needed sleep...

Sunday, September 16, 2007

LotR-fest 2.0

At seven in the morning, the faithful began to arrive, armed with cushions, blankets, coffee, and lots of junk food (which, they inform me, does constitute an essential food group when one is under eighteen).

8:02 a.m.: After some frantic running around on my part in search of a grand master key to open the conference center and not a few "one key to rule them all" jokes, we began watching the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Twelve hours and thirteen minutes, three pizzas, dozens of doughnuts, and one roll of toilet paper later, we finished the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

I'm still fascinated by the fact that kids will show up at school on a Saturday for nothing more than watching these movies, especially when many of them were going to the Georgia Tech game that evening. They already wanted to talk about some of the discussion questions I gave them on Friday, but we had to press on with the movie-watching.

As many times as I've seen those films, I still find something new every time I see them. Over the Labor Day weekend, I watched the original Star Wars trilogy with my nephew. It was his first time to see it, and he was glued to the screen. I can't wait till he's old enough to see Lord of the Rings.

Maybe by then I'll be ready to do another movie marathon.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Back to school, back to routine

Well...sort of back to routine. I figured out that between August 9th and September 9th, I'll have spent 13 nights sleeping away from my own bed. (And there's a ginormous tree branch poked into the roof like a toothpick into a cupcake above my bed. I'm thankful that I was not in that bed when the tree branch met the roof.)

So. Year 2 of Fantasy as a Genre. Still full of students that could kindly be called "behavior problems." They keep it fun, and they seem to listen better than last year's class did. Lord-of-the-Rings-a-pa-looza is in ten days; it promises to be thrilling.

Ninth grade class retreat is this week. I actually got my sub plans in early -- that will never happen again! I'm looking forward to the two days up at camp, especially because I think my homeroom is actually going to have a decent skit this year.

As for the Brit Lit classes, two have an unusual number of girls in the section. I've never had a section where the girls outnumbered the boys, but it's been interesting. I've maintained for the past couple of years that by the time they're juniors, the girls at school get reticent in classes with the boys, particularly when the boys are obstreperous. (There are quite a few obstreperous boys in this junior class, but none of them are in my sections yet.) As a result, it's often more difficult to get the girls to speak out and take leadership roles in the course. It could just be the blend of personalities in my sections this term; so far, however, the girls are being slightly dominant in class discussion. My holds-degrees-from-two-women's-colleges self is loving it. :)

There's a lot that's positive right now, although I feel like my life for the past eight months was taken over with infertility issues. Finally, finally, finally, we're moving forward with treatment, and there may be a light at the end of this tunnel. Even if there's not a light, there's at least forward motion, and that's better than standing still.