LanguageLover's Weblog

I’ve often written about the problems of my neighbors.  I don’t live in a great neighborhood, because most of the homes near me are filled with renters.  Renters don’t care about their neighborhood as much as owners do, in my opinion.

I always wonder where the line is for when I should speak up.  One house near me is filled with four young men who enjoy partying.  They are actually quite polite most times, but they invite many friends over.  These friends enjoy loud music, loud voices, and loud profanity.  Several times per week, I have to sit in my living room and listen to them shout and whoot and thump their music until I decide they’ve gotten too loud and then I get to be the “old man” next door who cries out “You kids settle down.”

I’m not sure how much it would bother me if I didn’t have kids and their rooms didn’t face these neighbors.  I’m extremely upset if someone wakes up my children in the middle of the night because they think shouting outside is fine.

But what’s the point of complaint?  Am I right to talk to them directly, or do I go to the cops?  Occasionally, when it’s gotten out of hand, I’ve threatened calling the cops.  With previous neighbors, who were not as polite, I’ve resorted to that. Which temporarily helps, but they mostly just get a warning, so by the next party they’ve forgotten.

The thing is, they don’t complain when I complain.  They’re respectful and they do turn it down, mostly.  I just hate having to complain.  I don’t like being that guy.  I wish I didn’t have to.  But, it’s that or have my kids up at 2 am.  Ugh.  I wonder if I’ll have to go yell tonight.

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.

I was reading a post on Scott’s blog and I decided to do just as he said and look up something he was talking about.  Sure enough, all of the reputable sites like snopes.com claim that his memory is wrong.  He is sure that the incident with Johnny Carson actually happened despite any proof otherwise.  As I read through the comments on the snopes page, I discovered that there were many comments that were much the same.  Essentially, they were all saying, “You better recheck your facts, because I saw it and I know it happened.”

It’s funny to try and argue with someone’s memory.  Most people are rock solid sure that their memory is infallible.  If you are reading this and have never been proven wrong about something you remember, it will happen.  It’s the nature of the way our memory works.  Memory is so very fallible.  It’s influenced by time, by perception, by feelings, and by age.  (probably more things, as well) My memory of being lost in a mall the size of the Mall of America as a child is quite vivid in my mind, but my mother tells me it was a regular Sears store that I was lost in for about five minutes.  Where does this memory come from?  In my memory, I got on an elevator, met a security guard, and he bought me a coke while they paged my mother.  I remember this.  Every detail.  However, according to my mother, I turned right when she went left, so I was looking through shirts while she was looking at shoes.  By the time she turned around, I had walked across the store.  One of the employees saw me walking alone and walked with me out to the aisle just as my mother came around the corner and found me.

Where did my false memory come from?  I think that when the story was told later and I tried to tell my version of what happened, I might have embellished it.  Partly because I was always trying to entertain people, but also because my young mind probably couldn’t remember all of the details.  Knowing my parents, they probably didn’t correct my new story as they probably found it humorous.  Over the years, my retold story stuck in my mind better than the false events and became “real” in my mind.

I think all of this has something to do with teaching and how students will remember parts of what you say, but not everything.  Quite often, students will be sure I said something that I never would.  There was a story going around a few years ago that I called a student a “Ho” in class.  People were sure about it.  They were puzzled why I didn’t get in trouble for it.  The fact that I have never and will never call a student a ho in the middle of class didn’t seem to stop the rumor.  To be honest, I’m not sure what event created that, but I talked to a few former students who knew who it was I had named in such a manner and even why it had happened.

What is my overall point?  Mostly this was an observation, but I’d like to point out that too many people rely on their memory and are unwilling to look at facts and consider the possibility that their memory may be faulty.  Keep an open mind, because your mind may have let in a few false facts.

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.

So, according to Larry in Bakersfield, Calif. in a recent publication of Annie’s Mailbox, there is actually a difference between using “i.e.” and using “e.g.”.  The two Latin abbreviations stand for “id est” which means “That is” which infers a complete list of what items answer the condition, and “exampli gratia” which means “for example” or “example given” and lists representative forms.

