January 2006 Archives

It's fast pace. Pretty much all the time. Just the other day, Josh made some comment about a kid walking slowly (a.k.a. normally) through a crosswalk. Something about how that kid should be more curtious and hurry up because look at all the cars waiting for him!!!

Man. You can't even cross the street at a normal pace here. And, quite frankly, it's exhausting.

I'm learning why great teachers melt into the woodwork, stop caring, stop volunteering, stop making eye contact. Because if you do care and do make eye contact, you may never see your family again! :-)

But, I digress...

My main point here was that I have like nine-kajillion blogs that I've started but haven't had time to finish. I'm going to publish them back on the dates that I actually wrote them, hopefully this weekend. Because, if it doesn't happen this weekend it will never happen.

I officially start my Master's program on Monday. Pretty excited about it actually. I finished all of my prerequisites and now it's on to the good stuff. I changed my major and am doing Instructional Technology instead. It's a project-based program, so I'll get to built projects involving technology that relate to my content area. We're also adding a broadcasting class to our program next year, which I'll probably get to teach. So, I'll get to work on stuff for that too.

One class that should be interesting in an educational design class I have to take. One of the books is about "design for non-designers." It goes over things like the elements and principles of design and how to make a nice layout. We have to make a flyer, a brochure, and a simple website. Heh heh heh. I hope it's not too challenging for me. ;-)

My brother (Chad) and his wife (Ronnie) added one to their flock yesterday. He doesn't have a name yet, but he was born a healthy 10 pounder! Yeah, I was heavier than you when I was born, kiddo! *Steph issues an official "WELCOME TO OUR WORLD!" to young Whiting boy.*

Anyway, it's been so fun to add nieces and now a nephew to my family because they get all of the adults on the ground playing again. That, and they add a whole new dimension of joy and pride to us all as we fight for their attention.

I'll post some pics and his name when I have more info. In the meantime, I polled some of my students for name suggestions and some of them were mildly amusing. Here's one conversation after a student suggested the name "Borgnine":

Mrs. L: Vlad, WHO ON EARTH has the name BORGNINE?

Vlad: My cousin! He's so nice!

Mrs. L: Oh. *walks away sheepishly*

Here are a few more of my favorites - note that these are all REAL names that my students HONESTLY suggested... just kind of multicultural at times: Biff, Boss, Brahams, Buzz, Eggbert, Glossi, Goebbels, Gokul, Graybert, Henning, Itai, Jambow, Kamp, Regards, Rendel, Royi, Salvador, Shehtert, Taiki, Thor, Vladimir, Weinrib.

Let's hope that young Weinrib Whiting is able to get a better name from his parents! :-)

Yesterday I had my first protest. It wasn't the stand on the street yelling kind of protest, but the silent hold-my-sign-along-with-a-group-of-others-so-please-notice-us kind of protest. It was at the Cupertino School Board meeting; currently we are negotiating a new contract. The contract will hopefully include some cost of living adjustments and salary increases, being that most of us can only afford to live here because our spouses are engineers. I actually make less now than when I started almost five years ago. So, I'm really hoping we get the mula, especially considering that our superintendents have taken some pretty insanely significant salary increases over the past few years while the rest of us took cuts. I digress...

My sign actually said something about our union standing united. Josh photoshopped it with a quip my political-guru brother-in-law said was basically at the heart of every protest. I'm thinking of actually making that sign and keeping it my trunk. See, in Minnesota, you keep a snow shovel and jumper cables in your trunk so you can help yourself or others in need. In California, you keep a variety of protest signs in your trunk so you can hop out of your car and join any random group of angry people who want something. I figure, this sign could really work in all situations! I'm even thinking of some cool rhyming things I could chant that would enhance my nifty little protest sign...

Well, some of the things I imported on my MT Blacklist basically blacklisted everything. I called my trusty resident geek to the job and I'm happy to say commenting is possible again! Huzzah!

Okay, maybe the word whore is a bit strong, but that's essentially what I've become. You see, in education, the only way you can get a raise is by getting something called Continuing Education Units (CEU), or by accomplishing a higher degree. It's basically me paying so I can continue teaching so others can get paid for teaching me so others can teach them... on an on until there is a huge bureaucracy of people taking classes from each other and leeching off the government as much as possible. Or something like that.

Well, I can't get a raise or move up to the next level unless I have enough units. Doesn't matter how good of a teacher I am. Just how many units I have. Well, I don't want to take really hard classes that require lots of homework. I want the credits! I want them cheap and I want them fast with very little effort. I know that sounds sad... I mean, I want to grow as an individual as well. But, for those of you in education, you know that education classes are generally the place for hoop jumping - for discussing something you've discussed a million times before, but participating nonetheless so you can just get the credit. They are not the place to go to experience personal growth. The whole thing makes me a little ill to be honest.

I found out that the fastest and cheapest way for me to earn CEUs is to go to conferences, usually over a weekend, and pay for units through a local university. So, this weekend I'm going to the MacWorld Educators Symposium in San Francisco, immediately followed by a Reader's Conference in Asilomar. I went to the Art Education Conference in November (which is actually a useful conference for me). I'm also going to the iCUE Conference in February and the Northern California Art Education conference at the end of February.

All said and done, I will have earned enough cheap & quick units to earn me a nice little raise. Sometimes I wish I could just get rewarded for being a good teacher so I could have my evenings and weekends to... I don't know... do non-teaching related things. That would be way cool.

Please welcome the newest addition to our family, ELLA! Official name: Ella Bo Jangles. I know, she looks a lot like Henson, but she's actually smaller and is a girl and has one blue eye (in addition to her other brown eye, of course). Her personality is also very different from Henson's. She wiggles and licks a lot and is generally sweeter. She was my Birthdamaversarymas present from Josh this year.

Overall, she gets along with Henson fairly decently. It has been difficult to potty train her because the California weather has been raining a lot lately. Nothing like standing in the cold wetness saying, "Hurry up! Go potty!" to a shivering little puppy who may catch some kind of weird pnemonia because of your crappy training. She just looks at me like, "Why are you doing this to me? WHY!?!"

She's better now than a few days ago.

Cool part is, Ella and Henson and 5 are all named after people/things Josh and I look up to. Well, Josh got to pick two of the names anyway.

I love commercial vehicles that have those signs on the back that say "How's My Driving? 1-800-PLEASE-DONT-COMPLAIN." Or something like that...

I was driving behind one today. It was a Schwann's Truck. It was the first time in my life that I was REALLY REALLY tempted to actually call that number. See, unlike Andy's rant about crazy drivers, my Schwan's trucker was actually TOO SAFE of a driver. Oh man.

Seriously, I went just two short miles down McClellan Road and it took me almost twenty minutes. He drove like 5 miles an hour (seriously) the whole way. I had to keep shifting my car down into first gear in order to keep up with him. And, there were school zones and stuff and he would STOP at every stopwalk even though there were NO CHILDREN IN SITE! Sheesh!

I wonder what the call to the How's My Driving? Customer Service Rep would look like.

HMD?CSR: I'm sorry ma'm... did you say he was driving TOO SAFE?

ME: YES! Who drives like that? It's a danger to society!!!

HMD?CSR: How is that a danger to society, driving too safe, that is?

ME: BECAUSE I WANT TO KILL HIM!!!

I figure it would go something like that anyway...