Friday, September 5, 2014
Ten Things Tabitha Feels She Should Not Have Needed To Say to Lauren
Presented without comment:
1. No, don't lint-roll the cat.
2. Don't ride a tricycle in the corn.
3. Don't use the cat as a footstool.
4. Don't make mac-and-cheese with sugar.
5. I don't think chickens like to swim.
6. Don't move the playing cards with your chin.
7. The cat is not "fluffy on the inside." She's fat.
8. "Stop, drop, and roll" is not for tornadoes!
9. Bacon is not candy.
10. Don't use babywipes on cuts.
Back to School
School has started up again here in Our Little Town. The year has begun – yes, the year starts in September, don’t let any calendar tell you otherwise – and all is fresh and new and waiting for the first inevitable screw-up, whereupon there will be stories and commiseration and probably something good to eat to make up for it, and this is how we survive from year to year.
Last year the girls were at the top of their respective schools, but this year? This year they learn the great lesson in life, that the top of one ladder is just the bottom of the next.
Tabitha has now outgrown Mighty Clever Guy Middle School, and has moved on to Local Businessman High.
It is an odd thing, to see her march off to high school. It’s such a strange time of life, being on the edge of heading out on your own but still not quite there, finding loves and groups of friends who, if you are very, very lucky, you will still be close to decades later. I wish her well over at LBHS.
Having graduated one daughter from MCGMS, we now send the other one. Lauren started there this week, having left Not Bad President Elementary behind in June.
She’s been enjoying it immensely, it must be said. She’s in classes with a lot of her friends – three of the Five Musketeers are seated next to each other in her science class, which her teacher will figure out soon enough – and so far the running about between rooms has worked out fine. If she can only get a locker that actually opens, she’ll be in great shape.
Getting home has been a trick, though.
LBHS is close enough for Tabitha to walk home – about a mile and a half, right up the road. We drop her off a block or two away in the mornings, mostly because otherwise there would be even less sleep going on around here for all of us, but she’s been hiking back every day. It's good exercise, and so far the weather has been nice.
Lauren’s return home has been trickier.
While Kim has often handled drop offs in the past, pick ups have usually been my area. I knew going into the year that Wednesdays would be tricky, since I had my Nursing U class, but that only runs until late October so that didn’t seem like a lot and Kim’s schedule could handle that. That was before the Chaotic Schedule Changes of late August, the net result of which was that I am now at Mid-Range Campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays at pick up time. So right now the schedule is that I get Lauren on Mondays and Fridays, Kim gets her on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and on Thursdays she walks home with a friend.
It all gets done.
Good luck in your new schools, ladies.
I’m proud of you.
Last year the girls were at the top of their respective schools, but this year? This year they learn the great lesson in life, that the top of one ladder is just the bottom of the next.
Tabitha has now outgrown Mighty Clever Guy Middle School, and has moved on to Local Businessman High.
It is an odd thing, to see her march off to high school. It’s such a strange time of life, being on the edge of heading out on your own but still not quite there, finding loves and groups of friends who, if you are very, very lucky, you will still be close to decades later. I wish her well over at LBHS.
Having graduated one daughter from MCGMS, we now send the other one. Lauren started there this week, having left Not Bad President Elementary behind in June.
She’s been enjoying it immensely, it must be said. She’s in classes with a lot of her friends – three of the Five Musketeers are seated next to each other in her science class, which her teacher will figure out soon enough – and so far the running about between rooms has worked out fine. If she can only get a locker that actually opens, she’ll be in great shape.
Getting home has been a trick, though.
LBHS is close enough for Tabitha to walk home – about a mile and a half, right up the road. We drop her off a block or two away in the mornings, mostly because otherwise there would be even less sleep going on around here for all of us, but she’s been hiking back every day. It's good exercise, and so far the weather has been nice.
Lauren’s return home has been trickier.
While Kim has often handled drop offs in the past, pick ups have usually been my area. I knew going into the year that Wednesdays would be tricky, since I had my Nursing U class, but that only runs until late October so that didn’t seem like a lot and Kim’s schedule could handle that. That was before the Chaotic Schedule Changes of late August, the net result of which was that I am now at Mid-Range Campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays at pick up time. So right now the schedule is that I get Lauren on Mondays and Fridays, Kim gets her on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and on Thursdays she walks home with a friend.
It all gets done.
Good luck in your new schools, ladies.
I’m proud of you.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
A Mystery, Wrapped in an Enigma, Covered in Feathers
We seem to have stumbled into something of a mystery with the chickens.
The County Fair is over now, and since we can’t show the same chickens two years running and next year will be an opportunity for new chickens, we have been trying to figure out what to do with Lauren’s flock.
Most of it has been surprisingly easy.
