Decision

Sensory Overload (Interacting with Autism Project) from Miguel Jiron on Vimeo.

I worked with several kids with Asperger syndrome or other autism spectrum disorders during the course of my four years at Webster.

I adored those kids.

They don’t know it, but just by being part of my class, they gave Riggy a better mommy. That seems fair, since Scout gave them a better teacher. “The gift goes on,” as Sandi Patty says.

This video made me cry.

I am applying to grad school this week. For reasons.

Emily

Costume

So we’re throwing a Halloween party at work for all the local kids, and my boss informed me that I would be expected to wear a costume.

I hate wearing costumes.

Ron suggested I just show up in my bee suit, but I’m in charge of the popcorn, and I am pretty sure the health department would shut us down if an inspector walked in and saw me scooping popcorn in my pollen-and-propolis-stained gloves and honey-smeared suit.

This was what I came up with instead:

Janis Joplin. Or, as I like to call it, “Casual Friday.”

Emily

 

 

The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Women

NOTE: This entry was inspired by my increasing frustration with the tendency of many young women to embrace and pander to the kinds of stereotypes that ensure they will never be taken as seriously, paid as much, or treated as well as their male colleagues. Many of my former students will be starting their careers in the next few years, and I don’t want to see them fail. This riff is for them. I hope they will find it useful.

The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Women

 

Habit 1: Baby-talking around men. I realize we can’t all sound like Lauren Bacall, but when you deliberately talk from your soft palate instead of your larynx, you are sending the message that you are small, immature, and vulnerable. This could attract a knight in shining armor, but it’s more likely to attract a predator looking for a weak-willed woman he can control easily. If a guy finds your fake baby voice sexy, RUN, because you do NOT want him living under your roof when the FBI raids his computer.

Habit 2: Playing stupid around men. Every time I need a man to take me seriously, I have to start by proving I am not the idiot you pretend to be. Stop it. Real men are not intimidated by bright women. Behaving like an intelligent, responsible adult will not keep you from finding Mr. Right — but it might keep you from wasting time on Mr. Condescending, Mr. Insecure, and Mr. Insufferable.

Habit 3: Inappropriate attire. I started to write a long riff about this, but the bottom line is: Quit dressing like a hooker, and quit doing stupid crap like wearing stiletto heels to the ballpark. It doesn’t make you look hot. It makes you look like Snooki.

Habit 4: Duck face. JUST STOP IT. If you’re old enough to vote, you’re old enough to know that you look like a conceited bimbo when you purse your lips and leer into the camera. Your future employer is going to Google you. Do you really want this to be the hiring manager’s first impression of you?

Habit 5: Passive-aggressive behavior. If you have a problem with somebody, confront that person directly. If the problem isn’t important enough to merit a confrontation, it isn’t important. Period. There is no situation in which passive-aggressive behavior is acceptable. It is always immature, self-serving, dishonest, and cowardly — which is precisely how you will be perceived if you do it. Don’t.

Habit 6: Gossip and backstabbing. Ownership of a uterus does not obligate you to make up crap about your enemies, complain about your colleagues, or revel in other people’s misfortunes behind their back. You can damage an enemy’s reputation with gossip — but in the process, you reveal something about yourself, and it’s probably not something you want people to know.

Habit 7: Whining. If you are being asked to do something immoral or illegal, report it. If you are being asked to do something unpleasant or inconvenient, either suck it up or look for a new job. Either way, don’t whine. Whining doesn’t help. It just irritates potential allies and makes you look unprofessional.

– Emily

Where I’ve been

I know, I know, I suck at keeping up with this blog. Cut me a break; I’ve been blogging (and tweeting and Facebooking and pinning and Instagramming) my butt off at work, so I don’t have much left by the time I get home.

If you miss your daily dose of hippie wisdom brilliance cleverness smartassery … well, you won’t find much of that on my work blog, because I have to play nice and act like a grownup, but I am writing a lot and posting a lot of pictures and doing a lot of cheering for Tulsa and Route 66.

Work blog is here.

Work Twitter account is here.

Work Facebook page is here. I’m still figuring out how to use Facebook as a promotional tool without totally overlapping the Twitter account. Right now, it’s kind of lame, but I’m hoping to get off my duff and come up with something better in the near future.

