Fantastic Little Chicadees II

I have raised my kids right. Today one of my fourth years brought a panettone in for the class. She was like "Is this the stuff you brought for us last year?" and "It is from Italy, so is it right?" Turns out that she was thinking of pandoro, but that's all right. Later this afternoon I located and found pandoro to bring before Christmas break (my own tradition). But I thought, how fantastic that she saw something Italian cultural, recognized it, and brought it in! I was impressed.

A bit too much ink still smudging the top, but not too shabby for my first attempt at printmaking!

Fantastic Little Chicadees

I had the best time yesterday with two of my little chicadees at the Virginia Museum of Art's Teen Renaissance Symposium. And my two little chicadees were so good. We left the school around 9am and they threw everything they had in the back of my car and I looked at their empty hands and said "I notice that there are no notebooks in your hands." So I pulled out some new notebooks for them, admonishing them to use them for this symposium and for other fantastic lectures that they will have the opportunity to attend in college--lectures that maybe have nothing to do with what they are studying, but that will be interesting and that will broaden their minds anyway. I also asked them to think of questions they have and to write them down. We all piled into the car and soon arrived at the museum.

The first session of the day was on Michelangelo and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was based on findings by a Dr. Meshburger reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oct 10, 1990 that the red cape around God and the cherubs in the Creation of Adam resembles the cross-section of a brain. We then listened to some Renaissance music and danced a Renaissance dance. After lunch, there was a fantastic lecture on Fibonacci's number and the Mona Lisa, a lecture on feminism in Shakespeare, and a commentary on the work of Durer (a special exhibit of his engravings is currently at the museum). We also made intaglio prints (my first attempt, which I will post). Dinner and a lecture on Leonardo's view of the body and soul. I had a blast. The kids had a blast. The kids were renaissance dancing in the parking lot. It was a fantastic day.

Amilynne and Vincent

I just got off the phone with Amilynne and she had the best news: this weekend, she saw her first Van Gogh. There was a special exhibit that came to her museum with lots of cool artists, but of course the Van Gogh was really what mattered. She said that she stood in front of it for 10 minutes and cried. I did the same the first time I saw a Van Gogh--the resident one at the Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. When Ami was telling me about it I was the biggest geek but I cried too. Standing in front of a Van Gogh just evokes such strong emotions.

It's one of those things that you really just have to DO. Van Gogh has to be seen in person, becasue he is all about the paint. And no matter what, a flat reproduction can't get the fantastic effect of the paint across.

I have to admit, though, that it was quite fun this last summer before Amilynne had seen a Van Gogh to tell her about the fantastic Van Gogh exhibit that came through here. A couple of years ago I got us a pair of matching Van Gogh books, and all of the paintings from this exhibit were in there, so over the phone I was all "...Now if you'll turn to p. 128, I saw that one too..."--she was green with envy. Her eyes even turned green. Permanently.

Next we just need to take a trip to New York to see the Starry Night.... We might need 15 minutes of weep time in front of that one.

Who am I kidding? The must is that my sister and I just plain must museum hop until we're dead. It's all so much better in real life.

Electric Coconut

Today I was administering a test in another teacher's classroom. This classroom belongs to an English teacher, and the walls were plastered with definitions of literary terms and parts of speech. As I looked around, I really had to wonder why parts of speech are so foreign to my students. The information is there for them.

The first thing that hit me, though, as I walked into the room was an overpowering coconut/vanilla smell. Woah! The teacher had a plug-in air freshener in the wall. By the time I left 90 minutes later, I was heady with coconut. I wondered how the students, still in the room testing, were faring.

It's unfortunate, though, that as strong as that coconut scent was, once I left the room I left the smell. If I had been in a room of cigarette smoke, I would have stunk like cigarettes all day. I do wonder why it is so hard to make a pleasant smell stay.

