Snow news here

(Bad pun, I know, but that's what happens when the weather is the top of the news nearly every day and the "white gold" falls in plowable amounts twice a week and more.)

We live in New Hampshire. It snows in the winter. It's winter. Ergo....

That doesn't seem like too difficult a syllogism to complete or accept, but from the grousing I hear, I judge that I'm in the minority who agree with that position. I'm not saying that I don't appreciate warm sunshine and mild breezes or having my toes buried in the hot sand while I sip a cool drink, but that's not natural to us in the days of short sunlight up here in New England. Those descriptions suit winter vacation destinations, the getaways, the respites from our mundane lives. In fact, I doubt that we'd appreciate them as much if we didn't have this expanse of snow, the collection of icicles, the dwindling stacks of firewood, and the array of thermal undies and sweaters for contrast.

Today is the fourth full snow day of our school year which, brings the last day for students to Friday, June 17, and the last day for staff to the following Monday, June 20. A friend of mine suggests that, since snow days called now shorten our summer break, we should treat them like gifts or vacation days, and I concur. These are, for me, days to rise at my leisure, pick and choose what tasks I do and when I do them, dress for the day on my own schedule, snack or eat slowly rather than wolfing down lunch at a prescribed time, and take care of those odds and ends that I've wanted to do but haven't found time in my all too short weekends.

Our school district hasn't gone the way of another one nearby that has teachers posting snow day lessons and being available online for advice or guidance to students completing the assigned tasks so the day counts as a school day. I think the jury is still out on the effectiveness of these lessons and other repercussions, and since our district either moves at lightning speed to adopt initiatives or thinks about/discusses/ investigates the life out of a new possibility until it sinks into oblivion, I doubt that I'll see it happen while I'm actively teaching. That's fine with me because part of the impact of actual classes is the spontaneity and interaction between classmates and instructor that can't be recreated online. I know this because I've taken several courses that were hybrids: first and last class on location in a physical classroom face to face with instructor and colleagues, and the rest of the time on my own, through emails, and in a closed, weekly online chat space for classmates and instructor. The courses weren't bad because I could accomplish the week's assignments when it was convenient for me to do so, and I could multi task during the chat session, but I'm an adult, one who's interested in the one course I'm taking, and motivated to do well because I truly want to learn information and techniques offered in the course. The wish is that all high school students would fit that description, or each high school course and instruction be interesting enough to motivate every student to the utmost, but I think that's terribly idealistic. Therefore, the human interaction - the eye to eye contact, the face to face discussions, the tone of voice that means so much, the teachable moments that only arise when teacher and students are together - continues to enhance education in classrooms of a wide variety of descriptions, making them still the best places, in my humble opinion, for many kinds of teaching and learning to occur.

Okay, I'm off my soap box for now. I think I'll do the last two days' newspaper crossword puzzles (yes, we still read actual newspapers) if they haven't yet been used to encourage the fire in the wood stove, and I may just make a loaf or two of banana bread or a pan of brownies... or not. This is one of those rather aimless days that I'm thoroughly enjoying: the gift of a summer vacation day, five months early.

Friday the 13th

(Yes, I know... two days in a row...wow! Maybe she's actually going to write here more regularly! Uh huh... maybe)

I have a friend who pays attention to 13's because he was born on the 13th, so as an extension, the number 13 resonates with me (as do a few other numbers, like 17, 24, etc.). There's a 13 upcoming that looks like it'll be a lot of fun. This August I'll be spending Friday the 13th at the League of NH Craftsmen's annual fair at Mt. Sunapee, not as a paying fairgoer, but as a photographer's assistant, something I've never done before. One of my favorite things to do is watch people who know what they're doing, do what they know how to do, so this will be heaven for me. Not only will I be working close up with someone whose expertise with the camera and sweep are already familiar to me and admired by me, but I'll be surrounded by artists and craftspeople whose excellence has been acknowledged by jury and it shows in every piece they've created. These people do the kind of work that I aspire to do, and rubbing elbows with them makes me want to improve and expand my craft plentifully and immediately. To a limited degree I can do that, which I will, but with other obligations upcoming near the end of August and for 180-some days after that, I feel like I can't jump in with my whole heart and soul just yet. Still, that proverbial itch can be scratched just a bit as I prepare for the upcoming fairs and shows. I'm greatly looking forward to this next Friday the 13th!

