I should be ashamed of myself.

OK … I have to post this, because it’s too typically, classically me to be left unblogged:

Ron and I love good barbecue, so my parents took us out to dinner at 17th Street Bar and Grill — home of maybe the best ribs north of Memphis — while we were in Southern Illinois last week.

As we were waiting for a table, I noticed that they were selling green-and-white baseball shirts with a smirking pig and the words “Nice Rack” emblazoned across the bustline.

For some reason, this struck me as the funniest thing I’d seen all week, and by the time we got done ordering our food, I had decided that I simply could not live one more minute without one.

I was wearing the shirt this afternoon when we went to Arby’s for lunch … where, predictably, I ran into two of my students. Fortunately, I was sitting at a table with my back to the boys when they came in, so they didn’t see their English teacher schlepping around in a “Nice Rack” T-shirt, but it strikes me that perhaps this would be a good time to rethink my off-duty wardrobe….

Emily

Watching the wheels

Oi. I just spent the past eight hours writing curriculum. The good news is that I have all of my regular classes’ work mapped out for January. The bad news is that it took a lot longer than it should have to get it done.

Between my past teaching experience (in a school so devoid of resources that I had to design all of my teaching materials myself) and Zaphod’s utter contempt for teachers who rely too heavily on textbooks for their lesson plans, I’ve picked up a bad habit of reinventing the wheel without first bothering to look for any prefabbed resources that might fulfill whatever objective I’m targeting with a particular lesson.

This means, of course, that I wasted the better end of two hours designing worksheets tonight before I opened the comp textbook to find an entire chapter full of exactly the same kind of exercises. D’oh!

Ah, well. On the up side, I’ve got a month’s worth of lessons ready for five of my classes, they’re generally better than the ones I used first semester, and now that I’ve gotten a better handle on the resources at my disposal, I should be able to plan the remaining four months’ worth of lessons a lot faster. Oh, and I cleaned the kitchen, living room, and bathroom while I was procrastinating on my schoolwork this afternoon, too. Not bad for a lazy Sunday….

Hope your evening was at least as productive as mine.

Emily