Terminating My Tilting

I have spent too much of my life fighting the giants. I'm putting down my sword and savoring the scenery with my Sancho's!

By the way, Don Quixote is a free download for kindle from Amazon!

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.
"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."
"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone."

Devil's Advocate in Response to Coloring for Fun

Thanks Cauffeemamma for the encouraging comments on Coloring for Fun. For future readers, I guess I'm used to an attack on my ideas about education so I thought I would attack first myself. A lot of people might think that it is the very "waste of time" of which I wrote about in Coloring for Fun that brought on the "needed" changes in education. Too much relaxation, too much fluff, too much freedom of choice in curriculum, no uniformity in teaching made us fall behind. Fall behind on testing. I would agree with that-yes, on testing, but I will NOT agree to falling behind on learning. I learn new ways of teaching in every class I visit. I have learned literally thousands of things about teaching from books, principals, technology, younger teachers, older teachers, other subject teachers, students, books, trial and error, video, workshops, youth groups, service clubs, my own child, my family, my friends, ministers, and the list goes on. Almost every teacher I know wants to learn something new everyday. Few I have met are stagnant.  I really miss the idea of how teachers got to be the boggeyman of the country. Before testing was the end game in education my students knew world events better than most adults, knew the world’s countries and capitals and their location almost up to the minute changing in the map weekly. They could draw, create, research; they visited the library often and for varied purposes. We had computer projects, inter-disciplinary units, almost "college” level research papers. They wrote often and well and in varied forms. They could write a limerick, haiku, quatrains, and many other poetic forms as well as a five paragraph essay. They could outline, they could write in cursive, type on the keyboard, and even learned calligraphy. They had English Teas, Chinese Stir Fry, Egyptian date balls, they constructed pyramids, dug for artifacts, made castles and shields, created mosaics, read novels, wrote reports, read and read and read some more. And they colored! Yes, I ran off map after map after map because I wanted them to handle any map they would ever see for the rest of their life and I hoped that those real life maps would take them into the big world that they were trying to understand. Then came the test and one by one almost all those things began to disappear. My scores went up and _____________ went down. I'll leave you to fill in the blank.  I heard Gov. Haslam asked the teachers and adminisrators to just be patient for a year and anything that needed to be fixed in Race to the Top and the new evaulation system would be taken care of.  I witnessed how things were taken care of during the summer of 2011.  If you trust the Gov. on this one, I have some land holdings in Yemen I'd like to talk to you about.  Don't know where Yemen is?  Don't worry, it's not on the test!

Coloring for FUN!

Sarah Morgan, my daughter, brought home her "first place" coloring contest picture with her other school work this weekend. I had heard about this "feat" for several days. She said that she got first place and told me who got second and third place and that she got a piece of candy as a prize even though she said, now it wasn't from the whole school, Momma, but just from Mrs. Hester's room and Momma it was for Veteran’s Day, do you know about that Momma, well, it was just in her class but I got first place. When Sarah Morgan talks, you don't have to use too much punctuation because she speaks in run on sentences. Hemingway can pull off a page with only one period but for SM and me, we just run on! Anyway, needless to say when she showed it to me I did ooo and awwww quite a bit. She said that it wasn't "scribble-scramble," Mrs. Hester's very sweet way of saying messy and she showed me it did have a 1st marked right on the top-but remember Momma only in Mrs. Hester's class. She was also so proud of her glittery spider web from Mrs. Jackson, her art teacher. Her Daddy asked her if she wanted us to tape them up on our official "door display" but she said no we had better not and just put them safely in her scrapbook. She was proud of her math, her spelling, her reading, her writing and all the other things that she and Mrs. Hester work so hard on each day but it was that little coloring contest that really made her day. I imagine those kinds of things are quickly disappearing from the Tennessee classroom.  For years when I taught in sixth grade we used to have a coloring contests for each holiday, Easter baskets and chicks, flowers and hearts, cats on spiky fences, the best witch picture ever with a big apron just the right size for a child’s poem, Santa with his long list, cornucopias with fruits and vegetables (Mrs. Brock is that an apple?  No, I think it is a pomegranate, Well, what color are they?), and of course snowmen. We would usually have a book that one of the teachers would read to the whole bunch of the students as they all sat together, a student might read a poem they wrote or give an oral report about a holiday celebrated far away or long ago.  We'd read about St. Valentine, St. Patrick, Rosa Parks, and Ukrainian Easter Eggs.  We'd decorate the halls and give out little candies for participating or a little bigger prize for the "winners." It used up paper and copy ink, it wasted time, it matched no standard, the kids weren’t doing anything productive, they just talked and colored and the teachers relaxed, too, maybe even grabbed a cup of hot chocolate or coffee and graded a paper or two while the kids colored, no RIGOR in the classroom to be found. Some didn’t like to color so they read that book they couldn’t wait to get to or watched their friend color and offered suggestions.  Sometimes we’d try an “anticoloring” book picture for the ones who didn’t want to always stay in the lines and to tell you the truth a lot of contest winners were those who added an “out-of-the-lines” touch to their “ditto”(I know that is a nasty word) picture. They always had colors, coloring pencils, and markers and if they didn't they borrowed from each other. Mrs. Davidge, our assistant, always kept up with our favorite master copies, taped up the entries, got to hear and pass along all the compliments the kids got for their displays, had fun watching the kids look at each others' art, got the art teacher or other interested party to judge, and announced the winners over the intercom to come to her table in the hallway to hand out the awards! We went slower then. Everything in school goes so fast now. I can't keep up. I think I'll go color for awhile.

