My Beauty Best Teacher

My mom passed this one on to me- apparently a group called the We the People Foundation has purchased a full-page ad in The Chicago Tribune today and Wednesday, calling their add an "Open Letter to Mr. Obama." It's described by the foundation as an opportunity for Obama to once and for all clarify whether or not he is in fact a natural born citizen of the United States, and thus able to fulfill the 'natural born citizen' clause of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Take a look at the story here at AOL News.

Although most people feel that Obama's birth certificate is authentic, there are a lot of suspicious things swirling around it that do lead people to question its legitimacy. For example, the certificate claims he was born in Hawaii- if that is so, then how come the Hawaii Dept of Health won't confirm Obama's assertion? How come there are legal affidavits stating Obama was actually born in Kenya. How come Obama's grandmother is recorded on tape saying she attended his birth in Kenya? And how come the Obama campaign posted on the Internet an "unsigned, forged and thoroughly discredited, computer-generated birth form created in 2007"?

If there was no fire and he is clearly naturally born in America, then there shouldn't be all this smoke. Now, it's probably not a full blaze- he probably is eligible to be President through his mother- but there is probably a spark here- doubts about her citizenship, doubts about her marriage, doubts about when he did acquire citizenship, etc.

There have been people who have brought court challenges over this, hoping Obama would just produce an undoctored original version of his birth certificate to reporters. But he won't, and the court challenges are thrown out of court because asking people to follow the Constitution is considered 'frivolous' by liberal judges. Other similar lawsuits have also been filed.

Here is a Q&A with the We The People Foundation Chairman Bob Schulz:

Q.) What sort of reaction have you received so far to the ads?
A.) We have experienced significant media interest from primarily talk shows and newspapers, including some well-known media entities. We have hoped that our ads would spur public debate on this topic and hopefully, this may have begun. In the end, there is no practical reason why Obama refuses to produce his original birth certificate. He is seeking the Office of President and has a duty to provide evidence that he meets the explicit requirements established by the Constitution.

Do I think there is anything here? Maybe, I do. Obama also falsified his draft card- I wrote about that already in my post here- Obama's Draft Registration Card Raises Serious Questions. Make your own calls on this stuff based on what you read and find out.

Oh, the title of the post refers to the fact that I think Barack is cooking the books and forging fake draft cards and birth certificates. Plus, I was just reading a post about how Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) might run for Governor of Florida in 2014. Purely a wild unsubstantiated rumor, but I for one want to see him give the peoples elbow to big government.

After a careful tallying of votes and considerable consideration of all bribe offers, I have ruled that The Best Posts of A Conservative Teacher 2008 are:

• Liberal Teachers: about liberal teachers and their agenda
• Working on the Standards: remembering my attempts to fight liberal bias on state tests
• Obama Calls for More Public Service: comments on Obama's call for more public service
• Happy-nicing Ourselves into a Dictatorship: Obama brings us into a brave new world
• Comparing Michelle Obama's Speech to Condoleezza Rice's Speech: this gem gives amazing insight into two women who have a lot of influence over Presidents
• Obama's Energy Plan Vision: see the pictures
• Global Warming Melted my Ice Cream Cone: shockingly, hot magma is causing ice to melt under Greenland, not my SUV
• Shays' Rebellion and the Financial Bailout- A Surprising Connection: title of post says it all
• Former Student Reports Voter Fraud on College Campus: I become more cynical about elections after hearing many of these personal stories
• Obama, Granholm, Kwame, Michigan, and Lions: The results of hope and change: written months before the disaster seasons of UM and Lions and the prison term for Kwame and the continuing destruction of Michigan's economy... only prediction not correct yet is on Obama
• Green Jobs, Jeff Daniels, the MEDC, and the myth of FDR: random connections
• Liberal Judge rules homeless voters may list air as addresses to get ballots: ah, liberal judges, making up laws as they go
• Parent protests assigned book: my call to action causes school district to pull liberal book from curriculum
• Buying the American Presidency One Criminal Act at a Time: on Obama's fundraising
• America Has Strayed from Its Founding Children's Books Ideals: what are you reading your child?
• Joe the Plumber Must Be Destroyed: also Palin
• Barack Obama was a member of the New Party: on Obama's membership in radical left organization
• My Experience Meeting Bill Ayers: my protests may have contributed to my eventual separation from that school district
• Warren Schools Blows Budget on Green Boondoggle: a sign of things to come
• Recent Evaluation of Michigan's Business Tax: sometimes I feel like a journalist, then I realize I'm doing real investigative work
• May You Live in Interesting Times: it's a curse
• Obama's Draft Registration Raises Serious Questions: anyone in MSM get this one?
• Libertarians Screwed Themselves By Not Voting or Voting Libertarian: to my libertarian readers
• Our Long Conservative Nightmare is Over: satire
• Bizarro World and the Israeli-Hamas Conflict: explore the concept
• Rezko's Lawyer Owns Obama's House?: does anything about Obama surprise
• Can you Smell what Barack is Cooking?: shady book stew
• Orwell's Children: is future 1984 or Brave New World?
• Beware of the Church of Climate Alarm: they have wooden stakes and will shove one through your heart if it will make you stop polluting the air with your stinking conservative breath

