School Projects

Yesterday, the 9th of February, I saw blooming snowdrops. In Muncie. This weather is well and truly confused. 

Purely Photography

It's been awhile since I could truly say that I was excited for a semester of school, but I think this one has the potential to be an awesome one. I'm not sure if I talked about it here or not, but I had the math teacher from hell last semester. One of those situations where a teacher doesn't realize that half (or more) of your class failing means it's you and not them.

Anyhow, I went into this semester knowing that I had two Profs that I like- on the head of my department for English the other a guy I would happily call the best teacher I've ever had. As it turns out, I like the other two as well although I really don't like the lab director for my geology class. I'm loving the geology class- I find it fascinating to study how the world works; everything is so much more amazing when you know the what and the why. Art history is rather boring, but it's not nearly the workload everyone had made it sound like.


My other two classes are both education major specific. One of them is my practicum course for the ESL portion. I'm working with two little boys this semester. J is a native Spanish speaker and is in 1st grade and M is a native Arabic speaker who is in 2nd grade. Both of them can speak very well, especially when it comes to socializing with their peers. M can't read at all, and J doesn't do well. I'm going to be evaluating J tomorrow morning to see exactly where he's at. M is getting some pretty intense phonics help from someone else- my goal is to help him with math word problems. That's going to be an interesting challenge. I've got some ideas and we'll have to see how they go.

The other part of that class is a class wide professional development project. Our plan is to make a survival guide website and document for general education teachers who have ESL students in their classroom. If it's not your area of concentration there's a very good chance no one has ever told you how to deal with the special issues these kids have when it comes to school. We hope to set up a workshop, or at least visit some classes, to present it once it's done.

My final class is my night class and it's diversity in education. Thankfully, unlike most diversity classes this one is not just focusing on race and income. It's covering everything from sexual orientation, to language, religion, and physical disabilities. We're currently in groups working on an iMovie looking at a certain problem in a chosen area and ways for teachers to help deal with it. I got a group together for language, specifically in regards to testing. 10% of kids in Indiana speak a language other than English at home. That's a low number; the national average is 22%. ISTEP, Indiana's standardized test, is only offered in English. 10% of kids at an immediate disadvantage, when their graduation, their teachers' salaries, and their schools' very existence depends on those scores. It's a huge problem.

New Year

I've never really been big on New Year's resolutions- seems like far too often they are forgotten about by the end of February and besides, if you want to make a positive change in your life why wait for some arbitrary date to start?

That said, I do have a couple of artsy goals for this year.

1. One of the guys over at deviantArt talked me into doing a 365 photography project. My gallery for that is here and you all should totally do one too.

2. I am going to learn to knit. I was supposed to do that the last quarter of last year, and a big project that was more important came up. (More on that when it's finished).

3. I am going to get my fiber stash completely organized and photographed and uploaded on Ravelry so I know what I've got. And I am going to get rid of stuff I know I'll never use. This goes with my general goal of cleaning out our closets and fighting our packrat tendencies (one down, five to go).

4. I am going to find and finish and/or frog all of my random WIP pieces that are laying around in all sorts of odd locations.

Singing the song of angry men

(yeah, it’s another one of those current events/political ones)

I don’t hide the fact that I’m an atheist. I can be quite militant about it, though I try to keep that in check, as I know plenty of perfectly lovely religious people who are not, in fact, stupid and bigoted. I’ve never seen the point in not being open about it; quite frankly my opinion tends along the lines that those that have a problem with it are just proving my point about the harm done by religion.  What I’m not always so open about is politics. Oh, sure, a five-minute conversation will tell you that I’m pretty liberal, but I tend to hesitate with actual labels. Largely because the actual label tends to cause some pretty negative kneejerk reactions. I am, at heart, a communist.

Yeah, that tends to get people’s attention, and not often the sort of attention you want.

However, I am also a misanthrope. The misanthropy makes me believe that human nature is not yet, perhaps not ever, at a place where communism can work on a large scale. There’s just too much greed and selfishness in humans, and there’s no telling if it’s innate or learned behavior. Both, I suspect. Regardless, while we can find small indigenous populations that do seem to have their communist utopia, it’s yet to work on any sort of large scale. I would argue that is, at least in part, due to the fact we’ve yet to see it evolve naturally. The communism of the Soviet Union was forced. It was a forced revolution by idealists (or they at least started that way) who didn’t think about the consequences of bringing that system to a group of people who weren’t ready for it yet.

But now…

Clearly, the capitalist system we are currently under isn’t working. The rich are getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer and more numerous. And people are starting not only to notice, but also to protest. I look at the Occupy Movements around the country and I have to wonder if we’re not seeing what could be the start of the closest thing to a Communist Revolution as Marx saw it as is possible in a post industrial society. I don’t think it’s going to go all the way to full on communism, and I’m not sure I would want it to (see above and the human nature stuff) but I do think—hope—that we might see an end to the unregulated capitalism. An end to a system where it is legal and ok for companies to lay off employees for economic reasons or to take government handouts but still give their executives huge bonuses. And end to a system where corporate welfare is good, but helping out people is bad because people are just lazy when they need help. 

