I put blog-type stuff on the back burner while I took care of the usual business I do every week and finished the electronic edits and revisions of my book.  I’m asking a couple more people if they will give me some input, plus reading it myself in hard copy one more time.  Then I’ll send it to Kristen, who will request other revisions, which I will dutifully do.  From there, it goes to editors.  Actually, once I’ve made Kristin’s edits, I do pretty well just forgetting about the sucker.

To clarify my last entry, as you may have guessed, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.  I went to the doctor with her yesterday, and we got great news.  Given the information we have right now, he’s anticipating doing lumpectomies on both sides and that’s it.  No chemo, no radiation—all good.  Just FYI, ladies, this was caught during a routine mammogram.  They caught it very, very early (long before she could have felt a lump), which is why the treatment is relatively low-key and the prognosis is excellent.  How’s that for motivation to get that mammogram done?

It is springtime in the Rockies.  It’s snowing…no, it’s raining…wait, it’s 78 degrees…no, make that snow…rain…sun????

You know how some time periods can seem a whole lot longer than others?  Especially if you’ve been transitioning from one very different thing to another.

Yesterday was a staff development day.  First, my department assembled a potluck breakfast, so we had a bit of social time, which is a good thing when you’re working together with people as a team, to some extent.  Then we hashed out some pretty important department stuff—next year’s reading and purchases, that kind of thing.  I think our principal is really trying to respond to the overwhelming workload, because we had the rest of the afternoon to just work.  I finished my quizzes and annotation guides for Lord of the Flies.  Then I graded a class set of papers.  Two down, one to go!

I went home, picked up my daughter’s friend, and did the mom thing for a few hours.  On our way out to dinner, my own mom called and asked if we could get together.  She’d been waiting on a medical test result, and we needed to talk.  I dropped the girls off at Noodles and Company to eat with my husband, picked up a cup of tea for me and a latte for Mom, and headed over there.

At some point, I’ll probably blog about this, but right now, she hasn’t had a chance to talk to my brother, so I’m going to hold back.  Suffice it to say that it’s serious, but both she and I are staying upbeat and optimistic, a factor I consider to be to her advantage while we work through this.

I went home and rested a while, then headed to my son’s high school to help supervise After Prom from 10:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.  I had a tough time sleeping when I got home and was awake by 7:30 a.m., up again by 9:00 (obviously, I wasn’t going back to sleep).  I went to Great Harvest, indulged in a ginormous cinnamon roll, and sat down to my computer to proofread my submission for my critique group on Thursday.  Once I got going on that, what the heck, I kept writing, and lo and behold…it’s finished!  The book I’ve been working on for over a year, my labor of love, homage to one of my favorite authors and favorite novels, completed!

Well, kind of.  I sent the last bit to my critique group.  This makes the total pages I’m submitting 50, when we usually cap at around 30.  I told them I’d sure understand if it was too much, but I’d like to get editing and revisions finished by June.  I once heard that a novel is never finished so much as it is abandoned.  Ain’t it the truth?

I just administered my last standardized test of the year, the ACT.  As you all know, I proctored six days of the state test, the CSAP, right before spring break.  We came back and gave the kids another week’s respite from bubbling, then made them take Acuity, our school district’s own, personal waste of time.  Alas, CSAP and Acuity are only given to grades 3-10, so we give the ACT to all juniors.  Each time I proctor these hours-long exams, I must “actively proctor,” which means I cannot read, grade, or do anything but stare at kids who are silently bubbling (now there’s an image).

Today, I stared at them for three hours and thought, “I’m so bored.  I’m so bored.  Oh, my God, I’m soooo bored.”  After a while, this became, “I’m so bored, I prob’ly think this song is about me…”  This, in turn, became the following:

(Sung to the tune of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”)
I walked into the test room
Clinging tight to my big blue box        (we keep the material in blue bins)
Stopwatch strategic’ly hung around my neck
Like Mic Jagger’s old silk ascot
I had one eye out for cheaters as
I walked around the room
I knew that I had to be an active proctor (be an active proctor) and…

I’m so bored.  I prob’ly think this song is about me.
I’m so bored (so bored).  I’ll bet I think this song is about me, don’t I, don’t I, don’t I?