Catapults

Last night the Simpsons had a catapult in their intro: the couch in front of the TV was attached to a catapult and they ended up catapulted over a mountain range. I laughed. I do love a good catapult. It all started with seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 10th grade English. I laughed so hard that I fell out of my chair when that cow came flying over the castle wall. Then again, a couple of years later, I was watching Saturday Night Live and they had one of their fake commercials for the Yard-A-Pult, a personal size catapult that gets rid of nasty things like baby diapers, hot coals, and dead pets by flinging them over the fence. Once again: laughed so hard that I rolled off the couch.

The real mystique is being able to throw things really really far using only physics. No gunpowder, no explosions, just gravity and torque, and CRASH! (or BOOM! or SPLAT!, depending on what you're throwing...) Total destruction.

When I was in Torino, I went to the medieval park they have down by the Po, and inside there was the coolest weapons shop, and they had a working mini-catapult. WOW. I wished so much that I had space in my luggage for that. It was beautiful, made of polished wood and all. And it would be so fun for flinging things around the house.

They also had guillotines in two sizes. But that's a topic for another day.

Life ReDesign

Sometimes I waste time thinking about what I would have designed into my life if I had started out with a bit of foresight. Nothing major--I'm not talking about warping into some weird life that doesn't resemble mine, because I have a good life and I'm quite happy with it. All the same, sometimes I find that I'm confronting a task and that my skill set doesn't quite measure up, and I think about when I could have possibly gotten the training I would need to attack said tasks head on. The skill set most often popping up as deficient is my skill with computers.

Now I'm not a complete idiot. I am a beast on Word and I'm darned good with Excel, and I make the meanest PowerPoint presentation you've ever seen. I love to play around on Illustrator and Photoshop, and I've even created (rudimentary) classroom materials with them. It's all kind of fun, because I don't know computers very well and so I can believe that computers inhabit a world with order where the right formula can get you what you want every time. It is this idealism that sinks my soul when I come up against a task that I want to figure out for myself but that just doesn't make sense, especially if it's something frivolous that I really could do myself but I just think it would be fun to make a bit fancier.

Or like blogging for instance. I would love to know enough to widen the column of writing on this page just a bit more. Why? No reason besides the fact that I think it would look better. Or I would love to be able to put together a cool web page, but I honestly don't have the skill, especially because I would want it to look good, not amateurish.

So should I ever come up with the ability to go back in time knowing what I know now, I wonder if I wouldn't make another choice--say web design--instead of what I do now. Or somehow in addition to what I do now.

It just would be kind of cool to understand better this cute little box I sit in front of every chance I get.

Breathing Again

How splendid is it to be able to breathe in again without accidentally inhaling too much political rhetoric! Sure, not all my guys won on Tuesday, but after watching the presidential race whittle down since last winter, WHO CARES! It's just nice to be able to see something different on the news (or to ignore the news altogether without feeling guilty about it).

On the downside, the people who live above me have been SO loud lately. They were shouting so loudly about 40 minutes ago that Amilynne could hear them over the phone. Now they're pounding around and stomping or dropping things on the floor or something. I usually try not to pound on the ceiling until nighttime, because during the day things are just more loud than they should be at night, but this is rediculous, and far beyond the noise of normal life. This has got to be the worst thing about living in an apartment.

The first nine weeks ends this week! Yippee! We're 25% through! And Thanksgiving's in 2 1/2 weeks! Yahoo!

Maria Full of Grace

Monday night we excursioned out to Williamsburg for a flick: Maria Full of Grace. All about a Colombian girl who decides to take a job smuggling drugs into the US by swallowing them. You would think that this would be tragic, and at times it is, but happily the movie didn't end in an absolute tragedy (although there is tragedy along the way) and that's good.

The movie also provides a glance into life as an illegal immigrant. It presents a very organized community that understands its environment and how to get by in it. What an issue illegal immigration is! I am worried that so many states are taking measures to withhold services to illegal immigrants. Of course I would prefer that all immigrants were legal, but I don't think that withholding services will effectively stem the tide of people leaving everything for a bite of the American hamburger. It will only create a wider diaspora between those that have and those who don't. How many people pushing for these reforms employ illegal immigrants to perform menial tasks an American wouldn't do?