The three hens are about to start the process of going to our friend who has been letting us use her barn. She has a flock of her own there, and they’ll get integrated into it over the course of a month or so and eventually she can sell the eggs back to us the way she already does with the eggs from her own chickens. This is called the business cycle, and economists have spent entire careers trying to figure out how to make money off of it, which is why they are economists and not corporate executives.
Bean, the biggest and most aggressive of the six roosters, has already found a home with another flock somewhere down the road. He is doing fine there, by all accounts. Candy, one of the Bantam Cochins, has moved over one stall and become the resident rooster to another friend’s flock, there in the same barn. He seems to be adjusting just fine, despite the fact that he is about 2/3 the size of the hens. Maybe he’s just motivated. Eventually this will turn into a rendition of the “two ducks and a giraffe” joke, which I am not about to repeat here.
Edward Scissorbeak has gone to his fate, unfortunately. There’s not much you can do with birds with his condition, but he lived a happy life for the time he was here.
We’ll probably keep Rosie and Sully.
Rosie is everyone’s favorite – a chicken with a personality. He’s sociable and friendly, and if you talk to him he’ll cluck back at you in a conversational sort of way. You can also get him to perch on your hand like a parrot. He’ll just sit there, bobbing his head in that robotic way that chickens have, until you either put him down or shoo him off.
Sully? Well, he’s kind of our special-needs chicken. He’s a pretty bird – all bright white and poofy – but even by chicken standards he’s kind of dim. That’s something of an achievement, really, considering chickens are a standing refutation to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. There is no conceivable way a chicken could ever be the fittest of anything. Chickens, as noted earlier in this space, are what rocks would be if rocks were more mobile and less intelligent. There are lintels smarter than your average chicken.
Sully is dumber than that.
But he and Rosie get along fairly well, and we will likely winter them over in the barn. They can be the roosters for next year’s flock. Plus they’re both kind of sweet and since they’re small they’re easy to handle. We know why Rosie’s small – he’s a bantam – but Sully just seems that way for his own purposes, a physical reflection of his stunted mental growth.
That only leaves Birdie, the other Bantam Cochin rooster.
We tried sending him over to the neighboring stall, but he didn’t work out too well so we switched him out for Candy. We can’t let him run loose with Lauren’s other chickens, because he gets aggressive and beats up on poor Rosie, though he leaves Sully alone, we suspect because he considers Sully beneath him. So we’re in something of a holding pattern with Birdie. Either he’ll find a new home or he’ll go the way of Edward, which we are trying to avoid if we can. But that is the difference between pets and livestock, and there you have it.
None of this is the actual mystery.
When we first started having trouble with Bean getting his rooster on, we built a little enclosure in the corner of the stall. It was fairly simple, really – just a pallet hinged on one wall and hooked on the other so you could open it if you needed to. It left him enough space to move around a bit and still allowed him to be part of his flock. Since he could fly over the pallet, we set another pallet on top. It made a nice little pen.
The one small flaw in this plan was the fact that every other chicken (except Sully) would roost on that top pallet, raining down chicken poop on poor Bean’s head. Sully, for his part, would perch in front of Bean’s pallet, poke his head through the slat, and just stare at him. For hours. Even as he too, was being pelted from above with chicken poop. This is why we ended up taking Sully home for a few days before the County Fair. Judges tend to frown on birds covered with a thick layer of chicken poop.
Not that it bothered Sully any.
Now that Bean, Candy, and Edward are gone, the pen belongs to Birdie. He seems happy there, most of the time, though Sully has stayed at his observation post and the remaining chickens have continued to rain down poop from the top pallet, oblivious to the change in occupant.
Lintels. Seriously. Lintels are Mensa candidates compared to the average chicken.
So this is our situation: One rooster in the pen. Three hens (and two other roosters) outside of the pen. The pen is secured shut. We are fairly confident that other birds cannot get in, and even if they could get in they would likely not be able to get back out. Birdie would have done that by now if that were easy.
There is a clear and impermeable (for values of “impermeable” which exclude chicken poop) barrier, in other words, separating the rooster in the pen from every other bird.
None of which explains how Lauren found two eggs in the pen yesterday afternoon.
They are small eggs, which could mean they came from a bantam (like Birdie) or just from a new layer (like the hens outside the pen) – all hens start out laying smaller eggs than they will as they get used to the process. But they are eggs nonetheless.
This raises some interesting questions.
Is Birdie actually a hen? That would be the easiest solution, except that he looks exactly like Candy (clearly a rooster), has been examined and judged by experts (all unanimously of the opinion that he is a rooster), continues to be aggressive toward Rosie (very much rooster behavior), and does crow now and then (more rooster behavior), though admittedly he does it in a rather unconvincing way, like it’s something he feels obligated to do for contractual reasons.
Could Birdie be some kind of hermaphrodite chicken? An egg-laying rooster? That would be interesting. And possibly lucrative, given the right audience. One suspects there would be a prevalence of either lab coats or banjos in that audience – or both, if one keeps an open mind – but money is money.