By the way someone else must love to color, too. There are thousands of coloring sites out there-easy or difficult, printable or on-line. 

 

A Cave in China

This writing project idea came to me in a dream. In fact the cave had a name which when I awoke I said I would remember but as many other times with dreams if I didn't write the inspiration down it leaves. I just remember it had something to do with a cave and Christianity. It was linked in my dream to the caves in which the early follows of The Way worshipped. As I got up and ready for my day other ideas began n to form around the setting. This is the way I usually write. I call it the snowball effect. I roll an idea around in my head until I have enough linked ideas to form it into a story. Like rolling a snowball downhill and seeing it grow larger and larger. When it finally forms then I try to write. I write phrases as fast as I can and then leave them for a while to ferment into something. Cauffeemama says I'm a good story teller :) That made me feel really good. My Mama would be pleased because her family has kind of a knack for telling stories. I loved hearing her sisters and her together telling old stories. My Dad's family also loves a good story and there are several that we tell on each other every time we get together. Anyway, I think most of my writing is just that-relating a story, experience, or memory I've had and then recording it in written word. This story idea seems different. I have been thinking more about writing pure fiction so maybe that was why I was dreaming about Christian caves in China. Her are the ideas for the start of my "snowball":

A cave system in remote China

Christian Tourist group

secret missionary twist to why they "think they are there"- in other words they were seeking to do some type of covert missionary actions( extremely dangerous by the way in China) while there and they think at first that is the reason for their trip but God "expands" their mission in ways that confound them.

There is an old man

He is their guide into the caves which are on the official tour

It is a well known ancient site for tourism however remote

It has been known as a "palace" of sorts for one of the kingly dynasties of early China (prince/king/ palace/ cave will be linked to the ideas of Jesus birth in a cave/ His titles as prince, etc.)

Somehow in the plot we find out that as the Old Man guides the tour and separates the group into a hidden and protected area that he is the guardian of the long hidden history of Christianity in China and that this cave is really the "Dead Sea Scrolls" type depository of Chinese anquities of Christian faith importance.  This will eb difficult, clashing cultures and religious ideas, set in the time of the Boxer Rebellion.  European prejudice will have to be shown truthfully along with the activites both good and bad of the church.  Research will need to be done on Catholic saints' work from this era.  Chinese Christianity had battles against many foes from within and without.

The group thinks that they will have to smuggle out the material but surprisingly the "treasure" is found within the memories of 12( link to12 disciples) little Chinese girls who are orphans and they have memorized the history and are the "living" thread that must be secreted out through China.  This will be a segment that must address Chinese adpotion policies.  The past and future of Chinese orphan girls and the shutdown that happened in 2005 in International Chinese adoption.

The old man becomes a martyr himself to save the group and the children

The group's struggle to freedom

The relationship that builds with the group and the little girls

Translation of little girls' memories from Mandarin into Greek and then into English

The adoption of the girls

The final surprise of the hidden artifact

Marie Curie in the Middle School

I subbed today in science class at the middle school with sixth graders.  We watched a film about Marie Curie and followed the important meaning found in the movie through a teacher-prepared viewer guide.  I really enjoyed the movie (even 5 times.)  This woman was such a hero.  I had forgotten that it was World War I era and not World War II.  She and her late husband broke such ground in the field of diagnostic medicine with their use of applied radium for X-rays developing machines that could use tubes to X-ray and even treat people.  They forwarded the scientific world's knowledge of elements and wide use of those elements.  Sadly, they had to fight the military, scientific boards, prejudice, and the government to make their finds useful.  What more they could have done if they had been backed and believed.  Curie won two Noble prizes, never sought to profit from her work, lost her beloved husband to an accident, and lost her life to leukemia, induced by radiation exposure.  It made me wonder during this day that I worked what scientists stood in labs around the world searching, searching, searching for ways, cures, discoveries, methods, medicines, codes, and equations that could better our world.  This is for the them-you are heroes.