Go back and spend a minute enjoying some of these classic posts from 2008, and get ready for a new year! My blog is growing (thousands of hits), and with your continued readership, and telling your friends, and linking to it on your blog, and emailing me- we will grow it further. My battle continues- be part of it by linking to A Conservative Teacher often!

Just got back from the "National Tea Party Express III, Just Vote Them Out! Tour" stop in Clinton Twp, MI. Clinton Twp is a little north of Detroit in southeastern Michigan. It was a pretty good event- I'm not good at estimating crowds, but people just kept coming, and I guess there was anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 people there.

Although the Tea Party doesn't endorse any particular party, there were no candidates there from the Democratic Party, and not a single Democratic candidate for any office was out there talking about liberty, freedom, or limited government.

I did see four of the five Republican candidates for Governor of Michigan there- Mike Cox, Pete Hoekstra, Mike Bouchard, and Tom George- and they all gave a speech to get the crowd fired up. Mike Cox gave the best speech and still remains a guy I like for our Governor. I'll also point out that the one candidate for Governor who was not there was Rick Synder- apparently he doesn't support the things that Tea Party people believe in, like limited government, constitutional government, human freedom and liberty, less regulation of society, less bureaucracy and red tape, and lower taxes.

There were other candidates there as well, all Republicans running for various state offices here in Michigan- Judge Mikael Warren was there promoting his book America's Survival Guide, Mike Bishop was there just hanging out with his family (he is also running for Michigan Attorney General but really wasn't campaigning today), and I also saw my good friend and chairman of the The Michigan Taxpayers Alliance Leon Drolet there enjoying the crowd and talking to friends (he also is running for State Senate but wasn't really campaigning today).

Okay, enough name dropping, because the real fun of being at a Tea Party event to me is not the speakers and comedians and music- which the Tea Party Express had going- but talking to real people. There were discussions that I overheard about the Constitution, about our Founding Principles, and about how we should never compromise in our fight for liberty. There were more specific discussions that touched on economics and history. People talked about how they don't like all the bailouts for companies, about how the alliance between big business and big government and the big unions is bad for America, about how the nationalized healthcare plan that Obama is setting up is going to be bad for our country, about how cap and tax will destroy our economy, and about how our energy policies are holding back American industry. People talked about drilling, lower taxes, less regulation, less red tape, and less control over our lives will lead to greater freedom and prosperity. Average every day people talked about this stuff- I talked to a retired janitor for a good bit who said that government isn't the solution to our problems, it is the problem, and he was right on.

It was a good day- there were the smells of hot dogs cooking on the grill, people selling flags and shirts that talked about freedom and liberty, petitions circling, and lots of good people. Here are some sights and sounds from the event- pictures that I took on my cell phone- enjoy, and try to get to one of these events yourself in the future!


UPDATE: For another report, check out theblogprof's REPORT (with pics and video): More than 3,000 show up at Tea Party Express in Clinton Twp, MI.

Via Chron:

Diamond Offshore announced Friday that its Ocean Endeavor drilling rig will leave the Gulf of Mexico and move to Egyptian waters immediately — making it the first to abandon the United States in the wake of (Obama's) ban on deep-water drilling.

