A slice of TV.

For years, we didn't have broadcast television. We weren't really watching anything regularly, so we just got rid of the cable. I missed the local news, though. So, I tried to use a digital broadcast antenna inside of the house. It didn't work well. I occasionally was able to get the local Fox channel to come in; however, none of the other major networks ever showed up. That's not to say I could get any channels. Al-Jazzera, the HK channel in Chinese, Univision, Telemundo, and the English language Russian TV each came in with unwavering clarity. I even managed to tune into PBS with some success. So, I pretty much stopped watching TV, except through Netflix or Hulu.

Then, this summer, Fios made us an offer we couldn't refuse. For about $10 less than we had been paying our other provider for Internet and phone service, Fios offered us phone, cable, Internet, and a DVR. Suddenly, I had TV again, and I could record shows (welcome to 2005!).  I was a bit afraid I would start losing chunks to time to the boob tube. I thought I might fill up the DVR with show upon show. I didn't really have much to worry about. 

Even though I have all these channels, I still haven't found much to follow. I do record one show I had watched online, The Walking Dead, and I'm glad I don't have to tell friends not to spoil it for me. Otherwise, I've only added one more: The Following. I'm not sure what it says about me that the two shows I go out of my way to watch are about surviving the zombie apocalypse and trying to outwit a serial killer. Still, it's kind of fun to follow a couple of popular shows that before I would have to wait months to see. Now all I have to do is watch the last season of Breaking Bad before the new season starts...perhaps my profession of watching little tv is a bit premature...

Bees and the coming of spring

Yesterday, Eric and I opened our three beehives for the first inspection since the fall.

The good news is all three hives are still working. All had pollen stores and seemed to be finding some early nectar. Also, we found eggs, larvae, and capped brood in all three, which bodes well for the much needed population boom warm weather brings. We even saw the queen in the white hive, the weakest. It was good to see a queen wandering over the frames in there as the population of that hive is so visibly lower than the others. Even though she's off to a late start, the fact she's there indicates we might have managed to pull all three hives through the winter.

As we inspected, all three hives took advantage of the warm weather, and worker bees brought in loads of pollen of a variety of colors to store away. Before we kept bees, I had no idea pollen came in so many colors! I saw the olive greens and yellows of varieties of maple in abundance. The pollen forecast and counts from Pollen.com confirm that these trees have been producing significant pollen lately. A bee laden with pollen is quite easy to spot; she looks like she's wearing pollen pants!

This isn't one of our bees, but the image shows what I mean by "pollen pants."

But in addition to the loads of maple pollen, I also saw a few bees in two separate hives bringing in a vivid, almost blood red pollen. I'm pretty sure this was henbit, an early spring weed which has been blooming around the house. As the bees find more fruitful nectar and pollen sources, they will leave the henbit behind. Since we've not had a hive survive the winter in the last two years, this is the first time I've ever seen the vivid color of this pollen. What a sight!

When we finished, we smelled like smoke and bees. I don't really know how to describe the scent of healthy bees; it's a cross between honey and propolis, but that's not even a good description. It smells clean and happy to me, which I know doesn't do it justice.

Now that the sun is up later, I'm looking forward to watching the hives working. There's something wonderful about the hum of the bees and their swoops and dives in and out of the hives that soothes me.

Language and Learning and Buddies

Yesterday, I attended the Northern Virginia Writing Project's Bernadette Mulholland Glaze Language and Learning Conference. This amazing local conference features keynotes by some of the best names in education. I've seen Jim Burke, Kelly Gallagher, Peter Elbow, Donalyn Miller, and this year's keynote speakers Kylene Beers and Bob Probst. But, what I truly love are the presentations by local Northern Virginia Writing Project (NVWP) teacher consultants (TCs). As this video about the 2012 Language and Learning Conference notes, the day gives a renewed energy and ideas teachers can use immediately. Learning from other teachers, both the keynotes and the TCs, is invaluable. They aren't some far off educational gurus; they are real teachers sharing what they do best in their real classes. I truly cannot believe more teachers don't attend the conference each year.

The session I attended by Winchester, VA teacher Mary Tedrow gave me tremendous food for thought. Mary, who is one of the co-Directors of the NVWP, is a tremendous teacher and thoughtful professional whose blog I have long followed and admired. I've attended her teaching sessions in past years and this year's session on finding a professional voice reminded me I have something to contribute about my work with teachers I have met via Twitter. In particular, I need to collaborate with +John Hardison to write up what we've done together as cross-community learning and to plan more interactions between my students in Virginia and his in Georgia. John already wrote a blog post about our first multi-state tweet up, which also included +Sarah Mulhern Gross  and +Michelle Lampinen 's students. Since then, John and I have worked on another tweet-up and have given some thought to more extensive work. I need to follow through on those thoughts and share our process with other teachers, too. We have something going here that I feel is good for our students, and it's something other teachers can do!

