It's Play Time Again

It's play time again. I'm directing MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. The good thing about the whole process: A number of these students have been with me for four years now - they're seniors now - and they don't actually need a lot of directing. Even in the early practices, we're having so much fun! I plan to take some pictures next week and will post some - as well as put some up on the wall at school to create interest.

I'm a reluctant director but, even so, once we're in it I do enjoy it. It's also nice to have an actor son who helped pick out a good play for this group of students and to whom I can turn with questions.

Good Editorial

This is a very good analysis of the travesty of assigning "racism" to the motivation behind many American people's opposition to the health care bill.

My Kids

I'm not really sure where this picture came from, but just found it on my hard drive, and think it's a nice and fairly recent picture of my beloved children.

Chicken Fajitas

My sister came to visit for a few hours with her good friend last week as they passed through the area. She brought me, along with cherry jam and zucchini bread, some bell peppers and onions from their garden. Which reminded me of fajitas. I don't make them very often, but once in awhile, if I have the stuff on hand, they are so good to make. My sister-in-law Ginny taught me how to make these, back in the early '90s.
Chop up the peppers and start sauteing them in a small amount of oil.

Add the onions and chicken, and continue sauteing until the chicken is browned.

Add water and an envelope of Italian seasoning mix (Yes, Italian, not Mexican), put a lid on it for awhile and then take it off for awhile, and cook it down for an hour or more until the peppers and onions are basically "mush."

Warm a tortilla, spread it with sour cream, put the cooked mixture on it, sprinkle with cheese and a little lettuce. Oh, it is so good.

Class Meetings

One of our new administrator's new ideas is to have class meetings once a month, led by the class officers. They have to come up with an agenda the week ahead of the meeting, approved by both the class sponsor and him. Today was our first class meeting, and my juniors came through with flying colors. It was a blessing to watch the song leader read the history of the song "The Solid Rock" and then lead the class in all four stanzas of singing it, followed by the chaplain giving a devotional on Christ our Rock. They conducted the class business well, then had three games/activities ready.

Right beforehand, the president and chaplain came up to me in a bit of a panic - "We forgot to bring blindfolds for the activity! Do you have anything we can use?" I did know of one possibility, but having been told to let them handle it, I decided not to intervene. Well, they thought of something - they got two hoodies, and had the two people who needed to be blindfolded put the hoodies on backwards. Problem solved - and they did it themselves.

Class meetings were a huge success. I love new ideas that work.

Reflection On 30 Years

This is my 30th year of teaching school. Hard to believe - that is the record of an OLD person. But it's true, like it or not. Seven of those years, when the children were little, were just part-time, so on an "official" record, each of those would appear as a half-year of experience. But, in terms of time put in, it's been 30 years.

At BJJH, I added approximately 100 students each year to the total of how many I taught. Here, it's a little different - my yearly student load is approximately the same; however, the same students pass through my room several times between eighth and twelfth grades. I'd say the total number of students I've taught is around 1600, with about a fourth of them being taught anywhere between 2 and 5 times due to different courses in different years.

There are several areas that I would be happy never to teach again. Weather, the sun, asteroids and meteors, William Wordsworth, early American literature, persuasive speeches - those are a few topics that are just not that interesting any more.

But there are others that I love. For example:

EARTH SCIENCE - Hands down, constellations and stars. I could teach those every autumn to somebody, forever. There is something very rewarding about seeing youngsters come in every morning and say "I figured out where the Pleiades is!" Or the Big Dipper, or Cassiopeia, or the Northern Cross, or any number of other constellations. I tell them that that is lifetime knowledge - the kind of learning that they will teach their own children someday while going camping or being out in their back yard. Furthermore, it's fun to teach them about nebula, star clusters, and other deep space objects. It is completely new learning for eighth graders, so they are very interested. And they can gain a new appreciation for the greatness of creation.

CHEMISTRY - Probably the mole concept (when they get it). And especially organic chemistry. I'm not the best of chemistry teachers due to not being very mathematical. Organic is not mathematical at all!

AMERICAN LIT - Novels, especially HUCK FINN and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Also short stories.

BRITISH LIT - Chaucer and Shakespeare. HAMLET and MACBETH are layered with so much to learn, layers of complexity and wisdom, that even after eight years I still find more.

BOTH UPPER LEVEL ENGLISHES: Objectionable Elements in Literature. It's very rewarding to teach students how to have discernment in what they read or watch. I remember Andrew coming home after the first day of this discussion, shaking his head, and saying "That's nothing like any English class I've ever had before."
Also, I love watching their writing skills improve from the start of their junior year until they graduate.