And the Ocean Endeavor's exodus probably won't be the last, according to oil industry officials and Gulf Coast leaders who warn that other companies eager to find work for the now-idled rigs are considering moving them outside the U.S.

It was unclear how many U.S. jobs could leave with the Ocean Endeavor, but typically more than 100 workers are on the rig at any given time, doing everything from drilling to cooking meals. Onshore, a network of businesses supplies the rigs with groceries, equipment, uniforms and drilling materials.
 
Dan Pickering, a financial analyst with Tudor, Pickering Holt & Co. Securities, said the legal uncertainties surrounding the ban - and the administration's plan to issue a new, revised moratorium - ensure that no companies will resume deep-water drilling in U.S. waters anytime soon.
 
"Are you really going to spend $5 million … getting ready to drill a well that someone would when probably block you from drilling?" Pickering said.

Are you going to invest money in doing something productive in America when Democrats are sitting around to talk bad about you, change the laws around, and tax that money away so that they can give it to their politically-connected friends? Are you going to work hard, knowing that Democrats can change the rules of the game whenever they want and whichever way the wind blows just so that they can pay back those who put them in office?

The answer to both of those questions is an obvious 'no', and demonstrates why Democrats shouldn't be running anything at all in our great nation. It is sad that their policies- the policies of Democrats like Pelosi, Reid, Peters, Levin, Obama, etc- have directly forced one company that employs hundreds producing a product that is high demand for a nice profit to leave our nation and go to Egypt because that country is more welcoming and accepting than ours. It is sad that these oil rigs are being forced to change their plans, and instead of making America a richer, more prosperous nation, are enriching a nation like Egypt instead.

Elections have consequences. This is what happens when you vote Democrat, anywhere on the ticket- businesses leave and our nation and society are a little bit less rich than we used to be.

In 3QuarksDaily Aditya Dev Sood writes about India's 'Mela Economy'...analogues of our Jua Kali's,Nnewi's ,Suame Magazine's and other under recognized informal networks? :

In the absence of malls and supermarkets, and given the diffuse distribution of the population in the countryside, a system of local weekly markets operates, which cycles through the countryside, so that on any given day you might be able to find a local market less than five kilometers away. You might go there to buy groceries or staples or fuel or essential tools and supplies, but you might also go to sell what was cooking or pickling or spinning or weaving or otherwise in preparation within the house. Most of the buyers at such santhey-s or haat-s or peth-s or similar weekly local markets might at the same time or on other days be sellers. The relationship between buyers and sellers is direct, and in principle at least, reversible. Through the propagation of the charkha, the manual spinning wheel, Gandhi's social philosophy expressly enjoined all of us users to also be creators of value. The village market and Gandhian economy, therefore, follows a decentralized peer-to-peer model, the very antithesis of the modern retail chain, and of late capitalist consumerism in general.

Mela-s are more festive, extensive and intensified versions of local markets, conducted to an annual rather than weekly calendar, often in alignment with harvest cycles. The people must have something to trade and something to trade with, for there to be a reason for a mela. The form of the mela seems to promote a kind of critical regionalism, similar to the wine concept of terroir: the kinds and varieties of goods available can be known on the basis of where they are from, the special techniques were employed in the creation, and the distinctive natural materials of which they are constituted.

More here
Image courtesy Times of India and Global Economy

• PodCastAwards.com

  I love my pod catcher app iCatcher. I use it to grab audio on my iPhone and video on my iPad. I listen to the podcasts in the car and watch the videos while washing dishes, laundry and cooking dinner. This list is worth voting on if you are a listener or to find podcasts and vodcasts if you are reventuring into this area. I only wish Wes Fryer was on here- he's great.

  tags: Education podcast

• Flat Classroom 11-3 Project - Expert Advisers

  Expert advisors are becoming a growing part of our projects. More savvy professors are taking in preservice teachers in a symbiotic mutually beneficial learning relationship with our students. They are learning about live collaboration and our students are receiving valuable feedback. The EA's are learning what makes a collaborative wiki and about the challenges and learning how to teach in a "flattened platform" and we are able to provide more feedback to students - an important factor, we've found, for improving student contributions.

  tags: education learning flatclassroom expertadvisors

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

 

Click here to buy from Amazon

"...Madame Dembélé Mariam Sidibé is the founder and Director of “Muso Danbe” a life skills center for orphaned and handicapped young girls in Kayes, Mali...Since family and community traditions are passed down from mother to daughter, orphaned girls often lack critical domestic skills such as cooking, child rearing and family etiquette due to being separated from their mothers too soon...The center produces beautiful, high quality cloth ranging from rich bazin, to colorful batik to traditional mud cloth and indigo..."