The second session by middle school teacher Natascha Brooks focused on revision strategies. It's a challenge to convince students the effort to revise is worthwhile. Plus, real revision takes time to model, teach, and perform. So, many of us (myself included!) give it short shrift in the classroom. Natascha shared some ideas for revision via Prezi and hands on demonstration that I think might help my kids do more work with their writing. I plan to use her strategies with my AP students after Spring Break as we look at their essays and with my regular 11 students as I start working on research and personal writing projects.

The keynotes? Well, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst deserve there own slice sometime when I have done more experimenting. I can say that Notice and Note, their new book, is outstanding. I cannot stress enough the value of the framework they provide to move our students beyond teacher-created-question driven reading of texts. Seeing them discuss their work and model the lessons...I could have been there all day and not noticed the time pass. The two of them together have a chemistry that speaks of a long collaboration and deep friendship. I found myself wanting to be a student in one of the classes where they taught these Notice and Note lessons. Their publisher, Heinemann, produced a series of 6 videos, the first of which discusses "The Importance of Close Reading," that are worth the time to watch.

Just as important for me as what I learned was reconnecting with my teacher friends outside of the virtual world. I finally met Michelle Haseltine in person. Jennifer Orr, who I met once before at a TC reunion, Michelle, and I frequently talk via Twitter, so our meeting felt like a reunion of old friends. My fellow 2010 Summer Institute alumni Jessica Bar, Lindsay Burgess, Lindsey Brauzer, Dahlia Constantine, Norma Coto, Kristen Henry, and Traci Michaud attended, too; as usual, I did not get to spend near the time with them or with Paul Rogers as I would like. Dahlia and I had coffee together after the conference, which reminded me how much I miss her and wish I could go through the summer institute again to reforge and reinforce the connections I made with these women and the 14 or so others that couldn't make it (I say or so because at least one of them has moved across the country and because my memory is craptaular).

Then today, there were bees... and that's another post entirely.

Twilight. No, Not the Sparkly Kind

Matt Groening's Life Is Hell ended last year. Today, one of his comics resonates.

This is the time of the year when I'm in the bottom two rows, teetering into the last row. I lose sleep. I think of new ways to try to hold on to the motivation and engagement in the class. I worry about the piles of papers that seem to grow. I browse the job sites. I wonder what it would be like to leave the classroom. Standardized tests loom over me. I've grown weary of walking into buildings before the sun rises, of cold weather, of wondering what will happen, of trying to reach someone determined to be unreachable.

These are the literal and figurative darkest days of the year. 

But, there are sunny moments that hint at the changes to come. This weekend has three events I'm particularly looking forward to:

• The clocks move forward and the days of pre-dawn school arrival and departure are over for the school year.  Though I will miss the hour of sleep, the sun does much to improve my mood.
• Also, I attend the Northern Virginia Writing Project's Language and Learning Conference during the first weekend in March each year. As with my November trips to NCTE, the L&L seems to come at the perfect time to keep me moving and excited about working with kids. 
• Finally, it will be warm enough to open the beehives and check on their progress. We'll ensure they have enough emergency food to last until the nectar flow really gets going, also in a couple of weeks from now.

So, my pre-dawn slice today in anticipatory. Tonight, I've been awake most of the night and working on school-related assignments and worried about what there is left to accomplish. However, I know the darkness won't last, even though it seems like I'm still stuck in liminal space and time. In the next couple of weeks, I will see more sunshine, get more excited about my work, clear the hurdle of annual state writing testing, and have a week-long Spring Break before charging toward the next tests and the end of the year. 

I'm looking forward to the light. 

Contrasts and Contradictions

This weekend, I will attend the Northern Virginia Writing Project's Language and Learning conference. The keynote speakers this year are Kylene Beers and Bob Probst, who will be discussing their new book Notice and Note. Well, in advance of the conference,  I tore through the book and found their method of helping kids read deliberately makes sense in the "why didn't think of this" sort of way that good teaching does. I immediately adopted their six literary signposts and have begun experimenting to see if they will help my students as much as I suspect. 

