rejoice for we are still standing

I'm not sure I'm brave enough to be a good teacher.

From an article in today's Toronto Star:

Kids slow to turn frugal
Perhaps the reality of recession doesn't hit home with children until they move out

...

Last month I found myself wondering, what if the bank calls the $6,000 loan on our line of credit? I'd barely started pondering how we'd raise that much cash, between the mortgage, car and braces payments...

...

We cancelled a Christmas ski trip to Vermont after the price suddenly shot up $1,200 because of the lagging loonie. We're heading to Quebec, instead, at about half the cost and three-quarters the mountain.

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Hey, here's a suggestion, why don't you NOT go on a $600 ski vacation and use that to pay down 10% on your line of credit! WOW. I think that's a pretty amazing suggestion on my part considering I haven't even looked at your finances and I've already found a way to pay down 10% of your line of credit. I must be a financial savant or something.

Also, maybe your kids aren't registering the reality of the recession, because despite the fact that you have at least four different debts - a line of credit, a mortgage, car payments, and braces payments - you're still going on a $600 ski vacation! Mixed messages much?!

My practicum is over. Ended a couple weeks ago actually. I feel really alone.

Teaching good.
Management bad.
Need fix.
Must be better.
Must be better.
Must be better.

Fucking Friday Night Lights has me crying a fucking 12 minutes in! This is fucking ridiculous!

Monday I start teaching. The unit is chromosomal inheritance. The level is Grade 11U. Timeframe is 4 days, ~75 minutes each, with Friday as a buffer. Plan is:

Monday - DNA chemistry, chromosomes (aka boring)
Tuesday - Plasmids, Biotech (Cloning, Fingerprinting, Detection)
Wednesday - Sex, er I mean Gender
Thursday - Genetic Disorders (plus assignment)

It's all going to be boring talky talk with blackboard writey write, because limited prep time and the subject material doesn't particularly lend itself to anything interactive at this level. There'll probably be a lively discussion on Wednesday, which is why I expect it to take the whole period. I might lead a class discussion about genetic screening on Thursday, dunno.

I need backup talking points though, if I end up running short. Normally, I could just make them do textbook stuff, but I don't like how the textbook covers the material, which is by jumping into the sex-linked stuff before going into the DNA stuff. When I did molecular biology in high school, we went from DNA structure and chemistry into replication, transcription, and translation, except that's in the Grade 12 course, so it's kind of a dead-end if I stick it at the end. (Diversity of Life is the next unit.) If I stick it up front, I can maybe bridge the ideas of DNA as a molecule and DNA as chromosomes and build up. I think. That's my plan anyways.

(Help.)

Matt and Julie 4ever!

(I think I've used this subject before.)

So I've been flu-ish for a week or so now. I could tell because I started getting nauseous on the bus, so I started taking flu medication, figuring I could fight it off maybe. But no, the flu-ish-ness persisted until this week and now that I seem to have picked up a secondary infection, I feel like hell x2, all with some school deadlines pounding down on my ass.

So now I sit here wondering if maybe I should have just submitted to the flu as soon I started feeling it. Maybe an earlier capitulation would have limited my suffering. Did I get too greedy?

Okay, so it's been a while. School school's been busying. Earlier this week, I did a 10-minute microteaching performance with peers that was filmed and was reviewed today. I went first and ran out of time. Oops. Next week, it's 2 lesson plans, a reflection on the microteaching, and a half-hour peer seminar. Nothing huge over-the-top, but it's enough to chip away at my free time. And, you know, NEW TV SEASON GLEE.

But you guys probably don't care about what I'm watching, not that I'm sure you guys care about what I'm learning/doing, but I figure if you're going to care about one, it'll probably be the latter. Anyways, today I found out where my practicum placement is, and it's back at Winston Churchill, with the same biology teacher whose classroom I observed twice. So I'm guessing I'm going to get that class too. I'm pleased that I get biology first, since I feel a lot more comfortable with that than I do math at this point, partially because biology's an elective that's limited to the upper years, but also due to general subject familiarity. I'm also pleased I'm back at WCCI, because Kramer and I will be running the Math Club there, a afterschool thingy for students intent on writing the CEMC math contests. So all in all, relatively good news, though my trepidation is still significant.


Oh, and for some reason, the subject of Gilmore Girls has come up amongst us classmates, and apparently I'm the only one who liked it :(

I think I had one today. It was one of those days that as you're about to drive home, you just stand in the parking lot and think about what happened and can't come up with anything. Just missed opportunities marked with hesitations, split-second decisions made without thought, ideas slung right through your mind into the trash. I feel like I missed out on almost the entire day; I don't even know what happened; I don't feel any way or another about it.

Maybe that's not the stereotypical bad day, but I think it counts.

Reading about multicultural education is like being in the room while your parents are discussing your lack of a love life.

This was the first day that I had envisioned. We were taken on a tour of Winston Churchill by the students, which was nice, though our particular student guide wasn't quite as much fun as she could have been. They took their jobs a little too seriously I think... that or I took everything a little too flippantly, which is just as likely.

