Friday, January 9, 2009

Dear Diary,

When I'm at work, it's all about the students. Seriously. It's not about policies and regulations, standards, tests, making parents, bosses, and politicians happy. It's all about the kids.

So yesterday I was teaching one of my classes some of the many words and symbols used in music, which almost always happen to be in Italian. When we got to morendo [dying away] we somehow managed to get onto a lively discussion about the various ways that people can die. Of course, the first thing that popped into my head was a tree falling on someone. That, logically, led one child to start talking about church, and how there's this one kid who always tells lies and he came in one day with a story about how he was headed to church when a tree fell on the car next to him, but he survived. That's when I realized we were way off topic, and I reeled us back into semi-sanity.

Well, today, the kid came back and told me that he had gone to church last night and found out that somebody in his church had just died because a tree fell on them. Creepy. I'm never talking about that in class ever again.

My favorite thing of all time has to be grading tests. Seriously. I let my kids doodle on them, which is quite entertaining, in itself. But then you get bits of gold like this:

A flute player is called a: flutish flutant.

Flutant??? That sounds like something you should use to clear your nose. [BTW, the correct answer is flautist.]

Lastly, but not least....ly, I found this hyper cool site about an inspiring Lego artist. Sweet!


~ichabod crane