While that book and this week's conference more than deserves their own Slices, I won't get into it here. What's more important to me the way the signposts have begun resonating in unexpected ways. It probably shouldn't surprise me I've begun to notice these patterns not just in my reading but in life. One of the six signposts they use to help students see patterns in literature is "Contrasts and Contradictions, " and  Today, in particular, seemed to be rife with contrasts and contradictions. With apologies to Beers and Probst, I've appropriated their signpost as my title for Slice #7 so that I can talk about the most dramatic contrast of the day.

This morning, school opened two hours late. When this happens, I like to try to get to school close to the regular opening time; often this allows me to get some preparation done and to touch base with colleagues I don't have the chance to see normally for more than a hello in the halls [1]. This morning, two colleagues, one my next door neighbor and another from different department visited. In both cases, we talked about writing and rhetoric. One asked about the rhetoric and composition program that she'd heard about from my former colleague-turned-preferred-substitute-teacher, who was in for me when I went to the Monday meeting. The other proposed a new student and faculty writing salon style meeting [2]. The end result of both conversations was a sense of belonging and of thoughtfulness. 

Soon after the second conversation, and well before school began, I sent two multi-page, double-sided print jobs and one single-sided print job to the second floor copier in preparation for 1st period. As I live at the end of the hall and far from any department printer, I tend to send my copying directly to the copier instead of printing, walking to the department office, picking up the print job, walking to the copier, programming the copy settings, and waiting for the copies to finish. Most of the time when I send sets of 30-60 copies that are double-sided and stapled, I leave my room and get to the copier soon after the job finishes. I simply pick up the copes and go back down the hall. 

So far, this has not been an issue. Once or twice, when someone else has been there to program jobs, I've had to wait for my print job to come up, so I assumed that the copy function takes priority. Apparently, that's not always the case. 

Unbeknownst to me, two of the building's copiers were broken and there was . Thus, the copier where I sent the print job had a line. And my printing took priority over other jobs. My colleagues couldn't figure out how to interrupt my printing jobs and do their own copying, so they watched and fumed as my copies got made.

Wholly unaware of the copier situation and chaos my use of copier as printer had caused in the more than 40 minutes before classes started, I stopped through the workroom to pick up other single-copy printing and ran into one of my fellow English teachers. She asked if I had sent a job to the copier and told me several people were ticked off that the job went through and they had to wait.

Though my friend suggested I lay low, I went to the copy room to pick up the job; when I arrived, a teacher I have never met before immediately laid into me about the printing. She didn't introduce herself. She didn't ask if there had been a mistake. She instead decided to scold me and asked me if I thought it was appropriate to make other people who had been in line wait for my jobs to finish. I pointed out that I had no idea the technology made my print jobs the priority. However, she seemed intent on making me admit that I was some sort of inconsiderate, thoughtless wretch and didn't seem satisfied that I was not going to contritely apologize for making her wait. 

The more she tried to manipulate me (or so it seemed to me at the time), the less I was willing to compromise by offering any sort of apology. After all, I didn't even know this woman, and I was not about to be treated like a 14-year-old who had spoken out of turn in one of her classes. We exchanged a few words, though I remember little of what I said as I was focused on remaining calm yet uncompromising. Then, I walked over to the administrative assistant's desk and picked up my job. It was one of the two most unprofessional interactions I've ever experienced in a workplace. Within the span of half an hour, I went from feeling like part of a community to feeling like maybe this was no longer the place for me. 

Fortunately, that moment didn't end up ruining my day, and I have not decided to change jobs, as I briefly considered immediately after the confrontation. But the left over adrenaline and defensiveness made it tough to get started for a while as I tried to shift my focus away from the feeling of being attacked. Thank goodness for the breathing room afforded by the Pledge of Allegiance and the morning announcements.

I will try not to let this interchange color the way this other teacher and I interact from here forward; now that I'm not in the heat of the moment, I'm more inclined toward compassion and understanding. Having had situations where I felt as if every second counted, I was behind, and I felt under the gun, I certainly understand how she could feel panicked about getting her work done before the bell. The change in the daily schedule and the unexpected copier obstacle likely combined  to make the routine seem even rougher than normal. I admit I've not always behaved as well as I would like; my reactions have been out of proportion to the situation at times, too. And I didn't always realize it until after I had done or said something that upon more sober reflection seemed outsized. 

For me, this contrast between my morning conversations reinforces that we all have bad days, but they are not the whole of who we are any more than our best days. I hope that I'm not judged by either my very best or my very worst days; either would be reductive of who I am as a person and as a professional. This isn't an easy job we do, and part of acknowledging that complexity means forgiving ourselves and each other as we forward. 