Work Pinterest is here. I’m not really into the whole Pinterest thing, mainly because I am too arrogant to get excited about photos that I did not personally shoot, but I’ve put up a few pins this week and have gotten a couple of repins, so I guess I’m getting the hang of it. I pin a lot more stuff for work than I do for home.

I think you have to download the Instagram app to follow my work pictures, but if you have it, my work account is listed as thecampbellhotel. I assume it will come as a surprise to exactly no one to learn that Instagram is my favorite of the social media I’m using at work.

I’ll try to post the rest of my vacation photos here in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, go entertain yourself with my work blog. I think it’s pretty good.

Go follow my work stuff and make me look good at the office, and maybe I’ll reward your loyalty and patience with a giveaway and some actual effort in the near future. XD

Emily

Sunday Lit Meme: Nonfiction

Sorry I haven’t kept up the blog very well this week. Don’t expect much for the next couple of weeks, either. Baseball season started last week; we’ve got an accreditation audit on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I’ve put in about 18 hours on school-related projects this weekend; parent-teacher conferences are this Tuesday and Thursday; and I’m scrambling to plan our NHS induction, which is right after spring break.

If you think I’ll be relaxing when spring break starts Friday, you’ve obviously forgotten what I do over spring break … and I’ve got to finish the Trip Guide as quickly as possible so I can head east for a visit with family that will double as a preliminary research trip for my next big project, which I’ll announce after I work out the logistics and feel more certain that it’s actually going to get off the ground.

In the interest of preserving my sanity, I traded in my piece o’ crap cell phone for an iPhone 4S the other night. Internet service on the iPhone is $30 a month, which is twice as much as the AT&T plan on my iPad cost, but Verizon also gives me eight times as much bandwidth as I was getting from AT&T, and I basically upgraded the phone to get Siri, which means I’ve basically just hired a personal secretary who’ll work 24/7 for $15 a month.

Now … on to your lit meme:

What’s the most interesting nonfiction book you’ve read lately?

Mine would have to be Bloody Williamson, which more or less helped clinch my decision to blow off New Mexico in favor of a trip back home if I can clear my plate in time to enjoy my spring break. Being a Southern Illinois girl, I should have read it a long time ago, but I just never got around to it. I finally got a hand free last weekend and read it cover-to-cover in about a day. Fascinating stuff. Go buy a copy and read it while I’m too busy to blog … and if I don’t get a chance to get back online before then, enjoy your spring break.

Emily

Latest creation

I’m holding a drawing tomorrow in class for another fabulous (read: ridiculous) handmade prize. Here it is:

I was going to do something different this time, but the last sock monkey went over so well that I decided to put together another one. It’s hard to tell from the picture, but its arms are “tattooed” with images of flying pigs that look vaguely like something Matt Groening would come up with.

I think the weirdness coefficient is high enough to endear this little character to most of my students….

Emily

Great day.

Today was awesome. Here are all the things I did:

1. Started organizing my classroom closet. My room is going to look soooo much better when I get this done.

2. Had a hilarious moment this morning involving a very nice professor and a student with a rather macabre sense of humor. The professor, who was a retired elementary teacher, tried to say something friendly to the student. Seconds later, the student turned to a classmate who was annoying her and said — in a tone of absolute seriousness — “If you don’t stop that, I am going to take an axe and cut your head off. Then I am going to cut up your body and hang it from the ceiling in a sack,” to which I replied: “Not in here on my carpet, you’re not.” It was like an episode of The Addams Family….

3. Watched a group of students in seventh hour teach an in-depth lesson on literal equations. Best moment: One of my irrepressible freshmen started the hour laughing and enjoying the opportunity to boss her friends around. She informed me that she was enjoying herself so much that becoming a teacher was her “new dream.” Thirty minutes later, she apologized for all the times she’d disrupted class and told me she would never want to do my job, because it was awful. I asked her what had happened to her new dream. “It’s shattered, Ms. Priddy,” she replied.

4. Got all my progress reports done and turned in three days early.

5. Had Spaghetti-O’s on toast for dinner. (Don’t judge me. This is better than it sounds, and just about perfect on a Friday afternoon.)