Perhaps one of the hens laid the eggs while the pallet above and they fell through? We can’t figure out how they wouldn’t break, unless they each hit Birdie directly (Bantam Cochins are remarkably fluffy) and then rolled gently into a corner, which seems improbable for one egg and exceedingly so for two.
Did a hen get in, lay two eggs, and then escape? We don’t think so, since all of the hens are considerably bigger than Birdie and if Birdie hasn’t escaped yet the hens wouldn’t make it either. And why would a hen go to that much trouble just to lay eggs? It’s not like it’s any nicer in the pen than it is in the rest of the stall.
Might the eggs have been laid outside of the pen and somehow carried in by the other chickens? It’s theoretically possible – you can fit the eggs between the slats of the pallet – but mechanically difficult given the physiology of the average chicken and vanishingly unlikely given the amount of intelligence required (i.e. any) to pull off something like that.
And yet there are the eggs. Incontrovertible in their physical reality, and definitely found within the confines of the pen.
It is a mystery.
---
EDIT 1 (8/31):
Per request, here is Lauren with the eggs:
The County Fair is over now, and since we can’t show the same chickens two years running and next year will be an opportunity for new chickens, we have been trying to figure out what to do with Lauren’s flock.
Most of it has been surprisingly easy.
The three hens are about to start the process of going to our friend who has been letting us use her barn. She has a flock of her own there, and they’ll get integrated into it over the course of a month or so and eventually she can sell the eggs back to us the way she already does with the eggs from her own chickens. This is called the business cycle, and economists have spent entire careers trying to figure out how to make money off of it, which is why they are economists and not corporate executives.
Bean, the biggest and most aggressive of the six roosters, has already found a home with another flock somewhere down the road. He is doing fine there, by all accounts. Candy, one of the Bantam Cochins, has moved over one stall and become the resident rooster to another friend’s flock, there in the same barn. He seems to be adjusting just fine, despite the fact that he is about 2/3 the size of the hens. Maybe he’s just motivated. Eventually this will turn into a rendition of the “two ducks and a giraffe” joke, which I am not about to repeat here.
Edward Scissorbeak has gone to his fate, unfortunately. There’s not much you can do with birds with his condition, but he lived a happy life for the time he was here.
We’ll probably keep Rosie and Sully.
Rosie is everyone’s favorite – a chicken with a personality. He’s sociable and friendly, and if you talk to him he’ll cluck back at you in a conversational sort of way. You can also get him to perch on your hand like a parrot. He’ll just sit there, bobbing his head in that robotic way that chickens have, until you either put him down or shoo him off.
Sully? Well, he’s kind of our special-needs chicken. He’s a pretty bird – all bright white and poofy – but even by chicken standards he’s kind of dim. That’s something of an achievement, really, considering chickens are a standing refutation to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. There is no conceivable way a chicken could ever be the fittest of anything. Chickens, as noted earlier in this space, are what rocks would be if rocks were more mobile and less intelligent. There are lintels smarter than your average chicken.
Sully is dumber than that.
But he and Rosie get along fairly well, and we will likely winter them over in the barn. They can be the roosters for next year’s flock. Plus they’re both kind of sweet and since they’re small they’re easy to handle. We know why Rosie’s small – he’s a bantam – but Sully just seems that way for his own purposes, a physical reflection of his stunted mental growth.
That only leaves Birdie, the other Bantam Cochin rooster.
We tried sending him over to the neighboring stall, but he didn’t work out too well so we switched him out for Candy. We can’t let him run loose with Lauren’s other chickens, because he gets aggressive and beats up on poor Rosie, though he leaves Sully alone, we suspect because he considers Sully beneath him. So we’re in something of a holding pattern with Birdie. Either he’ll find a new home or he’ll go the way of Edward, which we are trying to avoid if we can. But that is the difference between pets and livestock, and there you have it.
None of this is the actual mystery.
When we first started having trouble with Bean getting his rooster on, we built a little enclosure in the corner of the stall. It was fairly simple, really – just a pallet hinged on one wall and hooked on the other so you could open it if you needed to. It left him enough space to move around a bit and still allowed him to be part of his flock. Since he could fly over the pallet, we set another pallet on top. It made a nice little pen.
The one small flaw in this plan was the fact that every other chicken (except Sully) would roost on that top pallet, raining down chicken poop on poor Bean’s head. Sully, for his part, would perch in front of Bean’s pallet, poke his head through the slat, and just stare at him. For hours. Even as he too, was being pelted from above with chicken poop. This is why we ended up taking Sully home for a few days before the County Fair. Judges tend to frown on birds covered with a thick layer of chicken poop.
Not that it bothered Sully any.
