Coloring and Pasting my way to a Graduate Degree

So the Education Hall of Fame speech went pretty awesomely. I said almost exactly what I typed last time, and said it in a really corny-on-the-verge-of-out-right-sarcastic enthusiastic tone of voice with winking and eyebrow raising. I really pulled out all the stops for my lucky classmates. As for Mr. E.D. Hirsch's suit that I was supposed to make out of that piece of light blue paper....Well, since I'm not such a great artist, he ended up wearing a cross between a ladies suit and a leisure suit. His hands looked more like claws than anything, and his shoes were a delightful shade of brown, with perhaps a little more heel than I meant. I guess the shoes really were appropriate for the outfit, however. I tried to make him a really awesome shirt and tie to make up for it, but the markers didn't really cooperate with the colored paper, and he ended up with a purple and dark purple striped tie over a dark yellow dress shirt. Ah well.



For those of you wondering what ever happened about the Crokinole movie, I did find it with the help of some nice Crokinole Enthusiasts from the Toronto area. Thank you again to them. My boyfriend loved the movie, so he says, and in two weeks when I drive out to visit him, we're going to watch it together. After that, I'll write a very stimulating review.



In other news, I have to make a poster presentation on Wednesday about The Primal Teen by Barbara Strauch. It was a pretty good book considering it was all science-y and stuff. I enjoyed a lot of the analogies between rats, chimps, and teenagers. While the book did an awesome job of describing the development of the teenage brain in layman's terms and even explained some of their crazy behavior, it offered little on the side of, "So, what do I do about this?" and "My kid got a DUI while drag racing tractors inside the old abandoned barn that in sinking into the swamp and was caught with 40 pounds of crack in his front pocket. I know his brain made him do it, but what should I have done?"



Anyway, so for my poster I needed a giant picture of a brain. And I drew one! Yay! If you stand really far back and know that it is a brain, it almost looks like it might be a brain.....that a second grader made. Still, I'm going with it.



I also had to scrapbook a page for a mock yearbook for my literature circle presentation. We read The Freedom Writers Diary (which I would not recommend) and we have to give a stupid creative presentation on it. Since it is a series of diary entries of high school students over their four years at a California High School, we decided to make a year book and each talk about a year. It's a great idea! The only thing is, everyone else in my group is a scrapbooker and good with artsy fine motor skill activities. Needless to say, I had to have my mother help me put it together so it turned out at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing. Actually, I think it turned out pretty fan-frickin-tastic, so I'm pretty proud.



So it seems in order to get my graduate degree, I have to go back to 4th and 5th grade where everything is an art project. I can deal with this, except all of my peers now produce artwork at the adult level, but I never got any better after the age of 11. In fact, I think my younger sister could provide better artistic props for my projects and presentations. Bah!

Education Hall of Fame Assignment

So apparently I should be proof reading these things, because while I was reading some of my past entries, I realized that I make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes I leave out words or repeat words. My favorite is when I start one sentence, then end it with an entirely different sentence.

It isn't so much my inability to proofread as it is laziness. I already have to proof-read my school work. What do you want from me world? HUH? But seriously, I'll try to be better about it in the future. Not now. In the future.

In other news, I made a "campaign poster" for Madeline Cheek Hunter for my Schools and Society "Education Hall of Fame" assignment. It is kind of lame, but I am proud of my subtle "7" motif. You see, she came up with the 7 step lesson plan. It was freakishly hard to find a picture of her. It turns out that there is a romance novelist with her same name, and all the pictures online are of her. Bummer. I did manage to find one small kind of blurry one, and that is the one I pasted to my little poster.

Now I have to go write a campaign speech nominating E. D. Hirsch to the class' "Education Hall of Fame". I don't even really like essentialism. Cultural literacy my foot!

I'm thinking of something along these lines, although in all honesty I have just been goofing off so far. Here's what I have (and no, I did not proofread it!):

"It is an honor to have the opportunity to nominate my close friend and esteemed colleague, Mr. E. D. Hirsch, to the Education Hall of Fame! My friend, Mr. Hirsch, combined Jefferson’s idea of the common school and the ideals of Horace Mann to create his model of the essential school system.

