five alive

<-- Art! Oil pastel still lifes of the lily arrangement Peahen's mom gave me after the wedding. I promised Peahen I'd send the best, but I am so in love with all their work - so varied and so reflective of their individual personalities - that I might send photocopies. I know, I suck. Selfish, selfish teacher!!

I did wake up early enough to go for a 20-minute jog. Choosing to roll out of bed instead of spending the extra time in a warm snuggle was difficult, but I did it. I am not hopeless! (I did, however, sleep in my running clothes and lay out my shoes and socks the night before. That helped tremendously.)

Soundbytes from my morning, in which we discussed George Washington Carver, standard units of measurement, and the real definition of the word "ghetto" (boy were they surprised): I spent ... oh, a long time trying to explain that you cannot refer to an entire country, a house, or even Palolo Valley as a ghetto (this really confused them, because of the housing and all.) I stood firm because I wanted to use the concept of Chicago's slums in the 1890s as the "ghetto standard."

Me: "Palolo is not a ghetto."

Pumpkinhead: "Yes it is! There's LITTER!"

Me: "Some parts of very affluent communities are polluted. Palolo is not a ghetto."

Indignant, die-hard Palolo-loving kid: "YEAH! Palolo is a BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY!!"

Next up, explaining to one of my Ilocano kids that he is not Black. All his life, he thought that all dark-skinned people were African-Amercans. Well, what an eye-opener the morning was for him. He spent the rest of the period mumbling to himself about Martin Luther King, Jr., and discrimination against Ilocano people. I was a little worried that I had turned his whole world (or at least a large part of his sense of identity) upside down, but he seemed okay - mostly disappointed that he is not kin to Barack Obama.

Language Arts: practicing creating wordless definitions for vocabulary cards, using "rural" and "urban" as examples. Spend what feels like DAYS explaining that "rural" and "urban" are adjectives, but they keep asking questions like "Do houses in rurals have chimneys?"

The real word that we're drawing, by the way, is "variable" (a math and science core vocabulary word for gr. 5). Good luck and godspeed.

Random other:

"Ms. D_C, how do you draw cow ears?"
"Ms. D_C, how do you say 'Canada' in Japanese?"
"I live in an urban ghetto. I think. I'll ask my mom."
"Ms. D_C, which is stupider, a duck or a chicken? Because I only have room to draw one."

I should interrupt my narrative of this head-shaker of a morning to say that we had a really wonderful, intelligent discussion about democracy and the future yesterday. I was so proud of my kids, filing into the classroom shouting things like "Yes we can!" and "Democracy lives!" I love that they are informed enough to knock around McCain's tax proposals vs. Obama's.

Overheard at recess:

"Why should rich people get a tax break? That's stupid."
"Because they'll spend more money for the ecomony, dummy."
"It's ECONOMY. You're the dummy."
"Poor people should get a tax break so that they can buy gum."
"Ooh and have health insurance so that their cavities can be cured."

Tonight we get to have dinner with the 'rents and stuff more envelopes. Emily Post be damned, sometimes I wish I could just invite all these people via telephone.