Midsummer

I don't know that today is official Midsummer, but it certainly feels like it. The weather has been blessedly drier than the past two weeks, and it's a day of accomplishment: a lovely new screen door on the porch, paperwork for a craft fair that I help to run updated, a check mailed to pay for dinner at the reunion of a high school class for whom we were advisors all those years ago, and reservations made for a couple of luxurious nights away for our anniversary next month. One small item made me pause in all this enjoyable activity: a single red leaf on my lawn.

The mister marks the turning of the days when he starts to feel the increasing earliness of sunset, probably because he's looking forward to cross-country season, and the runs are often in the later, cooler part of the day. He also gauges it by a particular maple tree in a cemetery nearby: as soon as there's a tinge of color other than green among its leaves, he calls that the beginning of the end of summer. To that I say, "Bah! Humbug!"

We've already had Walkers' corn at three meals, a delightful experience usually slated for the last week in July but early this year due to the earlier onset of spring and heat of summer. Tonight we'll be enjoying the first stir-fry with vegetables from our garden, an event that pleases me greatly. Our garden isn't large or even medium sized by most standards of the very casual gardener, but we do manage to have a few good feeds from its limited bounty. Grilled ham steak will be the featured meat but the stir-fry will occupy a place of honor on the table, a dish made with our hands from start to finish. That feels mighty good.

I have yet to fall asleep on the lounge chair in the yard, a book splayed open across my lap, which would be another sign of deep summer, but I'm sure I can fix that soon. I'm not ready to rush back to the 186 days of delight called the school year quite yet. Let me savor July for another week and a half!

It didn't start with Lady Macbeth...

"Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it"
Lady Macbeth to Macbeth

Some well-known folks and some less so have bought in to this duplicity of maintaining a lovely, shiny, pristine surface that hides dastardly innards. Lady Mac urged hubby to do it and ended up being one of the victims. HAMLET is filled with characters whose exterior belies their interior. Even people in my own immediate world are attempting the cover-up of their true intent. It turns my stomach to be among the targets of their attempts that are so obvious to everyone but themselves, but in some cases, I'm driven, to a lesser degree, to some of the same behavior: covering up my true reactions to their smarminess. "It's all a big game." "It's just politics." What a great way to reinforce the concept that people should always be cynical for their own well-being. I grow weary of constantly being on guard against the two-faced folks.

Issues at work make me welcome the end of this school year with more genuine enthusiasm than in many other years. I plan no summer college courses at this point, and I have zero plans to do summer curriculum work after several years of it. I hope the changes instituted this past year are allowed a second year, one of stasis, to settle in and be judged as truly working or not. I've felt much frustration at the stated philosophy of Expect Excellence and its split from the reality of the current grading system. I think a lot of "brown stuff" will hit the proverbial fan in the next few weeks and again in the fall as a result of mass testing. It'll be interesting to watch the reactions.

On a lighter note, the turkeys are back in sizable numbers, and I see them several times a week on my way to school or back home again. They're a sign that, at some level, things are all right.

Waldo dog had a bath this evening and he's looking handsome....shaggy but handsome. It's almost time for him to visit the groomer.

Thunder and heat lightning preceded this rain storm, so sleep should be easier tonight. Between the cooler air and the a/c unit in the bedroom window, I shall sleep like the dead.

May (it not snow today) 9, 2010

Mother's Day was celebrated with Sis2 and Mom (and her bf Bob who is rarely more than a few feet away from her at any given moment) yesterday with a gift of cut flowers from me, a small Chinese red velvet purse complete with tassels and embroidered dragon-bird from Sis2, and a trip to Friendly's for ice cream. Mom shuffles along, her gait being stiffer with elastic stockings to her knees, and shoes that, to her, don't feel as if they're laced up quite tight enough, but she can still get from here to there. Her mental focus slides from one place to another and sometimes the past is the present, but then she'll remember something I'm sure she's forgotten, like the fact that my shop is usually open on Sunday afternoons. It's an interesting trip, and the nice part is that she's more mellow in this part of the journey than she was for most of my life.