Hey Candi,

"Some of the teachers at a DC public high school called the DC Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and reported they have failed students only to find the grades were changed by the school's administrative team later. The OIG called the principal yesterday and told her they want to conduct an investigation and see her books which is why she was seen crying by some of the staff. The bldg. rep. held a union meeting this morning and laid into the teachers who called the OIG rather than coming to her first so she could schedule a proper meeting between them and the principal. She basically called the teachers a 'bunch of cowards for going outside the building' by calling the OIG and she said thats why Chad Ferguson wants to fire the whole bunch of them!! Wow, what a way to boost morale, loyalty and support from the teachers!! Next the building rep said that the teachers cannot fail students based on poor attendance alone according to the DCMR. I know that the DCPS attendance policy states that if a students misses so many days of school they can fail a class.

Shane Mitchell writing in Saveur:

Photo: James Fisher

I find shelter behind twin blue doors in an alleyway, at the home of Lela Abdulaziz, whose family owns several fruit and vegetable stalls in the city's main market. I struck up a conversation with her earlier this morning, while buying black Zanzibar peppercorns from her father. On hearing that I'd come to Mombasa to learn about the foods eaten here, she invited me for lunch—my first taste of home cooking in this part of East Africa, a region knit together by a complex skein of linguistic and religious kinship that constitutes Swahili culture. In her foyer, Lela sheds her bui-bui, the black robe and head covering worn by many Swahili women, and begins preparing the meal. First, she unfolds a low wooden stool that has a serrated blade affixed to one end. She sits, a half coconut gripped in her hennaed hands, and grates the white meat against the blade into a fired-clay bowl. Then she stuffs handful after handful of shredded coconut into a woven-palm-frond strainer called a kifumbu. I watch as she pours in a cup of water and squeezes the kifumbu to extract the coconut's rich, thick milk, which she stirs into a chicken stew, called kuku wa nazi, that has been simmering in a pot on a charcoal brazier.

More here

Richard Dowden writes:

School is seen as an escape route from the village; a magic elevator that will lift your child from the patch of subsistence land and transport him or her to the city to work in an office and send money back to the family. It is a terrible illusion. Visit a typical village school and you will find rows of old-fashioned desks crammed with anxious young people chanting answers learned by heart. The curriculum that is being crammed belongs to Britain in 1960...The education system in most African countries is a steepening pyramid pointed at Oxbridge and creating failure and despair at every level. Each year millions tumble off it, without qualifications or useful knowledge. They are failures who have wasted the family's resources, but they cannot go back to digging the land, because they have "learned book." Despite the obvious need for profound curriculum reform, African civil servants and politicians have little interest, since they themselves reached the peak of the pyramid. But what about the rejects?

An answer comes in the form of Ashoka Fellow Mwalimu Musheshe founder of Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT)whose school:

teaches you how to make life better here in this area when you leave school." The next thing he tells parents is that they too must come to school and learn alongside their children. And it is not just literacy that the school teaches. There is a solar power centre and, if families can afford a car battery, they can charge it up for 60p, which will give them a light in their house for a month. In a country with 12-hour nights, that is a lot of studying time. The schoolchildren learn to grow their own food and use new farming methods. They look after the school herd of cows, using the cowshit in a biogas maker for cooking.

via Prospect Magazine

I'm always fasinated by conspiracies- not because they I buy them, but because I like to take them out and look at them and see if they hold up in the light of day. As I wrote earlier regarding the controversy of whether or not Obama fufills the qualitification of being a natural born citizen (see my post Can you Smell what Barack is Cooking?) , if there was no fire then there shouldn't be all this smoke. Obama seems to be at the center of other controveries too- for example, I wrote here about Obama's Draft Registration Card Raises Serious Questions.