Now that Bean, Candy, and Edward are gone, the pen belongs to Birdie. He seems happy there, most of the time, though Sully has stayed at his observation post and the remaining chickens have continued to rain down poop from the top pallet, oblivious to the change in occupant.
Lintels. Seriously. Lintels are Mensa candidates compared to the average chicken.
So this is our situation: One rooster in the pen. Three hens (and two other roosters) outside of the pen. The pen is secured shut. We are fairly confident that other birds cannot get in, and even if they could get in they would likely not be able to get back out. Birdie would have done that by now if that were easy.
There is a clear and impermeable (for values of “impermeable” which exclude chicken poop) barrier, in other words, separating the rooster in the pen from every other bird.
None of which explains how Lauren found two eggs in the pen yesterday afternoon.
They are small eggs, which could mean they came from a bantam (like Birdie) or just from a new layer (like the hens outside the pen) – all hens start out laying smaller eggs than they will as they get used to the process. But they are eggs nonetheless.
This raises some interesting questions.
Is Birdie actually a hen? That would be the easiest solution, except that he looks exactly like Candy (clearly a rooster), has been examined and judged by experts (all unanimously of the opinion that he is a rooster), continues to be aggressive toward Rosie (very much rooster behavior), and does crow now and then (more rooster behavior), though admittedly he does it in a rather unconvincing way, like it’s something he feels obligated to do for contractual reasons.
Could Birdie be some kind of hermaphrodite chicken? An egg-laying rooster? That would be interesting. And possibly lucrative, given the right audience. One suspects there would be a prevalence of either lab coats or banjos in that audience – or both, if one keeps an open mind – but money is money.
Perhaps one of the hens laid the eggs while the pallet above and they fell through? We can’t figure out how they wouldn’t break, unless they each hit Birdie directly (Bantam Cochins are remarkably fluffy) and then rolled gently into a corner, which seems improbable for one egg and exceedingly so for two.
Did a hen get in, lay two eggs, and then escape? We don’t think so, since all of the hens are considerably bigger than Birdie and if Birdie hasn’t escaped yet the hens wouldn’t make it either. And why would a hen go to that much trouble just to lay eggs? It’s not like it’s any nicer in the pen than it is in the rest of the stall.
Might the eggs have been laid outside of the pen and somehow carried in by the other chickens? It’s theoretically possible – you can fit the eggs between the slats of the pallet – but mechanically difficult given the physiology of the average chicken and vanishingly unlikely given the amount of intelligence required (i.e. any) to pull off something like that.
And yet there are the eggs. Incontrovertible in their physical reality, and definitely found within the confines of the pen.
It is a mystery.
---
EDIT 1 (8/31):
Per request, here is Lauren with the eggs:
EDIT 2 (9/1):
Lauren and Kim scrambled the eggs for breakfast and report that they were delicious.
Friday, August 29, 2014
Sight and Sounds
There are very few instantly recognizable sounds in this world – sounds that require no cognitive processing whatever – and they are almost all things you don’t want to hear.
The roar of a tornado. The particular ratchet of a pump-action shotgun. The squeal of skidding tires. The wail of a siren. Things like that.
This week I discovered a new sound to add to that list: the unmistakably precise click of a pair of glasses snapping in half two days before your first class of the semester.
It was, as so many things are these days, entirely my fault. I was upstairs sitting on my bed, reading while Lauren brushed her teeth. I’d taken my glasses off and set them down because I have reached the point where I actually read better with out them than with them. I got up to do something, went back to the bed to sit down, put my hand out and came down right on top of them – my palm directly over the frame. I must have caught it at some odd angle because it snapped fairly easily, and neatly in two right where the bridge met the lens frame. This also had the effect of popping out that lens.
“Oh,” I thought.
Or words to that effect.
Fortunately I had stumbled across my previous pair of glasses in a drawer just a week or two earlier, so I knew I had backup. They are not the bifocals that my current pair are, nor are they the current prescription, which meant that even in the long focus range they were a bit on the moody side. But they would do for driving, and – as noted – I didn’t need them to read anyway.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not a king. He is a chauffeur.
I didn’t really have time to do much about this before my first class. I wasn’t about to try soldering the frame back together – somehow that had “Onion headline” written all over it. Tape would just confirm everyone’s stereotypes. I didn’t want to pay too much to get them fixed, since it’s about time to get my eyes examined again anyway and there was no doubt in my mind that I’d end up with a different prescription. And the earliest I could get an eye appointment my insurance would pay for is late October, which isn’t bad in the scale of things but not all that helpful in the current situation.
So I decided to bull my way through my first class with the old pair and see how it went. Who knew? If it went well, then I could just keep doing that for a few weeks and the problem would go away.
Except that, as noted, the old ones are monofocal and it didn’t take long before I realized that I do, in fact, make use of the bifocal part of my current pair of glasses. I hadn’t been sure about that for the longest time, given that I have been taking them off to read for a while now. Perhaps my eyes had changed that much? Perhaps I could go back to normal glasses?
