The Median Sib

A man and his wife were sitting in the living room and he said to her, “Just so you know, I never want to live in a vegetative state dependent on some machine. If that ever happens, just pull the plug.”
His wife got up and unplugged the TV.

I spent a little time this afternoon re-reading parts of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Dating and Sex, and even though I’ve read it a couple times, I still laugh at parts of it. In the section “How To Survive a Fashion Emergency: Shirt Caught in Zipper,” there were the following words in step 3: “Apply steady force to the zipper; pull but don’t yank too hard. Be careful not to pinch your fingers. Also, be sure to keep the garment away from the body, so the teeth of the zipper don’t bite your skin. This is especially important if you’re not wearing underwear.” Do you remember the scene in “There’s Something About Mary” when Bill Stiller had that problem? I laughed till I cried at that scene. And when Mary’s mom tried to spray Bactine . . . It was, without a doubt, one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. If you’ve seen the move, you have to be laughing now just thinking of it.

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Dating and Sex

Now that I’ve been reading Mother Tongue Annoyances lately, I have realized that spelling and grammar mistakes in advertising are quite common! My granddaughters spent last night with me, and this morning when their mom and dad picked them up, we all went to The Franklin Chop House for brunch. After eating, Sweet Stuff wanted me to take her to the bathroom. While I stood there in the stall waiting for her to take care of business, I glanced at the stall’s advertising board. Nowadays, one can’t even use the bathroom without being faced (literally) by advertising. One ad was for Chadwick’s Personal Fitness Training. Here is part of their ad:

Don’t you just love it? If I’d had a camera, I would have taken a photo of it to post. I got out my purse, dug around for pen and paper and copied it down. Sweet Stuff wanted to know what I was writing, and I showed her my paper. “You drew a lot, Grandma Carol!” she commented. I did. I wanted to make sure I had the exact wording along with the website address, too.

I received an email one time that contained the phrase “for all intensive purposes” instead of “for all intents and purposes.” I guess someone could have an intensive purpose. I don’t know. I remember a comedian, Norm Crosby, who used malaprops as his comedy, and he was hilarious.

I’ll take my camera with me to work tomorrow and hope that the Pizza Hut sign I mentioned a few days ago is still there. If it is, I’ll post a picture of it here.

Just clicked on one of my favorite blogs, Suitable for Mixed Company, to catch up on Kathryn’s posts, and I saw that she had a review of my other blog, The Reading Teacher. It doesn’t take much to get me excited - cause I’m thrilled to have my blog mentioned in someone else’s blog! YEA! Thanks, Kathryn!

In looking at the blogs I check daily, I read this article in Daddy’s Roses about how teaching in public schools has changed recently. Joan is right! Until last year I was a classroom teacher, too. Each year we were required to do more and more. Test scores became the focus and there was an incredible push to get more and more content into the school day. Planning periods weren’t for planning. Instead, they were filled with required grade level meetings, IEP meetings, and parent-teacher conferences. It was necessary to differentiate and individualize, but it required time to plan and gather materials. There was absolutely no way to do an adequate job without putting in many hours outside the school day. And in order to do an excellent job, the after-school hours were staggering. There was constant anxiety and pressure. I was beginning to feel burned out and knew I needed a change.

Rather than change grade levels, I looked at my options. My school system had brought in several reading specialists, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. Since children’s literature has always been my passion, that sounded like a good fit for me. I took the required classes to get my certification as a reading specialist, and I got the job I wanted immediately. Now I still work daily with children, and I still have incredible responsibilities. However, those responsibilities don’t include the tedious, time-consuming and exhausting non-instructional chores of grading papers, doing report cards and progress reports, handling lunch money, supply money and field trip money, taking care of bus passes and permission slips, putting up bulletin boards and displays, and the minute-by-minute responsibility for every aspect of twenty-five children’s school day. I can actually go to the bathroom without having to get the teacher in the adjoining classroom to keep an eye on both classes for a few minutes. I seldom need to bring any work home with me. I can actually plan during my planning periods, and I’m able to spend the full 30 minutes of my lunch period having lunch. (Note: How many business people have only 30 minutes for lunch?)

I loved being a classroom teacher, but it became too stressful trying to handle the increasing work load. I love my job now even more. I love being able to work with all grade levels of children. When I walk down the hall of the school, most of the children know me because I’ve worked in virtually every classroom either teaching lessons on reading strategies or training the older children to be reading buddies for the younger grades. It’s nice to be able to teach a lesson to a class of students, and then go back to my classroom and work with small groups of struggling readers or advanced readers. There’s lots of variety. I’m out and about the halls and classrooms of the school all day. I still have tremendous responsibilities and paperwork, but it is manageable and there is time in the day to do it.

