Girl 1: Did you lose your phone?
Girl 2: Yeah.
Girl 1: What for? For cussin’ out your mama?
Girl 2: My mama don’t care if I cuss her out.
Girl 1: Then what’d you lose the phone for?
Girl 2: I don’t know.
Hypothetical Exchange
Results For "Month: April 2012"
Canvas
When your medium is chalk, the world is your canvas.
When your family includes a rambunctious five-year-old, escape is your standard.
Bike
We’ve been working on it for some time now: riding a bike. It’s something K and I take for granted, one of the shared interests that helped in its own little way to solidify our relationship years ago.
The Girl didn’t take to it immediately. She was scared of everything: going up hill; going down hill; turning; going straight; starting; stopping. It all scared her. “I was beginning to think she’d be like Babcia,” K remarked today.
It’s been a long time coming…
http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786
Inviting In, Keeping Out
It’s not something we experience daily: we’re often on our way or long gone when the sun shines through the kitchen/dining room window like this. That makes weekend light unique: we know it’s a day off when we tumble downstairs to see something like this.
We invite it in, making sure all the blinds are open and even turning off a few lights to enjoy the warmth of early morning spring light.
We aren’t the only ones glad to see the spring light.
The raspberry and blackberry canes are bursting with excitement, literally.
And so while some spring guests are welcome, others aren’t: last year, birds ate every single berry long before they were even ripe. This year, we’ve put up netting — a polite “Keep Out” that has me curious about its ultimate effectiveness.
Greater Expectations
It’s the end of the year, which means the English I students are tackling Great Expectations, having just finished a brief overview/review of clauses and sentence types. “To understand Dickens,” I explained a couple of weeks ago, “you have to break apart some of his incredibly complex sentences into manageable chunks.” So we practice: every day, students entering class are greeted by a few sentences of from the previous evening’s readings. The bell-ringer, starter, whatever you want to call it:
At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s, and my hesitating ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting me, as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage where her candle stood. She took no notice of me until she had the candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously saying, “You are to come this way today,” and took me to quite another part of the house.
Students cross out unnecessary phrases — prepositional, gerund, participial — and try to find the gold: a single subordinate clause. “If you find a subordinate clause,” I explain, “you know it’s either a complex or compound-complex sentence; if you don’t, you know it’s a simple or compound sentence.”
The results are improving daily.
Blossoms and Satan
Our lone rose is blooming.
And with our holly cut back, it’s easy to see why the sweet gum that continually plagued me was so difficult impossible to kill, other than it being a sweet gum tree.
It wraps itself around all that’s good and perverts it to its own nefarious ends. Sounds familiar…
Keeping and Surrendering
“Hey L, come help me take out the trash and recycling,” I call as we finish up playing tag in the front yard, our new daily tradition. I pull into the laundry room the wicker basket we put our paper recycling in during the week and have her help me transfer the paper from it to the tub we’ll take out to the street. And then she sees it: one of her drawings. There. In the recycling.
She gasps.
“What’s this doing here?!” she asks, confused. “Are you throwing this away?”
I think fast and answer truthfully: “Well, we went through everything, and we’re saving the best.”
She looks at one of her crayon drawings and asks incredulously: “And this?!?”
Truthfully, it is quite good.
“Well, we can take that,” I admit. “It’s a good drawing.”
“And this?!” she exclaims, pulling out another. “And my subtraction work?!”
Soon she’s pulled out every single item of hers, each time accompanying the delicate removal with a gasp of shock and horror.
I explain to her that we can’t keep everything, making a mental note to check with K before having the Girl help sort recycling again. Still, it’s not a lesson she’ll learn quickly: most of us tend to hold onto things more than we should.
Work
One class began working on Flowers for Algernon.
Another class continued with Great Expectations.
Still another class began looking at the notion of voice in writing.
Busy day back.
Preparing
Photo by Alexandre Duret-Lutz
The day before school starts again, I always get a bit nervous. What’s the return going to be like? Is it going to be like pulling teeth to get them to work? What will their attitudes be like? What will my attitude be like?
Easter 2012