Then, as I was bumming around on the internet, I came across this little fun fact- apparently, according to the assessment records for Cook County, Obama doesn't own the house that he used to live in- the house is owned by a man named William Miceli. This man is a lawyer employed by Rezko, and Obama formerly worked with him. Odd that Obama wouldn't own this house, but it really is that odd, because you might remember that the way that Obama bought this house in the first place was by using fraud, deception, and illegal government kickbacks to Rezko, which is why he is in prision.

Through the wonder of the internet and copy machines and scan machines, the truth could be now known- that Obama is renting his house from the lawyer of a felon. That felon got government kickbacks- and Obama, a former government official, is living in his house? Smells like corruption to me.

If this is true, and if you doubt it email me your evidence, then it looks like Obama is further in trouble, because he was deducting his mortgage payments on his tax returns, and you can't do that for a house that you don't own.

Is there any fire behind this smoke? Is it reasonable to ask questions about this, considering the fact that many people associated with Chicago politics are shady and corrupt, and that Obama has had dealings now with several people who are going to prision for corruption? I think so. Committing mortgage fraud and tax fraud are crimes still in this country, whether they are committed by Obama or Nixon.

UPDATE: Days later, the World Net Daily picks up the scent and is on this one- I wonder how long before the MSM gets involved? Here is what the WND wrote:

WND confirmed the tax bill for the Obama home is mailed to Miceli, not to Obama or the Northern Trust account through which Obama has claimed the home was purchased. Records from the Cook County Treasurer's Office give the PIN number for the Obama property as 20-11-115-037-0000 and list Miceli as the person who receives Obama's property tax invoice by mail.

And here is the commentary over at Vox Propoli, very similar to mine:

So, who really did buy the house? Who owns it now? It's certainly possible that there's an innocent explanation for why Rezko's lawyer should be paying the property taxes on Obama's house, but something smells very, very fishy indeed in Cook County.

A sovereign is the supreme lawmaking authority within its jurisdiction. When the Pilgrims left England and came to America, in their hearts they didn't recognize as their sovereign lord the King of England, realizing that anyone who could make it wrong to practice your religion could not truly be the real authority over your actions. The Pilgrims didn't recognize themselves as sovereign lords over themselves, able to determine what was right and wrong for themselves, knowing that this sort of selfishness and vanity would lead away from morality and create an absence of law. When the Pilgrims came to America, they didn't recognize 'no one' as sovereign, realizing that someone had to be responsible for their actions and had to provide law over them or else their community would dissolve into anarchy.

When the Pilgrims arrived in America, they knew in their hearts who their sovereign lord was- they knew who was the real lawmaking authority who watched over them and governed their behavior. Even on the shores of a faraway world, far from the British military or the power of the crown, far beyond the reach of any monarch, in a hostile land filled with potentially hostile people, the Pilgrims sat down and gave thanks to their sovereign lord and savior, to the authority which governed their society, to the source of law and rules and power, and to the one person who could possibly guarantee their safety and salvation. The Pilgrims gave thanks to God and his son, Jesus Christ, recognizing him as their sovereign.

Nolan Finley, writing in the Detroit News today, wrote in Editing God out of history distorts truth:

Ask any grade school kid who the Pilgrims were giving thanks to on the first Thanksgiving and I'll lay you three-to-one odds that the answer you get is, "the Indians." Public education is so obsessed with separation and so uncomfortable with discussions of religion that it has sanitized the unbreakable link between faith and America's founding. Now children are taught that the Pilgrims set the first Thanksgiving dinner for the Native Americans who helped keep them alive during their first harsh year in the New World.

This is more than just a small distortion in the name of political correctness. And it's not one of those Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays issues. Whether you're a believer or non-believer, you should be concerned that God is being written out of this nation's history because doing so will limit our understanding of who we are as a people.

Faith was the driving force in the lives of the Pilgrims. Certainly the Indians helped them through the deprivations of that first year. But the settlers believed it was their prayers that accounted for their survival. And despite the starvation and sickness, they saw this new land as a great gift from God, a place where they were free to practice their religion.

The freedom to worship sparked a hunger for other liberties and created a culture that chafed at submission to arbitrary authority.