How to fix all of this? I don't know. Giving opportunities for the poor of these countries to learn a trade may be the first step. Being willing to give legal status to the people who do our grunt work may also be a part of it. Keeping needed services from illegal immigrants is not the way to do this: it will only contribute to poverty, crime and disease in our society.

Mix Tapes

Yesterday I got the BEST thing in the mail. Amilynne sent me a mix tape. This was in response to an urgent SOS because the mix tape that she gave me when we saw each other in August has begun to self-destruct in my car tape deck. It's all I've listened to in my car since I got it, and it's starting to go. So last night I called Ami and said "Hey! I got your tape!" and she said "Pop it in!" and I said "No, I think I'll save it for the car--I'm going to watch I'm Not Scared tonight and then go to bed." "Oh." I could hear that she was a little disappointed that I hadn't popped it right in. But here's the deal: it's for the car, and it's not like I won't be SOSing in 2 months saying "Help! This tape is starting to warp! Make me another!"

But I couldn't wait. I popped it in when we got off the phone. It's magical. Where else can you listen to Brian Jonestown Massacre one minute and Bert and Ernie the next, and not much later you hear the Smiths? She even has Counting Crows on there, and I don't remember her liking Counting Crows.

I fell asleep in the middle of I'm Not Scared.

There is something about a mix tape. I've made lots of them; I've gotten lots of them. You're always in the mood for one. And somehow they end up getting shared around. Mix tapes are for being in love, for declaring independence from being in love, for letting friends know you miss them even though you live far away, for cool things you do with friends like roadtrips or climbing water towers. And sometimes exchanging them with your sister is just a hats-off nod to the enormity of her disc collection--so good you want it all; so big you know that in all of the Christmasses at Dad's you'll never get it all burned. I've got one mix tape from a friend I used to work with. She's a Beatles fan, so there's some of that, but nuttiest of all is an old recording of "When It's Springtime in the Rockies." I was singing it one day--she was like "Woah! My grandpa used to sing that to me when I was going to sleep!" and I was like "My great-grandma wrote the words."

I caught an interview on some talk show with Quentin Tarantino. When asked what he does to show a girl he's interested, he says he makes a mix tape. Woah. That would have to be the #1 reason to get up close & personal with Quentin Tarantino. He's got to have the bossest music collection around. That would be one heck of a mix tape.

All About Eve

No. All about Amilynne.

Amilynne is in class right now. She feels sad that I haven't posted many updates about her. She's right. I should definitely talk about her more.

We just spent a few minutes on the phone. Ami has seen I ♥ Huckabees. She reports that there is a Kafka moment and that it is the funniest movie in a long time. I must say that a Kafka moment is enough to get me into the theater, although I must also say that a Kafka moment is the reason why Amilynne and I should see this movie and our brothers should not. I do still need to see it myself. Something about fall and school, I tend to miss a lot of the shows I would really love to see.

Amilynne got to go see Senator Kerry do his campaign song-and-dance on Friday. She came away all signed up to help with the election. What a good little trooper Amilynne is! I've been looking at the Senator's website. His stance on education makes me hopping mad. He says that teachers aren't treated like professionals because they aren't paid enough and because they don't have enough responsibility. What? Not enough responsibility? Is that why I have to sleep for a week solid after school lets out for the summer? Because tonight I'm going to go see I ♥ Huckabees instead of writing the test I'm giving to my first years? Dad told me that Teresa Heinz Kerry said that Laura Bush had never had a real job. Hmmm. I'm pretty sure she was a teacher once upon a time. The Kerrys can take their opinions about teachers and shove it.

Sorry. I got off track. I'm writing about Amilynne.

Amilynne made me another mix tape. The one she gave me in August has not left my car stereo and is about worn out. I gave her some constructive criticism for this one: no Missy Elliott. Apparently she took the constructive criticism and I am looking forward to a real boss tape.

The Suicide of Ajax by Exekias, c. 540 BC. 

