Yeah, it’s been about twenty years because my first clear memory of wanting to fly helicopters was from when I was something like five. But somewhere in that growing and learning and forming infant brain of mine, I believe I knew. And so I have been waiting my whole life for this day.
:D
i’m a science teacher, i know safety procedure.
if it starts to go bad i’ll pitch it out the window.
wait..don’t the kids slide on the ice out there?
*see the post below before you read this one
Provisional Teaching Certificate: 200+ hours of study, work, homework up to date, and two more years of study
Moving to the bush: $1000 of food at Costco + $300 shipping
Teaching science: many, many hours of lesson planning
Coil of magnesium ribbon: $27 + $15 s&h
Combustion pre-lab and lab lesson planning: 6 hours
Setting off the school fire alarm with my middle schoolers despite doing our lab right next to an open window: priceless
So we all sit down one day and Oh hey, one of us got this crazy idea: lets make a model of the universe! And for now we’ll keep it simple, stick with just our galaxy and the Horsehead Nebula. Good? Good.
Here’s how it goes down. We make little models of the planets, all to scale, perfect scale, and we lay them out on a round table. How big were the planets? We used perfect scale…the sun, you can hardly see it, but we managed, made it happen. The sun is 0.015mm. Tiny bright yellow speck in the middle of the table. The planets? It was tough, but we made it happen, nicely painted and all. It was kinda tough to see ’em on the table, and what we presume to be far-larger-than-scale solar winds (it’s warm outside, so the ‘close the window’ idea got veto’ed quicker than a tea party filibusterer pork barrel bill*) kept blowing our planets all askew. So we glued them down and made labels. Easy.
And the horsehead nebula?
The horsehead nebula, in our model universe scaled to fit the solar system–home–on the top of a table, is properly located halfway between the earth and the moon. Nothing some good amateur rocketry couldn’t handle. Oh yeah! Almost forgot to mention, the model of the old horsehead, that was the hardest part. Little bit bigger than twice the size of Seattle.
*I proudly know next to nothing about politics.
Kids sent to the office: more than I remember (4? 5? something like that)
Kids who threw me completely off by standing up and announcing a decision to voluntarily go to the office: 2
Best thing I had to say: “LUCAS! Put your tooth BACK in your pocket!”
Quote of the week:
“A girl’s gotta have standards, even with chicken wire, a girl’s gotta have standards.”
–that’s his name. Well, it’s not his name actually. But, as a substitute teacher, I have to use good memory hooks; I find out this student is from Louisiana, the name stuck fast. Also, a relevant fact for later: I have this thing I do sometimes: I bring in half a dozen doughnuts and I tell my students they win a doughnut by putting me on my heels–do something to impress me. Mind you,if you’re going to ask students for excellence, you do not use supermarket doughnuts, no that would be idiotic; thankfully there’s a little doughnut shop in town that is as wildly amazing as it is pricey.
I subbed yesterday for a photo/computers teacher. When I saw “photo/computer” in the job description, what happened wasn’t so much that I ignored the computer half, more that I never even got that far. Photo. Photo. Wait…I can spend time in a classroom doing stuff with…photography? Really?
I stopped, did a quick pinch-test, nope, not dreaming, this is real. Great!
The lesson plan took all of 5 minutes to cobble together: can’t go wrong with good photojournalism. Aaron Huey.
Louisiana picked a war photo (this one: aaronhuey.com/afghanistan), and he did not address even one of the three assigned questions. In this failure, he wrote this, perfectly succeeding:
I don’t know what to think I saw this man walking not knowing if he had a bomb on his chest or if he was on our side we kept on driving he stared at us until we disappeared I still think about that man he stared at us with a grin on his face as if he was saying “we got you we got you once you think your ok we got you.”
“Um, so, I didn’t know how to answer any of the assignment questions, so I just sorta put myself in his shoes and wrote something” Louisiana told me, handing in what he’d done, what he’d done instead of completing the assignment. Louisiana was smirking, because he wanted a doughnut.
