Totally gacked from and . Thanks Tony and Lia.
I want everyone who reads this and wants to, to ask me 3 questions, no more no less. Ask me anything you want and I will answer them as honestly and completely as I can. Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this, allowing your friends (including me) to ask you anything.
This is a good exercise for me right before school starts.
Great questions!
1. I don’t know Taylor Mali’s “Like Lilly.” But I think I’ll have to think about this one, and make a poem out of it rather than trying to tell the story now.
2. My best vacation? This is a tough one. Either my trip to Italy, spending three days in Rome, three days in Florence and three days in Venice; or my trip to Scotland where I hiked all over the midlands and visited the Eildon Hills where Arthur is supposedly buried, and climbed Arthur’s Seat outside Edinburgh. It was a marvelous time. Both trips.
3. How to Conquer the World, a course on history and time management and organization:
A. Read about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the American Founding Fathers.
B. Draw on the experiences of those men to understand how great figures influence history.
C. Learn how to use their management lessons to keep yourself organized and your subordinates on track.
D. Rule your own world, and influence others to support your ideas.
Re: I’m really into the hypotheticals right now…
1. $100,000, eh?
I wrote 6 answers to this question before I realized they were all wrong. You could spend it on computers, but there’s no guarantee that the kids would use them. You could spend it on classroom renovation, but the kids would just deface them. You could spend it on books for the library, and they might not read them. You could spend it on teachers, but there’s no guarantee you’d get good teaching from it. Similar failures would result from my other schemes.
I would drop the money on a fully-funded physics classroom and a fully-funded biology classroom, though. On the order of Oscilloscopes and gene sequencers fully-funded, actually. First, you’re sending a serious message to the kids that science is important, and two, you’re breaking teachers and stduents of habits of learning ABOUT science ratherh than learning science. Experimental equipment is expensive, but spending money on the equipment for middle schoolers teaches tham that their contributions to science could be important; and you’re teaching them that they are old enough to work with serious tools.
2. I go to Japan. first, because I could never afford to live in Japan for a year on my own. Second, because the Japanese diet would be very good for me. Third because I’d do kanji study and learn Japanese. Fourth because I’d study with a kendo instructor and a karate instructor, and learn martial arts seriously. And fourth because it’s such a cool island culture.
That or France.
3. The world ends roughly every five years as it is now. Every five years, usually, my life goes through enough upheavals that it’s as though the world ended. I’m still here but my friends, family and work change enough that I live in a different world.
But that’s not exactly what you asked, so I’ll try to respond appropriately. I think I’d give up my job, and go walk the Appalachian Trail. I’d go out into nature and try to see and learn as much about it as I could. I’d attend more fire circles, write and perform more poetry, dance more frequently, tell more dumb jokes than I knew what to do with. I’d laugh and enjoy myself as much as possible, and try to make sure others enjoyed themselves as much as possible.
And I’d take on work as a carpenter’s apprentice. I’d love to learn how to work with wood.
1. This is hard, too. Assuming they can all temporarily speak English as I know it:
A. Thomas Jefferson
B. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
C. Marie Curie
D. William Shakespeare
E. Cleopatra
F. Robert Hooke
G. Janis Joplin
H.Lao Tzu
I. Mary Magdalene
J. John Locke
If that group couldn’t solve the world’s problems, I don’t know who could.
2. Sesame Street, almost certainly. It was the only thing I was allowed to watch when I was three. Plus, we only got three stations in our apartment in New York, until they finished building the Twin Towers, and they put the TV antenna on top.
3. I want to be dancing around fires, mentoring a group of fantastic young people to become their best selves, drumming up a storm, writing poetry that wins prizes and fame, getting acclaim for a best-selling novel, and be regarded as a grandfather or great-grandfather of the successful Revolution.
ahem I… ah… I’d better get to work, hadn’t I?
Princesspeanut’s questions
1. Yes, I do. I’m not sure it will be official ‘marriage’, with marriage license and all that, but yes, my friends will know I’m married and my family and my sweetie.
2. This is hard. Two things, one not in my control, and one I could have controlled. I think I would choose to not get rheumatic fever as a kid. I’d have been more active, less weighty, less God-obsessed, more of a crunchy granola type. I think I should have given into my impulses to be a freak and dress like one earlier. It’s harder to be goth or punk when you’re in your thirties and you’ve never really given vent to that before. I find I really miss having been that in my teen years and twenties.
3. Administrative side, no doubt. Correcting papers, grading them, putting them into a gradebook is one side of the ‘student side’ I could do without, but as a colleague of mine says, “Ninety percent of our time is dealing with kids, and the kids are ninety percent all right. But the other 10% is spent dealing with adults, and that can be all right or not all right in ways that are out of our control.”
I’m really into the hypotheticals right now…
1. If someone offered you $100,000 to improve the educational situation for your students, what would you spend it on?
2. This samn generous someone offers to pay all of your expenses for a year to live somewhere other than the U.S. Where do you go and why did you choose that place?
3. You find out that the life on earth will cease to exist in five years. You could tell people, but they wouldn’t believe you. Being the only person who knows exactly when it’s all going to be over, how do you choose to spend those years?
1. Best student story. Kinda like Taylor Mali’s “like Lilly”
*GRIN*
2. What has been your best vacation?
3. If you could teach ANY subject and do your own curriculum, what would it be.
*NUZZLE* *HUGS*
Lia
1. 10 dead dinner guests, who would they be.
2. what was your favorite tv show at 3
3. what do you want to be doing when you are 60?
1) Do you think you will ever marry?
2) If you could change one thing in your past, with the knowledge it would change your future, what would it be, and what would that futuristic outcome be?
3) Do you find there is more fustration with the student side of teaching or the administrative side of teaching?