It's All About the Greeks

I picked up a copy of the complete plays of Sophocles. I haven't read Greek drama since my freshman year in college, when I had a fantastic Intro to Classical Lit class from Dr. Timothy (I think that was his name) Winters. He was so good that when he picked up and moved to some college back east the next year, there was a real temptation to switch to classical studies, pick up, and follow. We read the Orestia of Aeschylus. I remember really liking it, and I just dug open my treasure chest of files of notes from my undergrad work and found that the person I would have liked most to play was Clytemnestra. (Side note: there is nothing happier than my treasure chest of files of notes from my undergrad work. Everyone should get the chance to major in Humanities at least once--completely impractical, but what a richness, having the charge to study the best work and greatest achievements of humanity. It makes my soul soar just to think about it.)

At any rate, it's Sophocles I've got now, and not knowing which play would be best, I started with the one at the front: Ajax. Now. I do love the tale of Ajax. There is a fantastic Greek black figure vase by Exekias where Ajax is planting his sword in the ground to fall on it. I'll have to try to post an image. So back to Sophocles. Let me just say that for "saying it like it is" in a very straightforward yet naked with feeling way, it's all about the Greeks. And it's because of the whole strophe-antistrophe chorus thing: they have the ability, within just a few lines of dialogue, to lay bare a hidden agenda or emotion or to state the epiphany of the whole play. How do we know how deeply Ajax's wife dreads his death? She says how much, but rather than saying it to herself and sounding like an introspective fool, she talks it out with that most perceptive chorus. (Could the Greek chorus be the predecessor to modern psychology?) It doesn't just work with the wife; it works with the brother as well: Imagine! A manly way to express one's deepest griefs, fears, thoughts, and feelings!

It is no wonder that terms as singular as drama and pathos come from the Greek. The theater is their ballgame, and they describe it best.

Black Elk Speaks

Today I finished reading Black Elk Speaks, a narrative by Black Elk, a Lakota medicine man who tells about Custer's Last Stand and the Wounded Knee Massacre. A link to read it online can be found by clicking on the title of this posting.

The book is fascinating because of its details about what it means to be a visionary in Native American cultures, and because of its descriptions of everyday and special happenings at the end of the ninteenth century as native peoples experienced the injustices and changes related to the settling of the West. Black Elk talks about so many battles, and I found it amazing that he lived through all of them.

It was good and thought-provoking reading. And I so enjoyed having it online so I could just look up a chapter while I ate my lunch.

But I never wanted to see the underside of a semi

A lovely day today (yesterday now, I guess). Thomas and I headed for the hills for some autumn foliage viewing. On the way west, we stopped for gas and found gelato! The skinny's on the other blog (linked by clicking on the title of this entry). We then headed for the Blue Ridge Parkway and drove south. We dodged random showers and some clouds, but found mostly sun and a lot of breezes causing showers of leaves to fall on us on our way. We did a bit of walking at a couple of spots. We found one overlook, Big Spy Mountain, which was better viewed from the hill that the trail didn't lead to. Then we found Crabtree Falls and hiked up partway, but darkness was starting to fall and I wasn't sure I remembered how to get back to the main highway and we decided to make sure we got out while it was still light.

Then we hit the traffic. BLAH! As soon as we hit Hwy 81, we were at a standstill. It took us two hours to cover the 8 miles to the next exit. Needless to say, we hadn't planned for that slowdown. At fault was a wreck almost to the next exit: what we saw was a tow truck attached to a semi on its side with its wheels facing us. Scary! Well, best guess was that at some point it was across most of the road, because traffic was so stopped for so long. After we'd been in the traffic jam for more than an hour, a police car came by on the shoulder. Another one followed half an hour later, along with a big-blinking-arrow-sign truck. It was so nice to finally pass it all and be moving forward. By the time we were arriving home, we had started to run out of music to listen to, and I had brought the music, so you know how long that takes.

Red Skies at Morn...

... teachers be warned. I drove to work today with a most beautiful sunrise all around me. The skies were pink and orange and the trees in silhouette were still leafy and as I was crossing the bridge I thought how glad I was not to be a sailor.