Then again, it might peter out and die long before then. But I hope not. Things are going to be worse.  With luck and perseverance it’s just getting worse on the way to getting better.  We are already witnessing brutal police attacks on unarmed protestors. So far, no one has died.  I question how much longer we’re going to be able to say that. When it happens (because I do think it is a when, rather than an if) all hell is going to break loose. It’s a terrifying thought to entertain, what might happen from this.

Autumn Musings

I have always considered nature to be a balm for the soul. I suppose that's why I took advantage of my first day off from both school and work in over a month to go out to a local nature preserve. I've seen almost no one else here and on some level I think that's a good thing. Te average person has become completely disconnected from nature, even when they're in someplace like this. They're racing through, talking, yelling even, just wanting to get it over with so that they can say they've done it and move on.

They're too loud to notice the rustling of the snake or the chipmunk in the leaves by their feet. They're moving too quickly to notice the row of mushrooms the size of small boulders.







And they've no time to stop and watch the squirrel eating a nut. They don't know enough to be able to tell at a glance which part of the leaf strewn ground is a part of the trail. No time is taken to just sit and listen to the sound of the wind in the trees and to really just be a part of where you're at.

 

Work, School, and Goals

I must say that I am happier with work now. I no longer have to describe myself as a cashier, but rather as an assistant manager. It helps reconcile the age and level of education with the position.

School is keeping me more than a little busy. My children's lit class (which I do enjoy, but still) has an immense amount of work, and I've got two practicums on top of that. Which means I have to do that whole dressing like a teacher thing almost every day. This is difficult because I don't have a lot of teacher appropriate clothes right now and am not eager to rush out and buy more because....







22.6 lbs down. It's not going as fast as I would like, though hopefully that will make it more sustainable, but it's still progress. And hey, I'm even sharing the real numbers.

I have lost 3 inches of my waist, 3 1/2 off my bust, 4 off each thigh, and have gone from a 38HH to a 36H. My weight goal involves losing 40 more pounds, but more important is keeping it off.

Tiny Visitors

I was on the patio theoretically working on homework, but some visitors dropped by and I had to go grab the camera. All I've done with any of these is crop them. Was fun to have the camera out and get some quality pictures again. It's been too long.

The Girly Girl

                                      VS.









A couple of weeks ago, a blogger over at the HuffPo decided to write a little blog about the loss of feminism that she started with the line "Women are girly. Again.." Great. Yet another writer (and a female one at that) buying into the mindset that being a feminist means trying to be a man. She laments that we bake cupcakes*, garden, and knit because instead we should be ditching all that stupid "girly" stuff and learn to hotwire cars, shoot guns, and manipulate our way into bomb shelters. (She didn't really go into the details on this last one, but I suspect it involves cleavage). She even gives us role models- Jane Austen = bad, Sookie Stackhouse = good.  The more I think on this, the more it bothers me, and not just that she couldn't find any real people (who weren't drug addicts) for role models  on what she thinks women should be. If it's tough girls she wants:

• I have butchered, dressed, and cooked any number of chickens (plucking the feathers is the worst part)
• I have helped deliver a lamb. By which I mean my hand was up there pulling because it was the only one small enough. 
• I have cleaned and replaced a prolapsed uterus on a ewe. 
• I have shot a gun
• I know how to change a tire and change my own oil (though I'll happily pay someone to do the later)
• I have a working knowledge of how to use hand tools (both power and not) to build a basic structure. 
• I enjoy hiking, camping (no trailers for me, please), biking, and boating. 

However, I also

• Spin, crochet, cross-stitch,  and sew
• I enjoy cooking from scratch meals for my family
• I like to garden and look forward to have a proper place to do it
• I am married and took my husband's name, with no real thought of not doing so

So, according to Ms. Aloi, I am a girly girl who forgot all about feminism. Well, that's fine, I don't need her approval. However, more than once in her article she mentioned some crazy apocalypse.  I've got news for her. If that happens, I'll be the one munching on the produce and animals I raised while keeping warm in my handmade garments and she'll be the one hungry and cold with nothing useful to bargain with. I think I'll be sticking with Jane then, and not Sookie.



                                                   

Ok. That aside. The fair was the past two weeks. It appears that none of the pieces I took down placed. It will be interesting to see the judges comments on them; there were several things (even in categories I didn't participate in) that made me seriously question the judges. Dustin will be picking them up tomorrow, as I have class all day.

School starts again tomorrow. Part of me is looking forward to it, but part of me is really not. Between classes and work I'm not really going to have any days off. Which means bossman isn't going to find out about days that school is out unless we really need the money, which we likely won't.

Dustin is going to be starting a new job on Friday. I'm not going to go into a lot of details, but it's a pay increase, has benefits, and isn't likely to have any of the slowdowns that we've been forced to become accustomed to. There might be some travel, but we've dealt with that before. We're working on bringing down our total debt and this is a good step in the right direction. (It's a very scary number that just got larger because of this semester's student loans, but I also know that it's less than some people's debt that's just from those student loans.)



*Interestingly, there is a woman of the same name who does blogging about cupcakes. All evidence points to this being the same person. Existential midlife crisis?