Mr. Hirsch believes that all children, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or gender can be successful as long as they have a good base of general knowledge. Mr. Hirsch believed that students need to be literate and have a command of a vast vocabulary because, just as Thomas Jefferson believed, America is a democracy where even the common man has a say in the political and economical decisions of the government.

We the people want our population to be as educated as possible – to know facts and vocabulary. Because learning builds on learning, a culturally literate America is a strong America."

We have to incorporate this piece of paper into the speech as well, and I am thinking of turning it into a little suit and gluing a picture of his head on top and pretending like it is him. Of course he'll be like 8 inches tall, but whatever.

I should go ACTUALLY write this speech now. Boo to that.

Fake Spring Brings the Bugs Indoors

So fake spring has come to an end in Minnesota, bringing the much beloved winter back into our lives. There is this woman in my Schools and Society class from California, and one day she was chatting about how nice it was that spring was finally here. Part of me - the sadistic part - wanted to let her continue raving about the weather which would surely only get better from here on out. Unfortunately, I felt it was my duty to tell her the truth about Fake Spring.

You see, in Minnesota, the snow melts sometime around mid-March. The temperature rises to about 45 degrees F, and Minnesotans rejoice, shedding their heavy boots and fluffy winter coats. Some of us, myself included, stop wearing coats altogether. The damp and squishy ground is sufficiently disgusting so as to raise our spirits, and we began chatting with our fellow Minnesotans about the "heat wave". Many men even chose to begin wearing shorts. This is spring weather.

The thing that a true Minnesotan knows that the newcomers do not know, however, is that this is Fake Spring. The snow will melt, the sun will come out, and you may even sweat from walking outside in pants and a long sleeve shirt. A real Minnesotan knows that it is not time to pack away the winter gear just yet. A true Minnesotan knows that sometime in beginning to mid April, winter will return.

A delightful example of this: Last week I drove my car with the windows down, soaking up vitamin D (hoping to make up for the deficiency from the last 900 months or so) and feeling rather warm in a t-shirt and jeans. Today, April 1st, it is snowing. To be fair, I was a little off when trying to tell this woman in my class about Fake Spring. It actually began last night, which was technically still March. Oops.

The point is, Minnesotans know to enjoy this tease from Mother Nature. She may think she is playing a nasty joke on us, but we make the best of it. Naturally there will be some grumbling later today about the weather, but we secretly love it. If you are from Minnesota, you can deny it all you want, but I know you love the end of Fake Spring, the return of winter, and the masochistic wait for real spring.

Anyway, if you are here, happy back to winter, and if you are somewhere warm, I don't want to hear about it. I am going to enjoy my slushy white world where things have just begun to come back to life, but have been brutally frozen to death by cruel Mother Nature.

That's the other thing, see? Fake Spring lures the plants and animals out of hibernation, then ambushes them with sleet and snow, killing a good chunk of the gardens and bugs. Also, it drives a lot of bugs into the house. This means that my family will have to begin vacuuming the ceiling for those Asian beetles that look like ladybugs. These things look adorable and are supposedly good luck and all, but they just stream in through the siding and itty bitty cracks in the window, then our ceiling becomes a giant meet and greet for these things. Occasionally a box elder bug joins the fun.

Beetle #1: Hey, Sue! Isn't it great to get out of the cold and walk around upside down on this giant white surface?

Sue the Ladybug: Why yes! It sure is! That Fake Spring fools me every year! Hey look! It's Bob and Mike and Lois and Allie and Marcus and Greg and Tina!

Beetle #1: Let's all go party over by the light. We should probably just congregate in a small area and move around to make it look like we are planning something.

Sue the Ladybug: Hello Brett the Box Elder Bug! Would you like to join us?

Brett: No think you. Me and my buddies are going to crawl up into beds and nestle into blankets to scare the bejeezus out of the people that live here. Nothing's funner than seeing them scream when we're the first thing they see in the morning or when we get under the covers then crawl on their bare skin while they try to sleep!


So yeah. I am looking forward to vacuuming up Sue and Brett and Company, but not as much as I am looking forward to driving on the slippery roads again!