Sunday, November 25, 2007

A Kind of Mediocre Thanksgiving Break Debriefing

These long breaks always make me feel obliged to retell as many Stories of What Happened as I can, but those things are (almost) never as funny to read about as they are to actually be in, plus there are plenty of pictures on facebook to allow the reader to recreate most of the weekend in his imagination. In this recreation, the following images-slash-story lines must be included: pirates, cougars, bulls' testicles, scrabble, long johns, whiskey, not going to breakfast after all - sorry scott!, mark wahlberg's penis, a fifteen-foot sushi roll, spooning, and Bop-It (If others who were there feel this list is incomplete, they should add on via tha comment box). The previous sentence notwithstanding, instead of particulars, I am simply going to report that though my sleep patterns over the holiday were practically inverted as well as severely truncated, I feel remarkably refreshed as I sit here at the end looking back. For five whole days, I had my life back to I spend time how I wanted instead of how some daily schedule dictated by The Man. I was also surprisingly productive as far as grading and grad-schooling goes. Who would have thought? In conclusion, I still love stuffing.

Monday, November 19, 2007

What I Did At School Today

Today and tomorrow are professional development days at school. This year we're focusing on technology, and somewhere along the way, between two key-note speakers and four break-out sessions, I learned about this crazy, new-fangled notion of 'embedding' things into blog entries. (I also started a wiki. If you know any word puzzles that would be fun for high schoolers, please share them with me.) But I digress; here is my first attempt at embedding on my own.


Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Somehow I've managed to land myself in a deluge of Shakespeare this month. This week and weekend in particular I will be reading four(!) plays for various grad-and-high-school-related undertakings. Othello and Macbeth will be (or have recently been) taught to the kiddles, and The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream have some strikingly tenable threads binding them to James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, which I will attempt to unpack and elucidate in a competent (or at least coherent) fashion by the beginning of December (sidebar: if anyone out there is a scholar of the Venetian Jew and has insights on the character of Shylock demanding to be shot in my general direction, they should not feel compelled to quell said impulses...). You'd think that the upcoming break from school would be a perfect time to immerse myself in this project, but the same days I should spend in academic seclusion happen to be the ones on which everyone will be home and ready to play. I think there used to be a version of me who was a pretty deft time-budgeter. We shall see if she's still in there somewhere.