He got one.
1. Understand english
2. Understand spanish
3. Understand soccer
4. Know FC Barcelona
So I’m watching the Real Madrid – Barcelona game last week and eating ceviche (a really delicious central american dish with fresh shrimp) and my gut’s all like “something’s not right man. These shrimp are at room temperature.” I’m a tough guy, so I ignored my gut.
Six hours later my gut was like “screw you.”
Note that the burners are going under all three pots. The fourth burner is going too, making hot cocoa.
Nikon D200 + old school Nikon 28/2.8 e series lens + carbon legged tripod + bounce flash
After trying two commercial html editing programs, two commercial WYSIWYG programs (neither of which I actually bought, just “demo” tried), then both an open source editor and an open source WYSIWYG, right now notepad simply works best.
Regardless of the truth or lack of it in the matter, I do feel like I’ve made it, arrived at somewhere good.
Edit: Jan 19th, 2011
Thanks to a very kind donation, one of the commercial WYSIWYG is now “free” so to speak. At the moment it works best to do a sidebyside mix. This program to quickly arrange visual elements and do things I don’t know the syntax for, then notepad to scrub and polish it. Someday maybe I’ll be cool enough to work fastest straight up notepad.
Here in Guatemala
1. Possums eat chickens, and in return folks eat possums. You know how possums love to play dead? Sometimes they’ll decide to play dead after they’re caught and clubbed. Then sometimes they come back to life after being skinned. Can you say angry-zombie-possum?
2. Common courtship process:
i. Boy and girl meet
ii. Boy decides he likes the girl, drives up to her house sometime after one in the morning and cranks a love song on his stereo for some indeterminate amount of time
iii. Girl goes to window and swoons for this indeterminate period of time, or goes to window to glare briefly then goes back to bed.
iv. Depends on the result of iii: (negative) the boy repeats step iii until he goes back to step i, or (positive) the boy and girl start to date.
v. After some time of going out, they become “novios,” something pretty similar to being boyfriend/girlfriend. Then after being novios for a while, they get married.
…at any point in the process, either the boy or the girl can tell the other that they do or don’t like him/her; often neither this event nor whether or not it’s reciprocated generally affect any of the five steps.
3. It is not a meal if there are not tortillas. Literally, like it doesn’t count as a meal without them–if you eat what we United-States-ians would usually call a meal, and it’s without tortillas, you actually get to eat another meal (with tortillas, of course) because the first time around didn’t count. This is pretty awesome, although may bode ill for my health if I don’t play a ton of soccer…and number four…
4. Soccer is different. It’s like…eating a meal or walking to work. I’m used to “oh cool, yeah lets go play soccer!” Here it’s not really something to get stoked about. Not that people don’t love it…they really, really really love to play soccer…it’s simply a part of life. Just about everybody has a brother who’s played semi-pro, or plays semi-pro.
5. In the U.S. if we’re going to make a gesture to signify the person we’re talking about, we generally point with the hand or nod with the head. What’s the most common way to do this here? A kissing-like-gesture with the mouth. This one took a while to figure out.
6. They drink lots of fruit punch. It’s very delicious and very specific: apple and pineapple juice with a bit of sugar and cinnamon, only served hot and with little pieces of coconut floating in it.
7. Coffee’s like this: brewed light, heavily sugared and always with sweet bread to dip. Once in a blue moon somebody in a restaurant will order coffee with milk–beyond that, coffee with any sort of dairy product mixed in is purely out of the question.
8. There are tons of motorcycles. They all–
1. Look different
2. Have nearly the exact same Chinese chassis and engine
9. There’s more of life and death and heaven and hell than you can shake a stick at.
(from a few weeks ago)
Observation #1: when sleepy, it is very easy to misplace things and very hard to find them.
Observation #2: coffee helps this. It helps a lot.
…now I’m off to go slog around the office to find where I left my coffee mug.
This may take a while.