Well no.
When I teach, I have my notes on the podium in front of me. But you can’t teach looking down – that’s one of the most basic facts about teaching. You have to make eye contact. And if I didn’t have my old glasses on, the students were just blurs. But if I did have my old glasses on, my notes were a blur.
Choices, choices.
Thus I found myself back at Sears the following day, hoping that they had a match to my broken frame so I could just get the lenses put in until the new prescription undoubtedly arrived. And lo and behold, they did, for what turned out to be an eminently reasonable fee.
I can now see.
Life is good.
But watch out for the next sound you hear. It could be a doozy.
The roar of a tornado. The particular ratchet of a pump-action shotgun. The squeal of skidding tires. The wail of a siren. Things like that.
This week I discovered a new sound to add to that list: the unmistakably precise click of a pair of glasses snapping in half two days before your first class of the semester.
It was, as so many things are these days, entirely my fault. I was upstairs sitting on my bed, reading while Lauren brushed her teeth. I’d taken my glasses off and set them down because I have reached the point where I actually read better with out them than with them. I got up to do something, went back to the bed to sit down, put my hand out and came down right on top of them – my palm directly over the frame. I must have caught it at some odd angle because it snapped fairly easily, and neatly in two right where the bridge met the lens frame. This also had the effect of popping out that lens.
“Oh,” I thought.
Or words to that effect.
Fortunately I had stumbled across my previous pair of glasses in a drawer just a week or two earlier, so I knew I had backup. They are not the bifocals that my current pair are, nor are they the current prescription, which meant that even in the long focus range they were a bit on the moody side. But they would do for driving, and – as noted – I didn’t need them to read anyway.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not a king. He is a chauffeur.
I didn’t really have time to do much about this before my first class. I wasn’t about to try soldering the frame back together – somehow that had “Onion headline” written all over it. Tape would just confirm everyone’s stereotypes. I didn’t want to pay too much to get them fixed, since it’s about time to get my eyes examined again anyway and there was no doubt in my mind that I’d end up with a different prescription. And the earliest I could get an eye appointment my insurance would pay for is late October, which isn’t bad in the scale of things but not all that helpful in the current situation.
So I decided to bull my way through my first class with the old pair and see how it went. Who knew? If it went well, then I could just keep doing that for a few weeks and the problem would go away.
Except that, as noted, the old ones are monofocal and it didn’t take long before I realized that I do, in fact, make use of the bifocal part of my current pair of glasses. I hadn’t been sure about that for the longest time, given that I have been taking them off to read for a while now. Perhaps my eyes had changed that much? Perhaps I could go back to normal glasses?
Well no.
When I teach, I have my notes on the podium in front of me. But you can’t teach looking down – that’s one of the most basic facts about teaching. You have to make eye contact. And if I didn’t have my old glasses on, the students were just blurs. But if I did have my old glasses on, my notes were a blur.
Choices, choices.
Thus I found myself back at Sears the following day, hoping that they had a match to my broken frame so I could just get the lenses put in until the new prescription undoubtedly arrived. And lo and behold, they did, for what turned out to be an eminently reasonable fee.
I can now see.
Life is good.
But watch out for the next sound you hear. It could be a doozy.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Semester Plans
I always do this to myself.
Every semester I think to myself, “Self,” I think, “perhaps this is the semester that you will rest on your laurels. Perhaps this, indeed, will be a semester without major revisions of existing courses, or completely new courses to make up from scratch. Yes, this semester will be a breeze. You will get long put off projects completed. You will enroll in that photography course you’ve been meaning to take. You may even sign up for the curling team, as you have been threatening to do for three years now.”
And then I laugh and laugh and laugh.
Because the first thing you learn as an adjunct is that saying no is never an option. When you get hired by the class, with no guarantee of ever being hired again, “Yes” is the only appropriate answer to any question aimed at seeing if you want to teach a class.
Sometimes they ask me to teach things I’ve taught before. And sometimes they don’t.
But, like the Professor in Gilligan’s Island, who had a degree in Science and could thus do everything from translate Pacific Equatorial tribal languages to build a radio out of two coconuts and a treadmill (although why he couldn’t build a boat has never been satisfactorily explained), I have a degree in History and can thus orate knowledgeably about anything that ever happened anywhere, as long as it happened in the past. Just give me a little lead time to get myself oriented, and off I go.
Ancient India? Sure! WWII? No problem! Medieval Europe? Got that in spades! US history? Seriously? Teach in my field? Is this a trick question? Sign me up! I have a degree in History, after all.
Truth be told, I end up learning a lot doing classes outside of my area. They’re fun that way, and then I have another class in my repertoire which never hurts when the next person wants to hire me to teach something.