Well, the more one learns (in order to teach, especially), the more one realizes she has to learn. But it has been a privilege thus far, to at least attempt to communicate knowledge and discernment to young people, in a Christian atmosphere.

Oops

I was attempting to explain to my eighth grade science students why ancient people spent a lot of time on the roofs of their homes at night, studying the stars and the sky. I said "Remember, they didn't have TV to watch." Then, in an attempt to include electronic games in the explanation, I said "Nor could they take to the roof their. . .and I accidently combined the two words "playstations" and "gameboys." I suspect I was the subject of some conversation at more than one supper table last night.

Gone to College

I am now officially an empty nester. It's an interesting feeling. I feel free - yet also know that I never know when the "Mom? I need. . . ." phone call will come. I got two of those calls today, necessitating another trip to their college town. There are lots of ups and downs about this new station in life.

There was nobody to carry in my groceries this morning.

I went to turn on the little fan in the kitchen that keeps air moving in there when I'm working. . . and it was gone. I vaguely remember about two weeks ago one child saying that that would be perfect for a dorm headboard.

There's plenty of room in the garage, and I can choose which side to park in.

If I feel like getting on the computer for longer than ten minutes, I can do so without feeling like it's a bad example.

I don't have to continually be thinking about what food is in the house, what food is cooked, and what is available for them to cook for themselves.

I can go to bed when I want, without waiting up for a child to come in.

There's no one to leave notes for, when I leave for school, such as "Please see that the dog gets brushed, washed and fed," or "Please take care of the laundry in the basket on the table today." Now, the laundry in the basket on the table is still there when I get home.

I will worry, be concerned, and pray just as much as when they were here. Probably more.

Memories

We take two to college this weekend, so it is difficult this week not to think much about the past eighteen years.

Where has the time gone?!

My son is "old hat" at this college routine, but this is the first time for my daughter. I have so many memories. Many of them this week have centered around the time she was three and four - the age when she really became verbal and her creativity started to blossom.

She became very adept at writing the numbers to twelve. When we asked her to write thirteen she replied "I can't - it's not on the clock."

She had a little pair of pink pants with orange polka dots that she absolutely loved. For some unknown reason she called them her "joy-joy pants." We tried in vain to figure out where she got that term and never did. But her beloved joy-joy pants were her favorite until she got too big for them. Once at a yard sale I found the matching top to her joy-joy pants and that made her happy also.

She loved games and was extremely competitive, even at a very young age. Some games were a bit of a trial for an adult to play repeatedly, but Memory was one that she could be successful at, yet I could play it with her and still be somewhat challenged myself. Once I had to stop the game to go to the kitchen to check something in the oven. I glanced over the counter from the kitchen to the den, and saw her furiously checking tiles as fast as she could before I returned. So we had a perfect opportunity to discuss the concept of "cheating" and what that meant!

She was writing a "journal" by the time she was four. Everything in it was phonetic and required a translation on the next page by me, so that now we can understand what she was saying. Sometime I will post some of her very creative spellings - yet the meaning of what she was trying to say made perfect sense, as did her phonetics.

When she was two, we wondered when she would start talking. The Christmas of that year, she kept repeating "ti-ti-tee" over and over. It seemed like a meaningless repetition - until we realized she was saying "Christmas tree" in her limited way.

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A year or two after that, we rode to school one morning - a twenty-minute one-way ride - and neither Andrew or I said a word the entire time. We couldn't get one in.

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All she ever needed for entertainment was a stack of paper and some pencils, markers, and/or crayons, and she was content for multiple hours.

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She was always good for a smile and was a big encouragement to her mother many times.

Murphy's Law for Freezers

When Mike defrosted the freezer last June, it immediately iced over with 1-2 inches of ice. So he defrosted it again in late July. Same story. He felt like it might have a slow freon leak--apparently a difficult problem to fix, and our freezer is at least 20 years old--we bought it used in 1990. Last weekend I told him that I would like to get a new freezer before school started, as I did not want to walk out to the garage one day and find that everything inside is defrosted and spoiled. He agreed. I found a used freezer on Craigslist, ten miles away, great price, two years old. Owner a grad student who was moving and needed to get rid of it. Mike, Andrew, and two young men who were helping Andrew with a project, drove over and bought the freezer. We put the old one on the driveway with plans to get Haven of Rest to come pick it up for their appliance fix-up program.

The next morning, Mike, who was ready for church a little ahead of the rest of us, went out and tinkered with the old freezer. He found a place he had accidently bent, or something similar, when he defrosted it the first time, in June. He moved the freezer to his shop, plugged it in, and checked it later. It runs fine. No frost buildup. Apparently the seal was slightly open from the bent place, and there is no freon leak.

Two freezers now. The original one fixed twelve hours after we bought the second one. Murphy's Law.