6. Placed one geocache on Route 66 and scouted an appropriate location for a second.

Hope your Friday was as good as mine.

Emily

Do you hear the people sing?

I spent most of the day humming “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Miserables after being asked to cover a world history class during my planning period. There were no lesson plans handy, but the kids were studying the French Revolution, so we read from the textbook and discussed modern parallels to the factors leading up to the revolution. We found connections to everything from Kent State to the Dust Bowl to Occupy Wall Street. After reading the description of Louis XV, I decided he sounded a lot like Jimmy Carter — which led to a conversation about why Carter was a good man but a fairly lousy president — and we questioned why France would have gotten involved in the American Revolution when the Colonies were English.

Considering the fact that I hadn’t studied the French Revolution since I was 14 and wasn’t particularly interested in it at the time, I thought the lesson went pretty well. Some of the kids wanted to sleep instead of participating, but several of them got into it, and a couple of boys were still talking about it when they got to my fifth-hour English class this afternoon. Mr. Oldani would have been proud….

I’m pretty amped about the project I’m planning to do in my classroom tomorrow. There’s a little railing around the inside of my classroom closet, so I bought some boards tonight at Lowe’s and had them cut to size so I can lay them across the railing to make a desperately needed storage shelf. The whole project cost less than $10 and should allow me to organize my closet and put away some things that are just cluttering up my classroom at the moment. I’ll try to get before-and-after shots of that project….

Emily

How to have a good day

Here is how to have a good day:

1. Download a bunch of songs from Sesame Street.
2. Program your iPad to wake you up with the Pinball Number Song by the Pointer Sisters.
3. Play your Sesame Street songs while you’re in the shower.
4. Wear a nerdy math-joke T-shirt and a long, multi-layered skirt that swishes around every time you take a step. (Skirts that move when you walk are fun.)
5. Start your morning by finishing up a time-consuming project you’ve been dreading for weeks.
6. Watch your student teacher transform an entire lesson with one minor, proactive adjustment made on the fly to get the kids back on-task when they start to drift. Bask in the knowledge that everybody is having a lot of fun learning.
7. Listen to some of your students engage in a spirited but good-natured argument as they work together to write a detailed, accurate explanation of a difficult concept.
8. Quickly analyze the source of the flames and respond calmly and appropriately to prevent the kitchen from burning down when dinner spontaneously combusts for no apparent reason.
9. Salvage dinner.
10. End your day at a coffeehouse you haven’t visited in ages, discussing Route 66 with well-connected people who are organizing a grassroots community development project in your neighborhood.

I’m pretty sure that Pinball Number Song thing was the key. Well, that and the fact that the weather continues to be awesome. There were irises coming up in the flowerbeds around the coffeehouse, and my neighbor has daffodils coming up.

Oh, and for the record: It is 24 days until Cubs pitchers and catchers report to Mesa, 38 days until I report to the bleachers at Reed Park, 78 days until Noise Nation reports to Coca-Cola Park, and 83 days until I report to the berm at OneOK Field.

Hope your day was good, too.

Emily

Bribing the children

I’m introducing a new reward system for good behavior and class participation. I printed up about a kajillion little slips that say “REWARD TICKET — for doing a great job in Ms. Priddy’s class,” and I hand them out randomly to students who are on-task, participating well, going out of their way to be helpful, etc. The kids write their names on the back, and the tickets go in a plastic bowl I picked up at the dollar store. At the end of the month, I’ll draw one name, and that student will receive a fabulous prize.

I explained to the kids that by “fabulous,” I meant “completely ridiculous” and assured them that the prize in question would be some one-of-a-kind, handmade monstrosity I’d come up with on a whim.

Sixth and eighth hours insisted that I post a picture this month’s fabulous prize online once I finished making it. Here it is:

Because, really, what sophomore doesn’t need a tie-dyed sock monkey?

This one looked sort of unfinished when I got done sewing him together, so I added a bowtie made from some bright blue ribbon with green peace signs and the word “LOVE” printed on it.

Ridiculous, yes, but look: I’ve seen sophomores fight over glow-in-the-dark plastic ants, so a tie-dyed sock monkey ought to provide plenty of motivation.

If this goes over well, I might do a drawing every two weeks. I’ve already got a ridiculous idea for the next prize….

Emily