Even when they want me to teach what I’ve taught before, the fact is that every few years you have to tear it down and rebuild it. My thinking changes over time. The recent history classes keep moving into the future and new lectures need to be added. New technology requires new ways to teach, which in turn require new stories and units because the break points move.
This semester I thought I’d have it relatively easy. I had one class I’d taught before and had just overhauled the previous year, so it wasn’t due for any major changes – just the usual tweaking that happens every year. And I had another class elsewhere that was brand new, but when you’ve only got two classes this isn’t much of a burden really.
Then I added another class, but I had also taught before, so that was good. Then – for long and complicated reasons having nothing whatever to do with me – I lost that class. Then I was asked to teach three classes at Mid-Range Campus. Of course I said yes – that would bring me up to full time, establish me at another campus in our system, further establish myself as a solution to whatever problems come up, and be fun in the bargain. And you never say no, not as an adjunct. Besides, I’ve got more than a week to get these classes together! That’s not nearly the shortest notice I’ve had, and the classes are all in my field to boot.
Granted, they’re over an hour away, and it’s been so long since I taught the face-to-face versions of these classes (as opposed to the online and streaming video versions) that I may have to redo a fair amount of them. There is that. We’ll see how that goes.
I went up to Mid-Range Campus yesterday for new faculty/staff orientation, and they were lovely people as far as I could tell. They were glad to have me, and I was happy to be there. I even learned a few things, which – given that I have been teaching in this system since 1996 – came as a bit of a surprise. Always nice to be surprised that way.
There remains the fact that I may have to bring a supply of bread crumbs to find my way around for the first few weeks – while walking around on the tour my mind kept filling up with phrases like “rabbit warren” and “fire trap” – but bread crumbs are cheap and there are no birds in the halls to eat them. As long as I leave before the maintenance people sweep them up I’ll be fine.
It will be a good but exceedingly hectic semester, methinks.
Every semester I think to myself, “Self,” I think, “perhaps this is the semester that you will rest on your laurels. Perhaps this, indeed, will be a semester without major revisions of existing courses, or completely new courses to make up from scratch. Yes, this semester will be a breeze. You will get long put off projects completed. You will enroll in that photography course you’ve been meaning to take. You may even sign up for the curling team, as you have been threatening to do for three years now.”
And then I laugh and laugh and laugh.
Because the first thing you learn as an adjunct is that saying no is never an option. When you get hired by the class, with no guarantee of ever being hired again, “Yes” is the only appropriate answer to any question aimed at seeing if you want to teach a class.
Sometimes they ask me to teach things I’ve taught before. And sometimes they don’t.
But, like the Professor in Gilligan’s Island, who had a degree in Science and could thus do everything from translate Pacific Equatorial tribal languages to build a radio out of two coconuts and a treadmill (although why he couldn’t build a boat has never been satisfactorily explained), I have a degree in History and can thus orate knowledgeably about anything that ever happened anywhere, as long as it happened in the past. Just give me a little lead time to get myself oriented, and off I go.
Ancient India? Sure! WWII? No problem! Medieval Europe? Got that in spades! US history? Seriously? Teach in my field? Is this a trick question? Sign me up! I have a degree in History, after all.
Truth be told, I end up learning a lot doing classes outside of my area. They’re fun that way, and then I have another class in my repertoire which never hurts when the next person wants to hire me to teach something.
Even when they want me to teach what I’ve taught before, the fact is that every few years you have to tear it down and rebuild it. My thinking changes over time. The recent history classes keep moving into the future and new lectures need to be added. New technology requires new ways to teach, which in turn require new stories and units because the break points move.
This semester I thought I’d have it relatively easy. I had one class I’d taught before and had just overhauled the previous year, so it wasn’t due for any major changes – just the usual tweaking that happens every year. And I had another class elsewhere that was brand new, but when you’ve only got two classes this isn’t much of a burden really.
Then I added another class, but I had also taught before, so that was good. Then – for long and complicated reasons having nothing whatever to do with me – I lost that class. Then I was asked to teach three classes at Mid-Range Campus. Of course I said yes – that would bring me up to full time, establish me at another campus in our system, further establish myself as a solution to whatever problems come up, and be fun in the bargain. And you never say no, not as an adjunct. Besides, I’ve got more than a week to get these classes together! That’s not nearly the shortest notice I’ve had, and the classes are all in my field to boot.
Granted, they’re over an hour away, and it’s been so long since I taught the face-to-face versions of these classes (as opposed to the online and streaming video versions) that I may have to redo a fair amount of them. There is that. We’ll see how that goes.
I went up to Mid-Range Campus yesterday for new faculty/staff orientation, and they were lovely people as far as I could tell. They were glad to have me, and I was happy to be there. I even learned a few things, which – given that I have been teaching in this system since 1996 – came as a bit of a surprise. Always nice to be surprised that way.