The words they used matter. When you edit out "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" from the Declaration of Independence, as President Barack Obama has been doing lately, you lose the understanding that the early Americans were able to take the extraordinary risk of breaking way from their king and taking responsibility for their own governance because they believed God was the only sovereign they were answerable to.

It was a remarkable proposition at a time when the entire rest of the world was under the rule of monarchs.

The belief in America's divine destiny and its providential partnership fueled the nation's sea-to-sea expansion and sparked a missionary zeal for spreading freedom. It gave rise to the notion of America's large and unique place in the world and the theory of American exceptionalism that is also now considered quaint in many quarters.

The irony here is that schools have no problem exposing our flaws in the name of getting history right. It almost relishes defrocking our heroes — Jefferson owned slaves, and so did Washington; Jackson practiced genocide; the pioneers ravaged the land. They do so even to the point of challenging the nation's legitimacy.

But when it comes to discussing the very complex and integral ways religion shaped our history, educators lose their nerve. So they invent more convenient scenarios, such as Pilgrims cooking up the idea of a huge Thanksgiving dinner to honor their Indian benefactors, instead of the God whom they ardently believed led them to this New World and controlled every aspect of their fate.

There's both good and bad in the nation's religious history. Americans have done some noble things in the name of serving God, and they've made some tragic mistakes doing the same. It's not proselytizing to explore that relationship between God and country. It's just telling the truth.

Truth is largely being scrubbed from public schools today, especially in the social studies, in ways big and small, and the fact that almost every single one of my students thinks that Thanksgiving was held to give thanks to the Native-Americans and not God is just one more piece of evidence that our nation is losing its history and its soul, and soon when people ask you who your sovereign is, your answer of "The President of the United States" will not be the same as the Pilgrim's reply of "God and Jesus."

Sometimes we have to go on autopilot. Knowing that we are too tired to trust our emotions.

Emotions are like tires on a car. Too many miles and they just get out of round.

Some rights reserved by TheDarkThing

We can't replace our emotions but we can renew them.

People who have never been in the classroom cannot understand the stress of winding up the school year. It is kind of like explaining having a baby to one who hasn't done it. But we don't have to explain. We don't have to justify.

Do what it takes to get through the last weeks.

Tip #1 Focus on the Most Important Thing

• Make a list of the three most important things you need to do.
• Put them in order of importance.
• Log out of email. Only open ONE tab in your browser if it requires your browser.
• Start on #1 Now.
• Work on that one thing and stay focused. If you need to write that one thing on an index card and keep it on your desk do it.  (I use the Next Thing app on my iPad.)

Tip #2: Outline Your Projects

But what if my most important thing is a project?

The time spent planning a project cuts down on the time it takes to do the project. Break it down into steps. Figure out the first thing you need to do to keep that project moving forward and put it on your most important thing list.

A checklist will help you here.

Tip #3: Focus on One Thing at a Time

Some rights reserved by austinevan

But I need to do a ton of things! How can I get it all done?

Start 3 other lists.

• After school is out
• Classroom work to do over summer
• Preplanning

I have over 100 things on my list. If I see something that absolutely doesn't have to be done before May 27th - it comes off.

Remove the date put it on one of those three lists and don't look at it until after school is out.

You can get this work done. One thing at a time.

You can't eat a watermelon whole. You have to eat it in small bites. Same with this watermelon of a workload you have during the last few weeks of school.

Tip #4: Make a "Finish the Year Well" List
What helps me is to list my classes and list every thing I have to do to close out that class for the year. Every grade left to take. Every school supply list to create.

Every project that needs to be done with a checklist.

All on ONE piece of paper. Yes, I have this list in my 2do app but when I overload. This is how I handle it.

Every day use a different highlighter. Highlight what HAS to be done that day. Write MIT(s) on my index cards (in the Next Thing app) so I will do those first BEFORE everything ESPECIALLY email.

Tip #5: Resist the Desire to Hide
Some teachers cope like students who aren't doing well. They hide in the bathroom or teacher's lounge just waiting for time to blow over and wash everything away in a tide of irrelevance.

But things like book inventories, curriculum updates, final grades - these things are important.

