Some punk struck with his graffiti last night. What he wrote on the school walls isn’t important, just a thoughtless series of words; it was the gesture of graffiti that translates as “fuck you.†The spelling, however, was particularly poor, even for thoughtless graffiti, which made me wonder which bothered the faculty more: the gesture […]
Hustling from the car into the schoolyard this morning, it turns out I wasn’t too rushed to pause for some birdwatching. A cluster of five birds hopped across one of the tiny patches of grass Newark still affords, foraging. I don’t know what kind of bird they were— the shiny black birds ubiquitous temperate, urban […]
I dream about school all the time, now. Hardly surprising when half my day is spent there. What bothers me, though, is that most of my dream classes are at least partially filled, sometimes entirely filled, with kids from my own high school days and not the kids I’m now teaching. What does it mean? […]
When I took calculus in high school, it was with a poor teacher. She took questions as threats, perhaps because she wasn’t quite firm on the material herself—I’m told she flunked calc at ECC. I learned straight from the textbook. Fortunately I could. Still, on the first test I scored only a B. Three other […]
I checked out “Summer Wars†from the local library this week. Anime has lost a lot of its sparkle for me, as it does for a lot of fans: what is at first a radical new animative form with amazing explosions and camera swoops, wacky humor, and plenty of cute eventually becomes familiar, and from […]
The calm following spring break didn’t last long. After a week off, both teachers and students had a chance to get all their stuff together. The kids were, by-and-large, sufficiently refreshed to put up with sitting through lessons. We had pleasant weather, but not so pleasant as to keep the students focused on getting outside. […]
The calm following spring break didn’t last long. After a week off, both teachers and students had a chance to get all their stuff together. The kids were, by-and-large, sufficiently refreshed to put up with sitting through lessons. We had pleasant weather, but not so pleasant as to keep the students focused on getting outside. […]
I had a very interesting job interview yesterday, though I didn’t realize it until I was already driving home. Job interviews, for any job, tend to be pretty similar, since they serve a similar purpose. There’s a standard format to them, and a set of standard questions. Some, like the infamous “what’s your greatest weakness?†[…]
I had a very interesting job interview yesterday, though I didn’t realize it until I was already driving home. Job interviews, for any job, tend to be pretty similar, since they serve a similar purpose. There’s a standard format to them, and a set of standard questions. Some, like the infamous “what’s your greatest weakness?†[…]
Spring break, in a sense, begins today. Technically, I’m not enjoying any extra time off yet; we get Friday nights and the whole weekend off, just like every other school, and only on Monday do we begin enjoying time in which we would otherwise be working. Unofficially, however, people pad out the break with normal […]