3/21

Day 17. There's too much to read; TV's easier but sickening, watching the CNN ticker ("So far, so very good" and other stupid statements), etc. I don't buy all that optimism.

More soup.

Oh, they're calling it 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' now?

3/23

Day 19? Definitely losing track. Made gallons of 15-bean soup yesterday. Was actually OK with no ham/portuguese sausage. Finally used up whole box of mostaccioli. Doing all right, better than a few days ago when I could hardly wake up from my naps. School is over, which might have something to do with it. Of course, the work isn't done yet, so maybe not. But then, I'm not actually working on the work, so maybe.

Yesterday Eugene's Brother got me a Dr. Seuss book to add to my collection. It's called "My Many Colored Days" and is illustrated in beautiful paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher. It's a completely different Dr. Seuss -- minus the signature furry-fingered characters, minus the outrageous gadgets and straight blues, reds and yellows. It's great for kids -- all mood, all color. It's a great collaboration. It joins "Gerald McBoing Boing," "Oh, the Places You'll Go!," "Hop on Pop," "The Butter Battle Book," "Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now!," "ABC," "Green Eggs and Ham," "On Beyond Zebra!," "I Am Not Going to Get Up Today!" "I Can Lick THirty Tigers Today!" "Ten Apples up on Top!" and "There's a Wocket in my Pocket!" (with bonus illustrations.)

I always thought I would import my children's book collection into my classroom but now I'm thinking, what kind of hell are they going to look like when I'm done teaching? Or even at the end of the first year?

Urg, groan, moan. More work to do. Lots more.

3/26

Tuition grousing. Safety check grousing. What the fuck happened to Spring Break grousing. I know it's only Wednesday but I can see that I'm going to be tethered to this chair until Friday morning, so, why am I here? Because I just wanted to report the wonderful discovery I made yesterday: MD still holds a lot of its old charm for me. We partied with fraction circles till 430 a.m., pain-free. Mountain Dew is truly my drug of choice.

Day 22, is it? I have these mashed potatoes stuffed in the back of the refrigerator, I have a sneaking suspicion they are slowly being fed to the dog. Which is fine with me, they're the awfulest mashed potatoes I've ever made. I thought you could leave the skins on with russet like you can with red. Duh, no. No duh. The bean soup, which is more like a beany mash now, still slowly chipping away at that. I like to make great vats of things so I won't have to cook on a meal-to-meal basis but I see things in the fridge starting to take on whole new shapes and colors and I guess I'm just going to have to stop being so lazy.

Last night I had an intense craving for Vienna sausage. Bizarro. I ate bananas and peanut butter instead. No similarity whatsoever.

So far this is going well, I guess. A quart of organic vegetable stock goes a long way and depending how you dress it up, tastes anywhere from all right to reallly good. The thing is, and maybe just because I'm not planning well, but when you don't eat meat you have to eat constantly. It takes way more to fill and energize. More time, more food (more $), more planning. The good: no more running to cheeseburgers for a quick fix. the bad: as good as Boca is, it's not a mcdonald's cheeseburger.

Ultimate challenge (no longer just making it to Easter, I know I will) is cooking something meat-free that my family just loves. So far they've walked a wide circle around everything I've made. Should be fun trying to get them to eat something and like it.

3/27

Two all-nighters down, one to go. This morning around while walking around in a dark room I tripped on a box of dog food and laundry detergent and fell forward, flat, splat. Even though it was 430 a.m. and no one else was around I got up quickly and acted like I didn't just do something totally stupid. The incident kept coming back to me later and I kept cracking up at myself, even as I was drifting off for a nap shortly after. So far all I have to show for this work is interesting bruises.

3:36 p.m.

okay I know I should be somewhere else but I had to leave this thought. I was logged onto the webboard again making last-minute comments to other people's posts and reading their comments to me. And I realized I do a lot of things I'm not supposed to do, like have negative opinions about some of the things I see in the schools I've worked at, like saying what I think is stupid, etc. THe other people in my program mostly go with the flow, write stuff like "My OPT is great! The end." But I wrote something like "My OPT gave the kids a fraction problem they didn't understand and forbade them to ask questions or help each other and I think that's stupid and wrong." My actual language was a little more tactful, but that's basically what I said. I was really annoyed the day that happened because it made no sense at all, it was obviously a waste of time possibly designed to make the kids feel like idiots and I thought it was wrong and I got mad and I said so in my log. Nobody else says bad things in their logs. Also, nobody comments on those parts of my logs. Nobody criticizes their OPTs, maybe because we are preservice and it's not our place? Bullshit. I mean, don't be rude about it, don't go tell your OPT she's got it all wrong -- whether she's been teaching 50 years and doesn't care what you think or she's been teaching one year and you seriously hurt her feelings, that's not the best way to go, and face it, you are preservice and should respect people who have been there and done that. But you don't have to respect the stupid things they do, just like as your OPT they should definitely offer correction when they see you do something stupid. At the very least you should be able to speak honestly with your mentor teacher and your preservice cohorts. I sure don't see the need to clean up my log so it looks like I visited Disneyland and not a public school in Honolulu. I take all these "little" things seriously when I see them, and I think having an opinion about it bothers people, but public education, already so flawed, is the last place people should put up and shut up. Not parents, tenured teachers, preservice teachers, kids. But the value of silence is so high, on every level. In the classroom, up with administration, in government. It's not my intention to start a revolution (yet) -- I just want to be able to say that I would do something differently, without getting these weird looks from people who never heard of disagreeing with the status quo. Of course weird looks or no I'll keep my opinions, but I wish I knew somebody who would actually talk about it with me.