We spent some time being manipulated into some teaching forms, moving our desks and chairs about to fit different conformations, engaging in variously structured discussions, and then analyzing how each method affected us as students. It was an interesting bit, because while I had thought of the differences before, I hadn't ever formalized the ideas strongly in my head. Most of us have probably distinguished the effects of sitting in rows and columns versus sitting in small groups, so it sounds silly I know, but somehow having a discussion about the effects of sitting in a particular orientation with respect to my classmates met some unrecognized yearning within me. It was the most concrete lesson we've received on how to be teachers so far, as opposed to everything else we've learned which can largely be classified under "Don't Be A Dick." It was fluffy, sure, but it's the first week, and it had the exact right transitional feeling to it.

The principal also came in and talked to us for a short 30 minutes or so. I like her. She reminded me a lot of Dr. Bartlett, my first high school English teacher, in her locution, the way she'd casually toss out her own feelings as a new teacher some 36 years ago and then weave those back into the programs at her high school, the organizational structure, the needs and wants of students, spiced with comments about how she's horrible at math, from a small town in Quebec, and generally ready to take names and kick ass. It was the speech I'd been waiting all week to hear. It was awesome, and I am excited to see what an entire school run by someone like Dr. Bartlett would be like.

Oh. And also, 89 = arccos(4-4) + 4/4. Had to resort to trig functions to get that last one.

Yeah. Today was pretty good.

That he was getting really tired of all this introductory craaaaaaaaap.

Please stop having us introduce ourselves to each other with these lame icebreaker games. I don't really care where the 30-something other people in my math teacher teacher class graduated when I can't even see their faces from the other side of the room. Can we just actually -do- something rather than talking about things that we will one day do?

That being said, I think I'll like my math teacher teacher class. The prof handed out some mathematical game handouts, such as one in which we are to create expressions equal to the numbers 1 - 100 using only 4 digits of 4 mathematical functions. I've got pretty much all the even numbers, but I've only got the odds up to 31. Beyond that, my reliance on using ±4/4 to get odd numbers fails me, as I can't reach the even values I needed with just 2 4s. This is a continuing source of frustration.

However, I don't think I'll like my biology teacher teacher class. The prof seems to be the authoritarian type who's only ever done things one way and will only ever do things that way because it's the only possible way to do things. I probed her a bit by suggesting that discrete classification of ionic and covalent bonds was incorrect, as molecular orbital theory, among others, tells us that bond electrons are never donated or received but rather that they simply spend a varying amount of time in the orbitals of each bond atom based on their respective electronegativies, and as such chemical bonds exist of ionicity.^*

Her responses were that she was a chemistry major, so she knows what she's talking about, that you can't teach molecular orbital theory to grade 9 students, and that the bottle of water I was drinking is full of ions so ions and ionic bonds must exist. But the first is clearly an appeal to authority, the third a little begging the question and a little just plain wrong since H2O is not an ionic molecule, and the second... well, I never said we had to teach grade 9 students MO theory, but we could at least not teach them stuff that was wrong.^**

In any event, it was weird being back in my old high school and not being actually part of my old high school. I said hi to an old math teacher, who responded in kind clearly not knowing who I actually was. Other than that, the freaks now lock the Huron Street door, which is a non-issue now but will soooo piss me off when it starts raining/snowing.


* The reason I even did this was because I'd overheard someone say that an ionic bond is when an atom donates an electron to another atom. Which is blatantly wrong. If that were the case, no ions would form crystals, but would instead all be liquids or even gases.

** Look, I relearned what acids and bases and how bonds work at least two times -each- in my academic career in chemistry. It's absurd that we would teach kids wrong things only to correct them later, and then continue to use some of the older, incorrect models in varying contexts.

Though a female student did initiate contact with my rump using, I believe, a water bottle. Apparently I was moving too slowly for her liking. I totally admit I was intentionally walking slowly, but did not realise I was in anybody's way. Still, I sort of regret not lying that that was as fast as I could walk due to a congenital defect, because really, if you're not going to lie to teenage girls, who are you going to lie to?

The school was quite large, and a bit grungier than I expected. Grungy in the "nobody cares to ungrunge this place" as opposed to the grunge of my high school which was "the building's 120 years old, what the hell did you expect." We spent the morning just in a classroom getting to know one another and handling administrative details about the course, Educational Psychology, though the principal did briefly whirl in and out with her posse. Apparently we get the full tour package on Thursday.

Tomorrow's my subject classes - biology and math - downtown, the latter being IN my old high school. I think I'm taking my half hour lunch break to go to Papa Ceo's pizza - I didn't go there much as a high school student, and now regret all the trips I made to Pizza Pizza instead.

Okay, it was actually just registration, but still. It may have been the first time I've been up at 8:30 AM since last August... or rather, the first time I've been awake at 8:30 AM having been asleep at some time between midnight and 8:30 AM.

