Monthly Archives: September 2014

Football Betting is For the Birds!

Posted in Advice, Humor, Life by
Photo Credit: furanda via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: furanda via Compfight cc

My daughter and I are in a football survivor pool. For those of you not in the know – survivor pool is the greatest invention for gambler wannabees during football season. A survivor pool doesn’t require much skill.

I don’t need to spend the time and energy that a fantasy football team requires. It’s low commitment, loads of fun, and, simple.  Here’s all I have to do each week:

  • I look at all the multiple football games being played that week.
  • I pick out one game
  • Then I pick the winner of that game.
  • If I win, I advance to the next week where I start all over again. Pick any team and then pick a winner.
  • Here’s the catch though. I can never pick my winning team again.

So, my daughter and her husband tell me, there are a variety of schools of thought on picking winners

  • Go strong at the beginning and go for a guarantee of a great team.
  • Some players, however, opt to leave their strongest teams until the end.

I play differently.  As an Audubon nature lover, my picks are all focused on teams that are named after birds.  As I have told you earlier in this blog, I’m not good with statistics and only passed in college because I was dating the instructor’s buddy.

Here are my current results. So far my bird teams haven’t let me down.

  • Week One, I chose the Seahawks and they won.
  • Week Two, I abandoned Jerome the Great and Good’s NY Giants, and chose the Cardinals. (I love the way cardinals feed their young and my granddaughter lives in Arizona. Makes perfect sense, don’t you think?)Yes. The Cardinals won.
  • Week Three, I picked the Eagles. Once when I picked up a piece of litter from a mucky pond, a bald eagle swooped over my head in salute, and I didn’t even think anyone was watching.

This Week Four,  I’m torn between the Ravens and the Falcons? What to do? What to do?  Got it!  I love crabs, both the succulent soft shell ones and the hammer ‘em open hard shells. Baltimore’s got them both,

As the sun sets and our midnight dreary approaches,  I’m wondering if Jerome the Great and Good is going to roll his eyes again at my weird team picks. The answer to that philosophical question is” Nevermore, nevermore”… because I keep winning.

Ravens it will be!

 

 

Adirondack Chairs in God’s Country

Posted in Humor, Life, Nature and the Outdoors by

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I see kids today doing their homework while reclining on their beds.

People of my age did not do that. We used desks.  If you are a contemporary of mine, I bet you remember taking great pride in your desk and feeling like a real hot shot when you organized your drawers with your new school supplies and, then, topped it off with your new green blotter.  I even had a special desk lamp!  Yowza!  Sitting at that desk, I felt like I was in the Oval Office.

That feeling lasted for the first week and a half of school. Then, I started hating homework, messing up the drawers, and listening to songs on the radio like Runaway by Del Shannon.

But, anytime my parents came in the room, there I was, at my desk, looking studious.

I think desks were a part of my parents’ American Dream.  Desks were ergonomically designed for work, and hard work meant success.

Speaking of success, as those of you who follow my blog know, I married Jerome, the Great and Good. We bought a home in what our parents called, God’s Country, because it was forty-four minutes from the Bronx. Also, our home was a real house, not an apartment with a screen door on the third floor or the elevated train running outside the living room.

Jerome and I bought two Adirondack chairs for our backyard. OK, so the chairs are plastic, and they are not exquisitely carved by Native American craftsman.  When you pull into our suburban driveway and see those two forest green plastic chairs under the trees on our dried up brown grass, you can almost hear the call of the loon and the howling of the wolf.

Unless you’re an astronaut manning a control panel during takeoff, Adirondack chairs are not designed for work. True, you can set your glass of iced tea down on the wide arms of an Adirondack chair, but if you drink your iced tea in your reclining position, you may choke to death on an ice cube.

The green plastic Adirondack chairs in our backyard are not suitable for reading a book, or writing a personal manifesto, or even a shopping list.

Adirondack chairs are only good for looking up.

Looking up is great, perhaps even greater than doing homework.  There is never a test on “looking up,” and you don’t have to study for it. Often I sit in my Adirondack chair, look up and think about the same stuff I thought about as a child. I count the leaves on a branch of a tree.  Then I try to figure out how many leaves there are on the tree. Then I think about all the other trees on my block, my town, my state, my country and the world.  Then I feel alive, even more alive than I felt when I listened to Runaway by Del Shannon.

 

 

The Meaning of “Existential”: An Empirical Study of the Pragmatic Use of Big Words in English Language Arts, aka ELA.

Posted in Advice, Education and Teaching, Humor, Writing Process by

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Students, try to use big words to sound smart.  One of my favorite big words is existential.  I can write or say stuff like, “The existential purpose of blah blah is blah blah,” and people will nod their heads in serious agreement, or squint their eyes in serious disagreement. Using words like existential in conversations makes people feel flattered that you have shared deep thoughts with them.

I do not know what “existential” means. This is a minor point.

My real concern is that there might be a list out there of “Teachers Whose Students Do Not Know the Word, Existential.” These days, you just never know!

Therefore,  all students who will be taking the College Board SAT’s ,  ACT’s,  KAT’s (Kindergarten Assessment Tests)and PNVEE Tests,  (Pre-Natal Vocabulary Enrichment Exams), please thank me in advance for giving you one of the  definitions of existential.

Courtesy of dictionary.com, one of the definitions of existential is:

  • Logic: denoting or relating to a formula or proposition asserting the existence of at least one object fulfilling a given condition: containing an existential quantifier.

Why are you cranky?

Here’s another dictionary.com definition of existential:

  • Of or related to existence, esp. human existence

I made up this sentence for you to clarify the definition of existential:

  • I eat because I am existential, and I need Rum Raisin ice cream to continue existing.

