Pages

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Christmas Shopping Help--Fast!


NPR saves the day, once again. If you, like me, are having trouble finding smart gifts for smart people on your list, Head Butler has ideas. They will even email them to you if you are really desperate or shop all year long.
Tyson and I happened to stumble upon this review of Amadou and Miram's album, Dimanche a Bamako. For some strange reason, Tyson heard of this band about a year ago and had been trying to remember who the heck they were and where he could find them, and POOF! here they are on NPR as we pulled into the grocery store parking lot. Weird, huh? I hope you like the video; as loyal readers know, I no longer have a working sound card on my laptop so I just went by looks.

So anyway, I realize it has been a long time since I checked in. Here is a partial list of things I have been doing and may, at some point, get around to telling everyone all about:

1. Going to the National Reading Conference in LA and feeling incredibly dumb around all the researchers, all talking about their "pedagogy" and "methodologies" and "multimodalities" and all that.
Related topics:
a. Everything in LA is expensive.
b. I got to drive a Prius.
c. I had five birds on me at the aquarium but then one of them bit me.

2. Going to Texas for Thanksgiving and eating Tex-Mex food and seeing the fam (except Deidre and my gay cousin Matt)

3. Desperately cleaning my house (including scrubbing the detailing in the cabinet doors with a toothbrush!) because other family is coming on Friday.

4. Teaching one of my classes about the Civil Rights Movemement, while trying to convice them that the way to change the world is not by going to jail--a fine line to tread, I might add.

5. Playing with Power Point and poetry

6. Beginning to realize that Christmas is coming up and I'd better get off my ass and, you know, think about other people for a change

7. Writing final exams. Here are some sample questions:
What kind of soda do advertisers drink? The correct answer is E.
a. Dr. Pepper
b. This is not the correct answer.
c. Pepsi
d. Sprite
e. Choose E. It is the correct answer.

What is the name of the teacher whose class you are taking a final exam for right now?
a. Mrs. Allen
b. Mr. Strotbeck
c. Ms. Downey
d. Mr. Guinn

(Actually, Mr. Guinn's first name is, inexplicably, Shelby, so I can see where they might be confused.)
Those are by no means the only questions. There are, of course, recycled questions on warranties and story elements, but hey, these are 7th graders taking a 110-question test. They need a little break once in a while.

8. Playing Sims 2 while I wait for Tyson to get a new external CD-ROM drive so I can play the long-awaited Neverwinter Nights 2.

9. Enjoying the 65-degree weather the last few days (sounds nice, huh Deidre?)

10. Fretting about my blog. Really.

Please check back in again early next week and I will have written about some of these topics, or about other new stuff, or about other things I heard on NPR.

1 comment:

huckabayda said...

You don't even know how cool snow is. I pity you for never having worn a pair of fat, fleece-lined, ultra-waterproof, heavy-duty, waffle-stomping Sorel snowboots before. Not everyone can appreciate the things finer. (And in case you didn't know: one of the things finer is getting to put comparative adjectives after nouns! Who's the sister cleverer, huh?)