Remember way back when, when the first day of school was just introductions and the course syllabus and just chatting about the teacher and ourselves? And then at some point as you advanced through high school, that stuff which used to take a full day instead took just a period, and then half an hour, and then even just 10 minutes, as though there was justsomuchtoteachwecan'tpossiblehavetimetotalkwe'lljusthavetolearnlearnlearnaswegogogo. Today was four hours of lineups and people verbally projecting information into my ears, to the extent that I can't actually say they were speaking and I was listening because at some point my brain just overloaded and what once was English became Futurama's Alien Language 1. I'm sure everything I need, however, is in the SIX POUNDS of reading material I was given. Not textbooks, mind you, and I even turned down some handouts.

I laughed at all the fashionable girls with teeny purses.


The real first day of school is actually Monday, which I start at my assigned high school - Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute. I'm going to go dressed as casually as possible and see if I get mistaken for a student. Hopefully, I won't get stabbed. If you never hear from me again, that's probably what happened.

Newspaper columnist writes this, "Disclaimer: I am straight, rabidly heterosexual in fact, not a lick of Lesbos in my nature. Not that there's anything wrong with it."

Oh really, you don't say? Does this actually work? "You're ugly and stupid, no offense." Do people actually not realise what they're saying as they say these massively idiotic things?

Earlier this summer, 4 rich white kids in Muskoka drive off a bridge into a lake, killing 3. The survivor, on her boyfriend driver, says, "I don't want people to think he was a drunk driver or anything like that. He was a good guy." Huh, I thought, fishily defensive and predictably rote with regards to the relationship between drunk driving and moral goodness, but fine. Then as the investigation proceeds, it turns out the four of them had over THIRTY-ONE drinks at a restaurant before getting in the car. Are you fucking kidding me?



I'll add, the same columnist wrote the following gems:

That counts as news at these Games – no Chinese athlete on the podium at the Water Cube.

There were 25 swimming events that the Chinese did not medal in, and there were no Chinese standing on the podium in the Water Cube on days 1, 7, 8, 10, or 12.

The Lightning Bolt is anything but, out of the blocks, with the seventh slowest reaction time in the 100.

Do you how long it took me to read this sentence before I figured out that she wasn't calling the "fastest man in the world" slow?

The former artistic gymnast, placed into a trampoline club by his parents as a youngster, did acknowledge that he'd hoped for a plumper score, was a teensy bit deflated at not earning a flat 41, aware that Lu was quite capable of supplanting his interim gold status, though a couple of other top challengers faltered badly.

Is this... is this even a sentence? What is this?

In fact, Canada has gone cross-border shopping for Olympians as well. Thing is, we grab athletes when they're long past their best-before date: Jujie Luan 24 years removed from her fencing gold for China; diver Arturo Miranda, Cuban-turned-Canuck, here at age 36, his first Games.

Go to hell, Rosie Dimanno.

So with my feisty new computer, I decided to give Neverwinter Nights 2 a looksee. I heard you get an actual party now, instead of a Diablo II-style henchman who's inevitably a rogue, because nobody wants to be a solo rogue. And it's true, you do get a party now, except it's a party of 3 Diablo II-style henchmen who are more than a little dumb. Like, standing idly on the other side of an open door while you get beat up kinda dumb.

Oh sure, you could switch to take over that character, but when you do, your entire viewpoint changes and you have to reorient yourself in the chaos, while the character you were controlling charges headlong into a pack of baddies through a hallway of traps, her being a pansy ass rogue be damned! I'm thinking that's why the default difficulty has no friendly fire. I'm thinking I should start over as a Fireball-chucking Wizard.

I want isometric games again. I know, 3d immersive experience blahdeeblah, but sometimes you don't want to play a game where you're completely alone, saddled with a team of retards, or is simple enough that a five-year old could engage in its primary mechanics. And nobody wants to ever play a game where your party members run back and forth between, but not attacking, the archers who are riddling your body with arrows and the swordsmen who are helpfully amputating your wounded body parts. Just give me full control again. It's not like gamers have demonstrated an abhorrence of controlling small teams simultaneously - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 and Company of Heroes are both games I've played recently and thoroughly enjoyed - but god forbid the RPG genre let that happen. To control an entire party at once would destroy the role-playing immersion that largely doesn't exist anyways because you're fighting poor controls, graphics, and cliched environments with the occasional -wtf- result thrown in just to keep you on your toes. I have a feeling Fallout 3's going to let me down the same way....

I'm going to finish the game. But I'm not going to be happy about it!

Guys. I just got involved in an Internet forum argument about racism and I was accused of committing a false analogy fallacy... WITHOUT EVEN USING AN ANALOGY.

What % of this is my own fault?

How is it that Lisa Loeb got bounced from label to label and is now relegated to writing children's albums? I'm listening to The Very Best of Lisa Loeb, which I suppose is a biased sample, but still. Half the songs are downright good, and at least half the remainder contain some spark of genius that makes me regret not liking the rest of it. Usually, that'll be the chorus making me bemoan verses that sound like they're from another song entirely, but Underdog, for example, is a song that actually grows on me as I listen to it. I hate it every time I start listening and though the lyrics never change, somehow the music shifts under my feet without my even realising it.

How the fuck did we choose "I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ha" over

The time between meeting and finally leaving is
Sometimes called falling in love