Now, my loyal readers, as an added bonus, I am going to share two new words that have always been problematic for me.  Common Core Standards expect you to use high level academic language. These two words qualify. According to dictionary.com, both of these words are synonyms for existential! Who knew?

The two new words are empirical and pragmatic.

Students, try substituting the word, empirical for the word, factual.

  • Example: If I write the word empirical in my essays instead of the word factual, my test scores may jump from a score of one to a score of five!

Now students, let’s take the word, pragmatic. Use pragmatic, students, every time you are tempted to use the word, practical. This is easy to remember because both words start with the letters, pr.

  • It was pragmatic for me to use the word, existential, because I had read many empirical essays about humans who existed.

Comments? Questions?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mindful Eating With Good Friends

Posted in Food: Getting It and Eating It, Friendship, Humor by

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Six close friends, we were together for a night of dinner out and then coffee back at Gail’s house. We discussed: restaurants, ISIS, Obama, Joan Rivers, Republicans, Democrats, The Middle East, Ukraine, some  theater and some TV.

We also discussed chicken sex.

I introduced the topic as I told them about the mindful eating seminar I had attended online and the articles I had read about mindful eating on the Internet. Scientists have provided some interesting data that eating mindfully can be a help to emotional eaters who want to lose weight.

It was clear from the weird looks on my friends’ faces that they had no idea what mindful eating was.

“The theory is if you eat mindfully and are aware of everything you put in your mouth, you will eat only when truly hungry,” I explained and shared what I recalled from an article about people who went to a monastery to learn mindful eating from the monks.

“At the monastery, the participants sit at a large table in silence,” I explained. “Slowly and deliberately, the monks teach them to touch their raisin, lift it, smell it, think about the grape it used to be, put it in their mouths, roll it around without biting it, bite it, chew it, and eventually swallow it.”

I told my friends that I was OK mindfully eating a raisin, but when it came to mindfully eating other food, I had a problem.

I always ended up thinking about sex.

For example when I was trying to eat some egg salad mindfully, my mind moved from eggs to chickens. Then I started wondering if chickens have sex?

Thus, to my table of friends, I posed the question, “Do you think chickens have sex?”

“Well, that’s why you have roosters,” said one.

“Chickens lay eggs,” said another. “Frogs lay eggs and they don’t have sex.”

I contributed, “In frogs, doesn’t the female lay eggs and then the male passes over them and fertilizes them? “

“Chickens are birds,” someone said. “Birds have sex.”

We never resolved the issue of chickens going “all the way” because Gail served her coffee cake and Jane’s banana cake. The six of us chowed down, and our conversation moved to liberals, conservatives, boots on the ground, and winters in Florida.

Tomorrow is another day to try mindful eating.

 

 

Retired from Teaching? Yes and No

Posted in Advice, Education and Teaching, Humor by

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I stole this chalk from my elementary school  on the day I retired from teaching. That was in August of 2000.  At this time of year I like to hold my chalk, and remember.

I retired from 30 years of  teaching elementary school in August 2000.  By  October,  I was working again, part time, in elementary, middle and high schools as a literacy consultant.  I’m still doing that.

Consulting is like teaching, but without the lunch duty, hall duty, attendance taking and money collection.

Consulting teachers can get away with stuff that regular teachers can’t. Sometimes, for my own self-preservation, I put on my “old grandma hat. ” I can say to a potty mouth student, “If I were your grandma, I would wash out your mouth with soap.”

The kids laugh, and then they behave. They say, “Yes, Miss. Sorry, Miss.”

All teachers have golden academic moments with their students.  The real art of good teaching is to take those  serendipitous  moments and make them happen routinely. That’s happening. It will take time, but it’s happening.

Kids are kids.  Kindergarteners and high schoolers have the same needs.  All kids can think. I have learned that often the kids with the worst grades can think at a higher level than the rest of the gang. They just haven’t learned how to apply their high levels of thinking to school. Maybe it’s the fault of the school.  That’s why change is in the air. That’s good.

All teachers have moments of great poignancy  with their students.  Probably those are the moments that students and teachers will remember most. Many of my fourth (or was it fifth?) grade students remember how I cried when I read Bridge to Terabithia to them.

All teachers have moments of great comedy with students. The art of good teaching is to take those comedic moments and enjoy the humor. Even in semi-retirement now, as I  work with a new generation of teachers, the moments continue. The story below happened in one of my high schools last year.

A first year biology teacher was doing an experiment on enzymes.  I met with him before the lesson and suggested he probe the students’ background knowledge to set the stage for the lesson. Recalling  my days as an elementary school teacher, I suggested he  “Ask the kids what they know about yeast.” I knew many teachers in elementary school had baked bread with kids at one time or another.

The lesson began and my eager protégé, asked his high school students, “So tell me what you already know about yeast.”

Instantly, the one student who always calls out, described, in graphic detail, yeast infections and where they are found. Using the feline word for female genitalia, he was indeed proud of his contribution.

I clearly remember the “deer in the head light” look of my young teacher as the class gasped and laughed.  Up until this moment, Mr. C. had trusted me.

Stepping in, I said to the eager student, “Thank you for your contribution. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I may have an extra sip of wine as I share this story with my husband. Let’s try to use more academic language in the future, and now let’s move on.” The teacher continued with his wonderful lesson, and  the class moved on.

So newly retired teachers, as you move on, take time to savor your remembrances . Also, you might want to also steal a piece of chalk…if you can find one.  It may be a valuable artifact someday.