The rest of this entry is an assortment of random thoughts:

I wonder sometimes if I weren't so helpful, would I be less memorable?

My brother is even worse than I am about getting to the post office.

What's the deal with people who get the rules, read the rules, agree to the rules, and then in the first 30 seconds expect to be the exception to the rules?

Today I'd have a tough time choosing between caramel and chocolate.

47.0 mpg That's my Prius.

We're using the wood stove on Sunday, May 9. That's a little later than I'm used to needing wood heat. Usually by the time the asparagus is sprouting up, the ashes have been cleaned out and the stove has become dormant for the season. Not this year.

Do I really need a cellphone?

NBA basketball: it's just a game.

Beads are calling my name. I think I'll allow myself to be lured by them. : )

Florida vacation 2010

What a short trip! Tuesday through Friday sounds like four days away, but when more than half of each of the end days is spent in planes and airports, the actual vacation time dwindles noticeably. I know now what I'd do differently in planning the trip, but since that's likely to be a year away, I'll make my notes and tuck them away to look at next winter.

We liked the St. Pete Beach, FL area, what we saw of it, so it's likely that we'll try to return there in the near future. The hotel where we stayed has its own large Gulf beach frontage of nice soft white sand and small shells that are constantly being washed up, and it has several pools and a nice hot tub which we used twice. The room was large enough to move around in, with two queen beds, two chairs, the ubiquitous desk/tv stand/dresser, and a good sized refrigerator in the main room, and the bathroom area with hanging rod, ironing board, large shelf and mirror over the sink in one section, and the toilet and shower in their own tiny room. As acrophobic as I am at times, I wasn't bothered by the 4th floor balcony outside our door, but I wished we had a Gulf facing room so we could enjoy the sunset. Turns out we could only see one of them due to weather and timing of arrival and departure, but we did get to see a nice sunrise, so I guess it evens out.

One of the off-putting things was the aroma. Most indoors areas smelled like a combination of mild stale smoke, cleaning bleach, and chlorine. I guess that's to be expected because of the need to purify drinking water, and because of the number of pools, but I find it unpleasant. It makes me appreciate the cleanness of the air here at home!

Say what?

I think I've mentioned the subject before, but it bears repeating: People who want to communicate something to others should do it in a way that doesn't make understanding the message a challenge or even impossible. Every time I become complacent enough to think that the average adult can do this, I find someone who should know better breaking some simple rule of writing and obscuring their message. Misspelling is one of the most frequent errors.

Today the reminder came in the form of a joke that was offered in an online space. It went something like this: "What did the green grape say to the purple grape? BREATH! BREATH!"

Breath?

After a moment I realized that the typist had meant "BREATHE! BREATHE!" because the purple color supposedly indicated asphyxiation. Cute joke, once I understood it, but there's the rub. The extra effort it took to decipher what was really intended knocked the legs out from under the humor. Too bad the typist hadn't chosen an oral delivery in which the spelling error never would have been detected.

Yes, call me a snob because I am one. Fundamentals of our own language -- or any language, for that matter -- matter. When I was a kid learning the basics of written and spoken English, I thought Spelling was just a memorization game for school rather than a necessary part of communicating accurately. Not until years later when a bunch of us were making posters to put on a homecoming float, and some of the posters had to be redone because they were misspelled did I make the connection. I don't remember the exact words now, but our class would have looked pretty foolish if the errors hadn't been corrected before the float traveled down the parade route for most of the town to see. Then I started to notice the kids who didn't spell well. I assumed that they weren't trying hard enough, and they'd improve in adulthood. Silly me.