I did not know that.  I assumed that they were interchangeable and have used them as such.  Of course, I was using based on experience and I believe that many people are misusing these phrases.  Am I wrong?  Was I the only one out there that was using “i.e.” to mean for example?

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.

If I haven’t mentioned before, I love my iPod Touch.  If I lived in a bigger area, I probably would own an iPhone, but there’s no service for it where I live.  So, I carry my iTouch, my phone, and my camera when I go on trips.  It’d be nice if it was all in one, but it’s not.

I find it very useful.  I can check my email at home and school.  I keep everything on iCal so I can easily access my schedule and since I sync it with my home computer, my wife can also check my schedule.  It’s nice to have music, all my music that I tend to listen to, with me all the time.  I even have a portable speaker for it now, or I can plug it into my classroom speaker if I want to play it at school.  I’ve also found many of the applications to be handy.  The ShopShop app is great for shopping, whether it is groceries or school supplies.  The stanza program has several free novels for whiling away the hours in a doctor’s waiting room or between classes.  I could go on.

Today, though, my happiest moment is when I synced after purchasing an application, which I rarely do–I like the free stuff, and I lost the app.  I was upset and thought I’d have to buy the app again, but lo and behold, Apple remembers that I had purchased the application already and asked if I wanted to download it again.  How awesome is that?  How many other companies would not take advantage of your mistake to make you buy it again?  Very cool.

So, that makes me a happy Apple customer.  Whoo!

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.

As always, I think about trying to make a more formal schedule when I’m putting together my class lessons.  Right now, I have the following idea:  Each day of the week, there would be a 10-minute activity to start the class.  No matter what material was being covered, this would be the plan for the day:

Monday–Root Word activities.  Something to do with Roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc…  We got a cool lesson with our new texts that is quite large and could last all year.  Would it build?  I think it might, if I stayed consistent in doing it every week.

Tuesday/Thursday–Journal Writing.  I always struggle to decide how much journal writing to do.  Inevitably, I do a lot in the first semester and scale back in the second semester.  If I only did it twice a week, perhaps I could keep it going year round.

Wednesday–Reading Break.  This is already built into our school schedule.  Not all teachers follow it, but I try to.  Since I’m an English teacher and all… (Such a funny phrasing.  I wonder how that came about.  And all.)

Friday–logic puzzles.  Sure, it’s not an English specific activity, but I think working on critical thinking and problem solving and logic is a good activity for students in all disciplines.

The two questions are these:  Could I stick to the schedule all year long?  Would the repetition become boring for the students?

I’m not sure, but I’m thinking of giving it a try.

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.

Teachers are funny.  For us, in almost every conceivable sense, the year begins in August.  The biggest changes, turmoil, stress, and excitement all happen at this time.  So, as such, I’m quite busy here at the end of summer trying to make plans and decisions for the year.  For many reasons, I’m not the kind of teacher who uses the same lesson plans every year.  This year, in particular, I have several things changing my teaching in some degree for this year:

1) The school is still involved in PLC (Professional Learning Communities), so all of the English teachers are supposed to be on the same page to some degree or other.  This means, we’ve made certain decisions about the order we’ll be teaching things this year.

2) We got new textbooks this year (and novels along with them).  This means we have all sorts of new material to go through and we have all sorts of interesting supplementary material to go with.  In addition, our PLC group has decided to follow the textbooks “recommended course of study.”  This is not how I’ve usually done things.

3) I got fired up by the National Writing Project again.  So, now I’m constantly thinking about  how to incorporate more writing in my class.  Well, to be honest, not just my class.  I’ve thought about how to give advice to other teachers on how to include more and better writing in their own classes, too.

In addition, I’ll be mentoring another new teacher this year and I think I’m teaching another adjunct class with the college.  Speech, this time.

What does all of this mean?  It means, I have a lot of lesson planning to do and not a lot of time to do it in.  I have a tendency to wing it, because I’m pretty successful at it, but I also know that I’m much better when I prepare.  So, I’m trying to get myself to prepare.  So far, not so good.  I have a couple of thoughts bouncing around in my head, but nothing written down. Maybe I’ll do better tomorrow.