Can I please be a sailor? No rainstorm, thunderstorm, or squall can compare with a roomful of 25 tenth graders taking the PSAT.

Gentile reader, you may wonder what tenth graders are doing taking the PSAT. Isn't that an eleventh grade thing? Well, I asked, and apparently all of the tenth graders are taking it this year too. What a waste of money.

You see, they haven't grasped the idea that standardized tests have a schedule and that they must be silent while they take them. There was also a guy who wanted to go to the bathroom as soon as I restarted things after the bathroom break. Too bad. If this had been an SAT session, I would have ejected about ten of them.

I wonder how much of a pay raise teachers could have had if they weren't wasting money having the tenth graders take the PSAT.

Too yummy for a title

I just had the great joy and privilege of introducing ten teenagers (my 3rd year class) to the bliss that is Nutella. Y-U-M-M-Y, or, put simply in Italian, che buono! Every job should have moments as fulfilling as this. It seriously reminds me of the day before I came home from Italy when Roberta Z. made me eat Nutella crepes. I had sworn not to eat the stuff because of its devastating effect on waistlines. The crepes were good. I didn't make crepes for my students--we had Bistro Cornbread crackers, which are super yummy with Nutella. But to make up for it, they got lemon Loacker too. They had to earn it by using various forms of the partitive to ask for it. (Repeat: Vorrei un cracker con della Nutella. Vorrei qualche biscotto. Vorrei un po' di tutto.)

Which reminds me that a while back I was watching a Will and Grace rerun and Grace was smacking on some lemon Loacker. Hee Hee!! It wasn't a product placement at all--you had to recognize that bright yellow bag in her hand. And recognize it I did.

Well, I was pretty good and only had half a cracker with the Nutella stuck on the knife scraped onto it. Then I had my lunch of a sandwich, an apple, and some edamame. Now it's back to work. We'll see how long the Nutella stays locked in the closet.

www.nutella.it

3-Way Calling, Ad Infinitum

Tonight all of my family was on the phone together! First it was Dad and Ami and me, then David called and Dad called him back. We needed Alan! I tried to explain to Ami how to go get him. Dad and David kept talking over me... Ami eventually hung up on us trying to get Alan, so I took the opportunity while I was getting her back to explain the process to her without male intervention. ;) It worked, and we were all on the phone together. It was like Christmas.

The best part is that now that we've done it, there is no excuse not to do it again. I love talking with my family! We laugh and joke and have such a good time. I would say that the only thing better is actually getting together, but this does have some advantages: 1. No one is sneaking off to their room to read a book or to the family room to watch TV; 2. No poking (except mental poking); 3. It sure costs a lot less! Hooray for good phone plans!

Little Miracles

This afternoon as I was doing some correcting after school, I had my door propped open and two of my former art history students stopped by to say hi. The first one had a locker outside my door last year so I used to see her all the time. (She was my student two years ago.) In fact, earlier today while I was standing in the hall between class changes I was thinking that I hadn't seen her for a while. She's the nicest girl and it was great to talk to her. A little bit later, another girl stopped by with a friend. I asked her how she's doing and she said that sometimes she misses art history class. That about floored me. I mean, I worked really hard on those classes, and I think that some students got to a point where they were thinking about art and were able to recognize basic formalist characteristics in it, but I didn't think anyone would ever tell me that they miss the class sometimes. That was so fulfilling because above all I want for my classroom to be a safe place where everyone has the respect and nurturing they need to have the confidence to learn. And I think that both of these students were responding to that more than they actually responded to the subject of art history. It was such a nice end to the school day.

Mirah

Ok, please follow this link and download the song "Cold Cold Water." I was listening to Launch tonight while lesson planning and this singer came on with an Italian song that I teach my students (it's a fun WWII song that the Communist party has picked up as its unofficial anthem...)

Anyway so I went online searching for the song, and I found this page, and this song rocks. The other one is good, too, but "Cold Cold Water" is where it's at. Let me know what you think.

http://www.epitonic.com/artists/mirah.html