At first, as a teacher of junior high English, I saw the matter in the same way: the kids who worked hard to memorize correct spelling succeeded in doing so, and somehow they were smarter than the kids who always did poorly on spelling tests. One day two of my students found me after school and asked me to help them translate a note that a boy had written to them because they didn't know from what he scribbled there if he liked one of them or not. Imagine that! Spelling mattered in a very practical way. We figured out together that apparently he did indeed like one of them, and they went on their way happily as I went on my way more sure of the need for correct spelling in communications. The intelligence half of my belief was shattered by an extremely smart and articulate boy who devoured thick paperback books in days, but who couldn't spell more than three words in a row correctly. Try as he might, he just couldn't manage to spell many words correctly. I don't know if there's a formal name for this kind of situation, but it must be something to do with the hard wiring in the brain. Clearly, he was a bright boy, but just as clearly, he couldn't spell worth a tinker's dam. I had to read his papers aloud phonetically to try to understand what he was attempting to say, and usually his insights were right on the money, but a lot of energy was involved in the discovery.

As a fairly new teacher whose classroom was on the top floor, I shared a classroom on the ground floor for one period a day with a math teacher to accommodate a student in a wheelchair. I was still naive enough to be shocked when I saw, written on the chalkboard by the math teacher, several misspelled words. Yikes! "Isn't that word wrong, Mrs. M? Isn't it supposed to be ______?" I heard from one of my students.

Before I could open my mouth, the voice of another student chimed in, "Oh, that's just Mr. K. He knows his math but he doesn't know how to spell anything right." I don't remember my exact response, but it was probably to refocus to our lesson while I erased the board and a reminder to myself to erase the board as soon as I arrived in the room on a daily basis. Later, when a bunch of us teachers were in conversation, Mr. K freely admitted that he had trouble spelling, that it wasn't his forte, and he didn't know why people made such a big deal out of it because it didn't have anything to do with how smart a person was or if they knew their material. I kept my newbie teacher mouth shut, as did at least one other math teacher, but a couple of his buddies ribbed him about it until he left the group, unhappy at being picked on. If I thought the episode would change his ways, I was being foolish because misspelled words continued to appear on the blackboard until the end of the year.

Did Mr. K's shortcoming in the area of spelling matter? Probably not as much to his students as it did to me. He taught the principles of mathematics -- proving congruence of triangles, charting correct slopes, determining the square root of a number -- and that, after all, was the purpose of his classes. Did his misspellings affect people's impression of him intellectually? Probably.

Fifteen years later I discovered another colleague spelling them "quizzs" instead of "quizzes" in a display on his bulletin board. When he asked me how I thought the display looked, I told him I thought it was very attractive....and I thought there was an E before the S in "quizzes." He didn't think so. A dictionary was found, and the truth of the matter was located within. He was dumbfounded that he'd been spelling the word incorrectly on the board, on handouts, in displays, and on folders for more than a dozen years and no one had called him on it. It mattered to him, and to this day he still mentions the issue on occasion when some communication error arises. Different folks, different styles, I guess.

Does correct spelling matter, especially in this age of texting when length of message seems to matter? Yes, it still does. I've been picked on for typing "you" rather than "u" in online text chat, and I had to work at teaching myself to ignore the need for capital letters in those chats, too, but I maintain that the style and purpose of the communication dictates the degree to which standard language format should be used. This discussion seems to replace the one about appropriate spoken language ("Would you say that to your grandmother?" "What if your mother heard you say that?") and yet it requires as much if not more consideration. If your application essay states,"I think this collage will be perfect for me," the director of admissions may think you're discussing a piece of artwork and toss your submission in the "I don't think so" pile. Colleges have their standards, after all. "U no what 2 do 4 now," seems an unlikely message to be left by a boss to her employees, but it might be fine in text messages on a cellphone between friends. Is your writing going to be seen by hundreds or thousands of people? Then be careful that your message is accurate, either in its pronunciation or in its spelling. That's all I'm trying to say.

(Now I'll go back to the top to see if Spell Check or my eyes can catch any errors before I publish this post!)