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.

Sometimes as an educator, I feel the need to “help” people make decisions about education. In particular, when it comes to them making decisions about their kids and where and how they will be educated, I’m always fighting with an inner voice about what to say and how much to say if I do speak up. I can’t help it. I have two degrees in education. Just because you have a kid does not mean you know how he or she should be educated. But, most parents feel they know best. So, my advice is unheeded at best, and condescending, at worst. Here’s an example of my newest dilemma.

My friend is dating a single mother. They’ve moved in together. He isn’t comfortable in the “daddy” role. That’s a completely different conversation, but it does fall into the same category of “should I offer advice” question. Anyway, he and his girlfriend have decided that her son will attend a Montessori school in the fall instead of kindergarten. Apparently, kindergarten is not required in the state. I didn’t know that. However, the rationale for choosing it is because back at her previous home in California, she wasn’t impressed with public schools, so she doesn’t want to subject her son to one. It doesn’t matter that it’s a different state. It doesn’t matter that she’s temporarily unemployed and they have to come up with the money to pay for it. It also doesn’t matter that they have no plan for where he’ll go when the school gets out at noon each day. And it finally doesn’t matter that this is only offered until next year when her son will be forced to transition to public school for first grade.

Oh, and they didn’t ask the advice of their friend the teacher. Probably because I work for the public school and they think I would have been biased. Or, she’s his mom and doesn’t need advice. Hard to say.

I have mixed feelings on the Montessori school and I’ve read mixed reviews from people in different areas. We’re not big enough to have anyone writing reviews on our Montessori school. I’d like to discuss it with my friend to see if he’s making a rational decision, but I don’t know if it does any good.

So, I don’t know what to do. Keep my mouth shut even if I think that they are making the wrong choice for the boy’s education? Risk alienating my friend by telling him he’s making a bad decision, especially since he’s probably just going along with the decision rather than being an equal partner in the decision-making? It’s tough watching friends make stupid decisions. It’s even tougher watching friends make uninformed decisions for their kids.

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.

I just got back from my convention/retreat.  It was great.  I had a blast and worked so hard each day that I could barely string together a sentence by five o’clock each day.  I met great people, solid connections, and was able to form community.  By the time I left, we all commented on how much we had learned and what we could take back to our districts and writing sites.  (This was for the National Writing Project, for those who know what that is)

The problem is now that I’m home, it’s hard to verbalize everything I learned. People seem to think that I can sum up five days of work can be summed up in a sound bite or a worksheet.  On the one hand, people do need to know what I learned.  On the other hand, the expectation that I can just spout it out in a quick conversation is ridiculous.

What to do?  I suppose I should jot out my thoughts on everything we did and everything that happened and then maybe work on a cheat sheet of bullet points for quick conversations.  After that, those conversations might be easier.  I don’t know.  It’s a thought.  I just don’t know how to summarize what I learned.

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.

I’m getting ready to go to an educational retreat.  I’m excited about it, but also apprehensive.  It comes down to a problem of language.  With educators, I find that the language that is used can fall into two categories:  highly educated, vocabulary laden, book talkers, or those who talk less formally.  I don’t think either of these things have anything to do with intelligence or education, necessarily, but they do often create a bit of tension between groups.

I’ve been through grad school.  I have a lot of terminology at my disposal, but I just don’t like to talk that way.  It takes a shift of mental gears for me to become comfortable in that area.  It just seems more formal and I hate formality.  In general, I work harder to simplify terminology and talk plainly.

However, if most people are of the other persuasion, I’ll have to shift gears and start dropping the $100 words again.  It’s not that I’m a slave to peer pressure.  It’s just that I don’t think my opinions will carry as much weight if I sound as though I’m less intelligent.

Another issue is that most of the other people attending are college professors, most of whom have doctorates.  Not all of those respect the high school teacher.  I’m hoping it will be a conference with lots of friendly, open-minded people, but as it gets closer, I do get a little nervous about it.

Well, either way, another day and a half and I’ll be on my way there.  Hopefully, it goes well.

I am the language lover and these are my thoughts.