What’s the answer for classroom teachers? I don’t know, but there has got to be a way to stop putting more and more responsibilities on them.

Taken in July 2005 on Eagle River outside of Anchorage, Alaska.

A child at school today asked me this riddle: What question can you ask hundreds of times each day, and each time the answer will be different, but each answer could also be correct?

Think about it…

Answer: “What time is it?”

Here’s another one: Before Mount Everest was discovered, what was the highest mountain in the world?

Answer: Mount Everest - it was still there, even if it hadn’t been discovered yet.

I am Carol, and I am a blog addict. I started this blog because I like to write. But then I began looking at other blogs and seeing the number of visitors and all the links and all the comments and all the cool memberships in various blogging groups — and my competitive nature kicked into high gear. Instead of being fun, it became an obsession. I had to write posts - even when I didn’t have anything to say. If I had two posts yesterday, then I had to have three posts today. I had to get more people to look at my blog - that site meter had to keep going up. I had to get people to link to my blog so I could move to a higher level in the TTLB system. This evening I came to my senses. I don’t know what the catalyst was - nothing out of the ordinary happened - but I’m glad that something in my thinking changed. My blog is for me. I may cancel the site meter so I can stop fixating on it. I might even take off all the ads. So far in the 2+ months I’ve been blogging I’ve accumulated about $20 in on-paper income from the various ads and links on The Median Sib…and I’ll probably never see that since it has to reach a certain amount before it pays off. It would probably average less than a cent for every hour I’ve spent working on this blog. I don’t want to continue with the blogging-as-competition mindset.

Bottom line: Don’t look for as many posts from now on. However, maybe the posts will be better since I won’t be stretching to find something to write about. Yea for blogging sobriety!

A six-year old lad came home with a note from his teacher suggesting that he be taken out of school, as he was “too stupid to learn.” The boy’s name was Thomas A. Edison.

Alfred Tennyson’s grandfather gave him ten shillings for writing an elegy on his grandmother. Handing it to the boy, the old man said: “There, that’s the first money you ever earned by your poetry, and take my word for it, it will be the last.”

Benjamin Franklin’s mother-in-law hesitated at letting her daughter marry a printer. There were already two printing offices in the United States, and she feared that the country might not be able to support a third.

~Cora M. Campbell, Sunshine Magazine~

I don’t know whether or not those stories are true. If they are, then they’re good lessons in not putting too much stock in what others think about us. If they’re wrong then I guess old Cora M. Campbell fooled a lot of people.

I visited Alaska this past July and loved it! I might not like it as well in the winter, but in July it was wonderful. Two of my photos turned out great — even if I do say so myself. So here they are:

This picture was taken early one morning as the sun was rising. We were staying at Riversong Lodge which was right on a river (can’t remember the name of the river, but the Iditarod goes right over the water shown in the photo). The shapes in the foreground are the posts of the dock and the motors on the boats tied up at the dock there.

This post will probably make me some enemies, and I don’t mean this to be insulting to Harry Potter fans - different strokes for different folks and all that…but I have to say it. The Harry Potter craze is getting old. After however many years and however many books, I’m tired of the little lightning-impressed pre-teen. Am I the only one who has no interest in the new HP film that’s about to be released? Or maybe it’s already in theaters - I don’t know because, frankly, I don’t care. I started to look it up and include some links, but that would be putting more effort into this post than it’s worth.

I’m an elementary school teacher - a reading specialist, even. I read daily from a wide variety of genres, especially in children’s books. So when the first Harry Potter book came out, I read it and thought it was good. Not phenomenal but good. J.K. Rowling certainly had an original and engaging story. I read the second one soon after it was published, and it was okay. Not as good as the first one but typical of sequels. The third one was tedious. I had to force myself to get through it. I didn’t even bother with the ones after that. Hoping that the movie versions would be better, I saw the first two movies. They were okay, but I didn’t hit pause whenever I had to take a bathroom break. They were forgettable.

For all you Harry Potter fans - more power to you. You see something in either him or the story that I don’t see. Despite all the publicity and the legions of fans pledging undying devotion to HP and J.K. Rowling, I just don’t like Harry Potter. Sorry.