We started this several years ago
When we were still quite naïve
When we thought if we tested ev’ry single kid
That then they would all achieve
We stopped teaching all the things kids love
And walked around quite peeved.
We had some dreams they were clouds in our coffee (clouds in our coffee) and…

Chorus

I heard Bush hoped to jack Texas schools
And his plan nat’rally won
Then he flew his Lear Jet to Washington
To start the total Regime of the Son
Now he’s in our classrooms all the time
It’s like we all forgot
He left his school with a C- average (C- average) and…

Chorus, repeat, fade

See what happens when you drive teachers nuts?  Feel free to share it with anyone who may need a little song in his proctoring heart.

Bob Herbert ran a pretty good editorial in today’s New York Times called “Clueless in America .”  Naturally, I agreed with him about the lack of depth in the whole Hillary vs. Obama bruhaha, and I figured that I was in a pretty good position to comment on his main theme: the poor quality of secondary education in America.  I’m going to say that a lot of it has to do with something I’ve already blogged about.

Herbert cites a study showing that American fourth-graders can compete globally in science, while a gap opens up between us and other developed nations as the years go on.  I would say that is due in large part to the “just ‘cuz” thinking I blogged about earlier.  Up to fourth grade, science is pretty innocuous.  By high school, we either have to go deep into “just ‘cuz” territory, or we have to stop.  American students will never be able to compete globally in science as long as our schools must tiptoe around anti-science activists.  As long as we have to pretend there is any remote possibility that the earth is only a few thousand years old or that animals were created out of thin air or by some supernatural force of “intelligent design,” we intentionally hold our kids back.  Let me say that again: We intentionally hold our kids back.  Most Americans have no idea how the rest of the developed world sees our ridiculous beliefs—that to Europeans, our respect for creationism looks no different than indulging a primitive insistence that the world is flat and rests on a turtle’s back.  Jeeze, even Pope John Paul II embraced evolution.

And when it comes to general critical thinking skills, we tiptoe around those, too.  You see, actual critical thinking threatens so much of what parents believe and therefore insist that their children believe “just ‘cuz.”  Real critical thinking, the kind that forces people to question authority, common wisdom, and shallow nationalism, is often labeled a “liberal agenda.”  You know, that “liberal agenda” for which teachers are reviled in this country.  I have news, America.  As long as people insist that teachers are wrong and subversive for teaching kids to question, reach, think for themselves and engage in real, honest-to-goodness scientific inquiry, the rest of the world is gonna kick our collective ass, and believing America is number one just ‘cuz that’s what we want to believe won’t help us one little bit.

A brief post today, I think.

This has been an OK anniversary.  The most OK it’s ever been.  I think that part of this is because it’s Sunday.  I’m not at school.  Usually, we have to be at school, but we have no students, so I sit in the building and think about it, think about it, think about it.

I haven’t been thinking about it all month, as I have in Aprils past, dreading the day.  April 17th was on my brain earlier.  I kept thinking I had something to do that day, an appointment or something, but I didn’t.  I think that was just my subconscious.  I’ve had an odd thing about that date over the years, because in 1999, it was prom (the last conversation I remember with Rachel; our dresses were very similar).  I have this kind of weird thing stuck in my head—an image—of prom being held on a train in the night, and the track gets switched in the dark so that we speed toward another train on which await two boys in trench coats with dufflebags loaded to go.  I guess it was from a lot of thinking about how Dylan took Robin to the prom, and then both boys went to After Prom in the wee hours of Sunday, April 18, eating and laughing and joking with everyone, knowing full well what they would do on Tuesday.  They knew; we didn’t.

And I’m thinking about that now because I’m writing this, but I haven’t felt like I’m somehow back on that train this year.  No nightmares.  Just a day.  It’s OK by me.