Back Among the Living

Do you remember how I once complained about not getting the summer school job? Well, in retrospect, I realize that this was the biggest blessing in disguise ever!

I had harbored these romantic images of me teaching every day until 1:00, then going over to Umass from 5-9. I thought, "This might be a slight pain in the arse, but I can handle it."

That was before I encountered EH, my "Designing Middle and Secondary School Curriculum" professor. Eunny pronounced, Oonie), as she liked to be called, was hell on wheels. This course only lasted one month. In that time, I wrote:

a pre and post assessment of my understanding of curriculum (1.5 pages each)
a 5 page "philosophy of education" at the beginning of the course
a 33 page critique of an existing ELA curriculum in Epsom, NH
a 19 page suggested modification of the curriculum
a 42 page document with three lesson plans**
a 5 page reflective paper on a presentation I gave to the class.
a post-course "updated" philosophy of education, this one totaling 13 pages. ***

**: I was required to cite literature and write a lengthy introduction to my lesson plan. NO teacher EVER writes formal lesson plans after five minutes in the business. They certainly don't write lesson plans with citations and freaking literature citations. Jesus!

***: She "corrected" my original philosophy of education, and told me to rewrite it, citing the literature we had read in class. Ahh...the literature was SHITE, and I had to basically scrap my enduring philosophy of education and write one in which I proclaim to model myself after the phony baloney "experts" we read in the course. NO teacher has a 13 page philosophy of education. Well, except for me.

The woman was psychotic and incredibly hypocritical. Keep the following three examples in mind:

1. She would regularly talk about the evils and ineffectiveness of lecturing the kids. She would tell us we would lose them, that they have an average attention span of 7 minutes, that kids will just disengage. Then, as these warnings were still hot and wet off her lips, she would launch in to lectures that would last for an hour or more! Fucking horrid.

2. When one of the women in our group didn't do her part of the project, she told us all she was refusing to accept the work. When I went to see her to appeal to her "logic" to evaluate the rest of us on the portion of the work we had done individually, she kept insisting that it was our problem as the work was meant to be collaborative. When I set up and appointment to meet her privately, she got angry, slammed the chair back under the table, buried her face in her laptop and barked, "Nancy, if you were having this conversation with your student, what would it look like?" After a brief pause, I told her, "It would not look like this, I can guarantee you that!" Then I called her a hypocrite for telling us to respect our students, and then treating me like this behind closed doors. She showed up to class ten minutes later, acting as if nothing had happened. I gave her the silent treatment for two days, and she asked my classmate, Mary, "What's wrong with Nancy?" Ahhhhh.....????

3. See the abovementioned list of work!! Add to that the average of 150 pages of reading per night.

Anyway, I'm freakin' done! My second class was pretty painless, but I'm glad to have it over, too. It seems strange not to have a major dissertation to write.

Ok, enough about that.

Every summer Stephen wants to watch the Tour de France, so we upgrade our cable. Usually I can take it or leave it, but this time around, I'm inexplicably addicted to BRAVO!!



Come on....what's not to love?

Project Runway....You're out, "Auf wiedersehen!"

Shear Genius. Awesome. Annoyingly obnoxious and egotistical people. An impossibly young looking Jaclyn Smith (she has to contain lots of plastic at this point), the over-the-top dramatics.

That Real Estate show with the absolute most arrogant asshole I've ever seen in my life (you know, the guy with the huge lips and the worst case of cheerleader cadence-itis I ever did hear.) He is so horrible and yet I'm oddly compelled to watch.

Now there's the Real Housewives show coming up, and the real estate show with the 12 year-old brokers, one of whom has that horrible combed-entirely-forward hairdo. Very dodgy.

I read something about Bridezillas on Reesie's blog. Is that on Bravo, too? Does anybody know anything about this? Praytell.

And finally, my computer is back. Lauren took me over to pick her up, for which I'm extremely grateful.

The silence of my computer is deafening. Whereas pre-repair it sounded like a jetway, it now sound blissfully like nothing. I'm trying to be optimistic, but we've been here before. A new logicboard and power supply, followed by a few days of silence. Then right back to grinding fans and all the other good stuff. But hey...as long as I'm still under warranty, I'll just keep bringing it in for repairs.

And hey....

7 days and counting until France!!