There remains the fact that I may have to bring a supply of bread crumbs to find my way around for the first few weeks – while walking around on the tour my mind kept filling up with phrases like “rabbit warren” and “fire trap” – but bread crumbs are cheap and there are no birds in the halls to eat them. As long as I leave before the maintenance people sweep them up I’ll be fine.
It will be a good but exceedingly hectic semester, methinks.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Registration
The school year started, more or less, today.
Every year the folks running registration for the schools here in Our Little Town get better at it. When the girls were little, back in our first few years of Not Bad President Elementary, getting all the paperwork done for the beginning of the school year was an hours-long event featuring parents strewn all over the all-purpose room trying to find flat surfaces upon which to write.
Now? Most of it’s online.
There is still a pile of stuff that you have to do – this form, that form, that other form (yes, that one, even if you didn’t think it was something you had to fill out again) – but you can enter most of the basic information into the snazzy new computer interface from the privacy of your own home these days. You can even pay most of the fees online too, and let me tell you what a great thing that is.
Especially when you realize, an hour before heading off to the actual schools to complete the registration process, that you have used up your last check.
Nobody uses cash in the midwest. Be serious. I once saw someone pay for a candy bar and a soda with a check out here.
So, kudos to the school district for making my life easier over time. Not many organizations can say that.
We started the day by heading over to Mighty Clever Guy Middle School, where Lauren will be going for the next few years. We’ve pretty much got this routine down now, after Tabitha’s three years of it. She and I showed up early, breezed through the first couple of stations (“Yes, we did all that online – see ya!”), bought a gym outfit emblazoned with the MCGMS logo, and arrived in the cafeteria, where we collected her schedule for next year and signed up for the Opening Day Conference – a 20-minute “Welcome to MCGMS” meeting with Lauren’s homeroom teacher, after which you get to find your locker and stuff it with all your books and such.
From there it was over to the auditorium for school photos, and back to the car. In and out in about half an hour.
Then it was Tabitha’s turn.
We arrived at Local Businessman High School to find ourselves amid a throng of similarly lost-looking people shuffling toward the first Checkpoint. Fortunately Kim figured out that we could cut to the front of the line and just have them sign off on our form because all that was already taken care of online, and then it was on to the next Checkpoint.
Tabitha collected her lunch account PIN, and then we stood in line for a while for school photos. After that it was over to the desk where she could collect her schedule, and then down the hall for textbooks. My camera is currently in the repair shop and Kim couldn't come for Lauren's registration, so this is our photo of the day. It's a nice photo.
I don’t remember those textbooks being quite that thick back in the day, but maybe they’ve just piled on that much more knowledge since I was in high school. I suppose I was lucky to graduate when I did.
We left in a torrential downpour, registered and looking up at a brand new school year in brand new schools for both girls.
Every year the folks running registration for the schools here in Our Little Town get better at it. When the girls were little, back in our first few years of Not Bad President Elementary, getting all the paperwork done for the beginning of the school year was an hours-long event featuring parents strewn all over the all-purpose room trying to find flat surfaces upon which to write.
Now? Most of it’s online.
There is still a pile of stuff that you have to do – this form, that form, that other form (yes, that one, even if you didn’t think it was something you had to fill out again) – but you can enter most of the basic information into the snazzy new computer interface from the privacy of your own home these days. You can even pay most of the fees online too, and let me tell you what a great thing that is.
Especially when you realize, an hour before heading off to the actual schools to complete the registration process, that you have used up your last check.
Nobody uses cash in the midwest. Be serious. I once saw someone pay for a candy bar and a soda with a check out here.
So, kudos to the school district for making my life easier over time. Not many organizations can say that.
We started the day by heading over to Mighty Clever Guy Middle School, where Lauren will be going for the next few years. We’ve pretty much got this routine down now, after Tabitha’s three years of it. She and I showed up early, breezed through the first couple of stations (“Yes, we did all that online – see ya!”), bought a gym outfit emblazoned with the MCGMS logo, and arrived in the cafeteria, where we collected her schedule for next year and signed up for the Opening Day Conference – a 20-minute “Welcome to MCGMS” meeting with Lauren’s homeroom teacher, after which you get to find your locker and stuff it with all your books and such.
From there it was over to the auditorium for school photos, and back to the car. In and out in about half an hour.
Then it was Tabitha’s turn.
We arrived at Local Businessman High School to find ourselves amid a throng of similarly lost-looking people shuffling toward the first Checkpoint. Fortunately Kim figured out that we could cut to the front of the line and just have them sign off on our form because all that was already taken care of online, and then it was on to the next Checkpoint.
Tabitha collected her lunch account PIN, and then we stood in line for a while for school photos. After that it was over to the desk where she could collect her schedule, and then down the hall for textbooks. My camera is currently in the repair shop and Kim couldn't come for Lauren's registration, so this is our photo of the day. It's a nice photo.