Those who win the race are those who finish well. You've come this far, finish well.

Tip #6: Put One Foot in Front of the Other
If you want to have a panic attack think of everything you have to cram in today. It is probably too much! Just look at the next thing you need to do. And the next. And the next. You can do it.

Tip #7: Let the Rough End Drag
Granny Martin always said "sometimes you gotta let the rough end drag."  The roughest end of teaching is definitely the last 2 weeks of school.

My Mama, a veteran teacher gave me some sage advice my first year of finishing the year. She said,

"If you've got the money, order out. Don't give yourself any grief about cooking dinner every night. Just make it through May, it will pass."

I remember crying,

"But Mom, no one has any clothes because I haven't had time to do laundry."

She said,

"Just go to Walmart and buy the cheapest of what you have to have in clothing. You gotta make it through, cut yourself some slack. Let it go, it is OK."

Tip #8: Don't Make Any Life Changing Decisions
Today, this morning. I feel like a failure. Last night I felt fantastic for a moment when a parent called excited about her child's website. Yesterday afternoon when a child forgot what his c drive is, I felt like a failure.

I look at all the things these kids need to know! I swear that they do their best to forget during the last week of school just to frustrate me. I feel like I've taught them nothing because there is so much left to do! I'm worn out and not very rational. No one except other teachers really understand.

Tired decisions are often WRONG decisions. Be careful and don't make them unless you have to.

Tip #9: Love on Your Other Teachers
I love my friend Pam our Science teacher. Her daughter is getting married next Saturday and she had an unexpected death in her family and had to plan the funeral this past Monday and Tuesday.

She'll ask how I'm doing and we'll just look at each other. She looks into mine with her snappy smart doe brown eyes and says, "I know." And she Does. She knows.

So do the other excellent teachers. The ones who care about finishing well. We are running around on the verge of hyperventilation frustrated at those with their feet up on the desks and leaving early because they checked out two weeks a go.

Teachers, we've got to stick together. 

 Look for your friend who is drowning and reach out and help her up.

Yes, you have too much to do. So does she. If we rescue everyone who is drowning then when you are drowning you'll find four or five hands pulling you out of the whirlpool. Don't let a good teacher go down for the count.

If there is a time when teachers break it is now. Look out for your friends. Love them for who they are and what they give.

Don't let them walk out and never come back because if they get to that point, they will. This is what happened to my mom. In post planning, she packed up her stuff and left and no one except the principal really knew it was coming until she was gone and they could do nothing about it.

A kind word. A loving gesture. Even looking at their papers and saying, is there something I can help you with?

Tip #10: Keep Your Eye on the Main Thing
These kids aren't finished. Don't expect them to be finished little perfectly polished gems of knowledge if you know that you aren't either.

We're never finished, we just move on to another circumstance of life that will add luster to our learning.

Know that you are part of something. The best thing you can do right now is to get good feedback from your students both with an anonymous form and through "focus groups" of sorts. Ask them what they liked, what they learned, and what they felt was pointless. They will tell you. But they will also appreciate and respect your rapt attention and the fact you want to improve! (Lots of good teachers do this, like Glenn over at History Tech.)


Let's Finish Well!
And now for a poem! ;-)

This is a reprint a poem I wrote that I plaster on my wall every May. First published in May 2006 on this blog:


Living in May

Lord, let me live through May
as underclassmen stress and seniors play
Help me stay positive
no matter how they act
Let my emotions be calm
and my attitude intact.
Lord, please let me live through May.

Lord, help them live through May
as they tend to act up all day
When temperatures rise
and tempers flare
As younglings try wings
and rebels dare.
Lord, please help them live through May.

Lord, let me teach through May
not just biding time all day!
Each day is a gift
as is each precious one.
This may be my last chance
to reach someone!
Lord, please let me teach through May!

Lord, let me live in May
sharing knowledge all the way
Enjoying the ride and laughing a lot
Cause in this school year
May's all I've got!

I do not want to waste a day
even the waning days of May
I do not want to miss a chance
to make their cerebellum dance!

I really want to leave my mark
to fan the flame and kindle a spark!
For as I use each second of time
I make a deposit in their mind.

It is now, when I unselfishly give

that now, in May,

I truly live!