[1] The room where I teach is at the end of one of the hallways. I can go literally days, and probably weeks if I'm not careful, without interacting with my peers beyond brief smiles, "how are ya"s, or waves. This isolation has been exacerbated by having a different lunch schedule than the others in my department, which was admittedly self-inflicted because I wanted to have time to move the computer lab where I teach journalism during the last period of the day. While I like the quiet at the end of the hall and the time to move without the hallway crush, I do miss the brief connections afforded by shared lunches.

. 

[2] Again, this deserves its own Slice when this colleague and I have fleshed out the idea further. The proverbial cat should be out of the bag sometime during the month.

Unproductive

When I suspect there will be a snow day, I pack up all of the grading I have to do and bring it home with me.  If I'm home alone, I have a better chance of getting it done. Today was not one of those days.

Don't get me wrong; I do not blame Eric for this. I would just rather spend time with him than with the papers if I get an unexpected day off.

So, what did I get accomplished today? 

• I explored non-fiction works for my AP students to read over the next two weeks. I have been working with one of the fabulous librarians at school, and I tweaked the list we'd come up with months ago. I still need to finalize the list and type up the corresponding assignment, but I think that will happen tomorrow during a timed writing I give to my students.
• I helped shovel the driveway. We'd put it off, thinking that the snow would keep coming. When the snow changed to rain, we got out there before the driveway changed to ice. 
• I helped portion out pasta for lunches.
• I remembered to write this Slice of Life post.

That's about it for "productive" work. However, I also

• finished Game of Thrones season 2 with Eric;
• watched this week's The Following  and The Walking Dead on the DVR;
• slept in to get rid of a headache that woke me up in the middle of the night last night;
• had lots of cat lap time; and
• watched the local news's silly weather coverage.

And so, I will likely drag the grading back to school with me and work tomorrow...unless the school system cancels. I know it's a Faustian bargain that I will regret when I have no work day in April, but I'd take it, hoping I'd be productive the second time around.

My hobbies include reading, playing board games, and meteorology...

Winter in the area where I live is a mixed bag. The average temperatures don't really tell the story.  In the last 30 days, we had highs ranging from 33-60 degrees. We can have rain, ice, or snow as the precipitation from any given system, and sometimes a mix of all three.

To be honest, I didn't pay much attention to the winter weather before I started teaching in 2005. Bad weather meant I had to use my vacation time. Bad weather was not something to be celebrated.

But now, like many of my colleagues, I become an amateur meteorologist when the seasons change. At school, days off and delays happen with the ice and snow. For years, my department ran an informal snowday pool to guess which would be the first cancellation due to snow. But for the past two years, we've had very little of snow or ice, and that pool has fallen by the wayside.

Still, we perceptually look to the skies and the internet, especially during the drag of February and March when the honeymoon has ended and before the crush of testing and end of the year activities has us spinning through never-ending "to do " lists. Social media has become the outlet for our weather obsession.

In the past four days, it;'s become increasingly likely there will finally be a measurable snowfall in the area. In response to this developing story, I've watched my timelines fill with  snow talk like this:

• More than one teacher has shared this image: 

• The BSB weather team (BSB are the initials of three teachers who try to predict delays and cancellations, often comically incorrectly) has made its pronouncements. 
• Several people, myself included, have talked about the Capital Weather Gang's latest predictions and models.
• One teacher claims a student send her photos of ice cubes in the toilet in an attempt to get extra credit for causing the snow day. 
• Teachers have started talking about their to do lists and/or their plans to avoid working and use the day as a rest.
• So far, the funniest has been a rumor that Jim Cantore had arrived in Washington, D.C.[1] on Tuesday, a sure harbinger of weather doom.

Most of this is harmless fun and wishful thinking. We all want a day to catch up and breathe. We probably will get it, too.

But, we could also get Thursday, which will be a Faustian bargain. See, these days aren't all free. The school system where I work schedules three days without make-ups iinto the instructional plan. After that  we start losing federal holidays and teacher work days. Eventually, the system will tack dyas on to the end of the year and lengthen the school dya to meet the state-mandated requirements.

Still, as I gaze upon the piles of student writing to be graded and look forward to a week and a half of schedule interruptions due to state-mandated writing tests, I cannot help hoping to have at least one day of space before the next "to do" list starts again.

[1] @JimCantore's Twitter feed had an Instagram picture of the Charleston, SC Food and Wine Festival on Sunday. He retweeted a picture of himself and several friends outside of a Charleston restaurant on Monday night. So, I don't know if he was in DC.  But, he also tweeted "I feel a trip to #DC in my future: http://wxcaster.com/gis-gfs-snow-overlays.php3?STATIONID=LWX … #vawx#mdwx #wvwx" on March 3.