I don’t remember those textbooks being quite that thick back in the day, but maybe they’ve just piled on that much more knowledge since I was in high school. I suppose I was lucky to graduate when I did.
We left in a torrential downpour, registered and looking up at a brand new school year in brand new schools for both girls.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Cats and Doors
It’s been six weeks now, and the cat still hasn’t figured out the new storm door.
When we moved into this house in 1996 one of the first things we noticed was that the back storm door had no closer. It worked just fine as a door, but the little compressor thing at the top that would close the door for you was missing. “This will be the first thing to be replaced!” we said, in that flush of new homeownership that long-time homeowners regard as so cute.
For you see, the door functioned perfectly fine otherwise. It kept the cold out and the warm in during the winter. It kept the warm out and the cold in during the summer. Rain did not penetrate its glass panels and side insulation. Bugs were foiled by its screens. Yes, we had to leave a bungee cord wrapped around the landing rail so it would be handy for attaching to the door handle if we wanted the door to remain open. Not a big problem. There was surprisingly little incentive, in other words, for us to replace the door.
But then during a particularly icy stretch this winter Tabitha slipped while entering the house and took out one of the glass panels. Fortunately the glass did not shatter and nobody was hurt. But the panel was irreparable, and we spent the rest of the winter without it.
And the cold came in. The rain penetrated. The bugs saw it as a highway. It was no longer a functioning door. It was a decorative attachment.
So we bought a new door.
It sat in the garage for a while, sending guilt-rays about this fact, until we moved it closer to the actual door. Oddly, this did not solve the problem. So one weekend we took off the old door and put in the new one. There were the standard number of extra trips to the hardware store and the contractually-obligated use of profanity and idle threats, but eventually the job got finished.
It is a nice door. It has glass panels all the way down, so that Midgie can stare forlornly outside to see what she is missing without having to stretch. It has a closer. The proper temperatures are maintained on either side of the door. The bugs have moved on to easier challenges.
The thing about the new door, though, is that we could put it on so that the handle was on the right or left as we came in – there were holes pre-punched to give us the choice. And since the actual door has its handle on the right, Kim decided that the storm door should also have its handle on the right.
Except that the old storm door had its handle on the left.
Mithra loved this fact about the old door. Whenever she wanted to come in she would sidle over to the left-hand side of the landing, jump up onto the railing, and wait for us to open the storm door. Then she’d jump down and stroll inside.
When she tries this now she just crashes into the glass.
We’re waiting for her to make the adjustment and jump up on the right-hand side of the landing, but so far no luck.
The solution to the problem just changes the problem.
When we moved into this house in 1996 one of the first things we noticed was that the back storm door had no closer. It worked just fine as a door, but the little compressor thing at the top that would close the door for you was missing. “This will be the first thing to be replaced!” we said, in that flush of new homeownership that long-time homeowners regard as so cute.
For you see, the door functioned perfectly fine otherwise. It kept the cold out and the warm in during the winter. It kept the warm out and the cold in during the summer. Rain did not penetrate its glass panels and side insulation. Bugs were foiled by its screens. Yes, we had to leave a bungee cord wrapped around the landing rail so it would be handy for attaching to the door handle if we wanted the door to remain open. Not a big problem. There was surprisingly little incentive, in other words, for us to replace the door.
But then during a particularly icy stretch this winter Tabitha slipped while entering the house and took out one of the glass panels. Fortunately the glass did not shatter and nobody was hurt. But the panel was irreparable, and we spent the rest of the winter without it.
And the cold came in. The rain penetrated. The bugs saw it as a highway. It was no longer a functioning door. It was a decorative attachment.
So we bought a new door.
It sat in the garage for a while, sending guilt-rays about this fact, until we moved it closer to the actual door. Oddly, this did not solve the problem. So one weekend we took off the old door and put in the new one. There were the standard number of extra trips to the hardware store and the contractually-obligated use of profanity and idle threats, but eventually the job got finished.
It is a nice door. It has glass panels all the way down, so that Midgie can stare forlornly outside to see what she is missing without having to stretch. It has a closer. The proper temperatures are maintained on either side of the door. The bugs have moved on to easier challenges.
The thing about the new door, though, is that we could put it on so that the handle was on the right or left as we came in – there were holes pre-punched to give us the choice. And since the actual door has its handle on the right, Kim decided that the storm door should also have its handle on the right.
Except that the old storm door had its handle on the left.
Mithra loved this fact about the old door. Whenever she wanted to come in she would sidle over to the left-hand side of the landing, jump up onto the railing, and wait for us to open the storm door. Then she’d jump down and stroll inside.
When she tries this now she just crashes into the glass.
We’re waiting for her to make the adjustment and jump up on the right-hand side of the landing, but so far no luck.
The solution to the problem just changes the problem.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)