Wow.... It's been a while
I just looked at the date of my last post, and while it seems like the stuff I was writing about happened very recently, I've gone almost a whole month without blogging. I blame NCLB and the SOLs. My kids are taking the eight grade writing test on Tuesday and Wednesday. They have gone three years without a standardized writing test... I'm responsible for teaching/making sure they know and remember three years of writing instruction in six months of classroom time while also preparing them for the reading test in May. Anyway, it's been a crazy short month with me grading lots of essays and worrying a lot. Although I do see lots of improvement in some of my students' writing, there are still a lot that I don't think will pass the test. Unfortunately, since they only get tested in eight grade, they bad scores reflect on me. I think we're running close to the deadline to make our failing sub-groups (African Americans and SPED) improve enough to near the passing percentage. But, oh well, I've poured so much of my soul and heart into teaching them how to write that if they don't do better this year, my feeling of self-worth is going to be trashed. I can't imagine how I can teacher where I am and have children. One group of kids is going to be severely slighted. Being a good teacher (I am going to say good teacher because there are plenty of teachers who don't care and who leave at 2:30 and don't do anything at home and don't wake up at three in the morning worrying about how many of your students understand the necessity of the three part parallel thesis statement) takes everything you have and everything you didn't think you have. I just come home and crash everynight. I don't know how much energy I can give to my own kids.
Okay, enough ranting about how much my job drains me of energy. I just have to say that I love my cats. Jack is so cute and is sitting on my shoulder and headbutting my ears. He was a good pick. Waffles is sitting on the Christmas tree box upstairs in the loft and looking at me. I feel like I've been neglecting them. Jack took a receipt our of a plastic bag, balled it up, and started whacking it around the apartment. Then, he started attacking the windows. Poor baby just wanted to play so badly. He was mewing up a storm last night when I started to play with the cat wand thingy.
Things to do this weekend:
1. Work out (since I've been too exhausted to do it much this week)
2. Go out to lunch with Antonietta
3. Clean up kitchen and living room
4. Go laptop shopping (I really want one, badly)
5. Purchase waning supply of beauty products (I haven't bought anything since Christmas!)
6. Put together wedding planning binder (Woo hoo! Planning! Wedding!) (I went to Staples yesterday and picked out a periwinkle binder - Ben's thinking about that as one of the colors for the wedding)
7. Go check out wedding sites (You know, it's really hard to plan for something a year and four months away and not want to do it sooner)
8. Plan meals for the next week and go grocery shopping -- I've been eating cream of wheat and bagels for dinner most of last week, well, on the days we didn't go out to eat
So in the tradition of Ben and I being totally untraditional, like, I knew exactly when my ring was ready, he's been helping me pick out wedding dresses online. How bad is this? It's hard getting married to your best friend who you share everything with.
posted by Anna @ 8:08 AM
8 Comments:
I love the way you totally glossed over getting engaged by just mentioning it since all your readers (that you know of) already knew about it. :P
BTW, a picture of ring on hand would be nice.
First, congratulations! I find marriage to be an utterly frightening proposition, but it seems to be just right in this case. Well played. And periwinkle is hilarious... the name, I mean, not the color.
Second, right smack in the middle of the paragraph about writing, you have this: "I can't imagine how I can teacher where I am and have children."
Stop making fun of my poorly worded sentence with various degrees of ambiguity. I have to give a standardized writing test tomorrow and Wednesday; my brain no worky.
yeah... i'm glad i don't have to take a standarized test... they kind of suck. also, i never learned what a three part parallel thesis statement was... i didn't know a thesis statement had parts, let alone parallel ones.
by the way, i make academic books.
Wow. What did your teachers teach you in English. The three part parallel thesis statement is the corner stone of the well organized standardized essay.
If your three main support points about what makes a good friend is that they listen, are nice, and share you would write a thesis like this: A good friend is someone who listens, is nice, and shares. Or, A good friend is someone who is a listener, nice, and sharing.
Granted, my kids have been testing all day with the world's worst prompt and I feel like their undoubtedly poor performance will reflect poorly on me. My brain no worky.
PS - pictures of potential dresses would also be nice to see. Email perhaps?
Anna, I got my mail server set up, so I can give you any email address you want @fivepercentyak.com . I can also give you a webpage at http://www.fivepercentyak.com/~annalee or whatever you want to be after the tilde. I didnt really catch exactly what you were trying to do, so send me an email at teegoff@comcast.net or something. I will also try to call you tomorrow.
yeah, i definitely never learned about that thesis statement business. maybe that's one of the reasons i sucked at writing essays... though somehow i doubt it. as cold-hearted and logical as i can be, once i start trying to write down a logical argument, it all becomes one giant mess of convoluted rubbish that i don't really have the patience to untangle. plus i found that most of what i had to say would really only fill about a page and the other five to ten pages were just basically nonsense filler. this is why i was a drama major, which also turned out to be nonsense filler...
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