"To Kill A Mockingbird" removed from Biloxi, Miss. schools curriculum
Elmer J Fudd
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
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Plans for 2011?
Comments (13)My main goal for every year is to make sure I move forward, no matter what. 2011 is mostly working on BALANCE. HOUSE: I told myself I would work on my kitchen in 2011...take my time with it, and get it done if it takes all year. I got the motivation over xmas time and I've got 85% of my list done already. I wanted to spend the quiet winter months knitting, reading, and taking a break from "projects". I really need to focus on slowing down, so I'm finishing the kitchen since I'm in the groove, and no more indoor projects until 2012. As a single parent, I work full-time and raise my kid. When she's with her father every other weekend, I love my alone time with my DIY projects, but my projects are physical and tiring. I love my time, but I gotta slow down. Not fun to be sore from my projects, have a couple hours to shake it off on Sunday afternoon, and pretend it doesn't hurt when DD comes home and wants me to pick her up. KID: My daughter is 5. She missed the Kindergarten cut-off date by 7 days, so she's still in daycare. She's caught between older/her-age friends who talk about school and bigger-kid things...and little toddler-talk at daycare. I'm working hard to get out more and expose her to things bigger in the world than what we're used to. Step out of the little-kid things. You know what I'm talking about. 5 is such a transitional age for her and for me. I don't want to be caught up in being too busy that we fall into the toddler routines because it's easy for both of us. PERSONAL: Since my kid is now 5 and more self-sufficient, I'm finding small blocks of time to read books again, do some quiet things for me, care about hair, makeup & clothes, and just being a girl again. It's only been 5 years since she was born, 4 yrs since we left that awful marital existence, and I'm feeling like things are stabilizing and not so frenzied. Yay. I really love my life, and as long as I continue to assess, make changes where necessary...and now in 2011...slow down and BREATHE...it should be wonderful....See MoreIs This Education?
Comments (20)As reading goes, so goes writing. I have seen it over and over-good, enthusiastic readers who pick up books that challenge them are often the ones who then can write well. My theory: they absorb, by osmosis if you will, varying sentence and paragraph structures, expanded word choices, correct grammar and punctuation (they develop an inner eye that tells them a mistake "just isn't right" without neccessarily being able to tell you WHY it's wrong-it just IS), rhythms, descriptions....as I teach writing, I'd much rather come across a student that is copying a writer's style than one who is still stuck in simple sentences with basic "article, adjective, noun, verb, adverb" structure over and over. The one who is copying a style will go on to try on other styles, other structures, as they read more-the simple sentece non-reader may add another descriptor when asked by the teacher, but then it will be the "big, fat dog ran fast and barked" instead of just "The big fat dog ran fast." They can't write what they haven't seen. As teachers, we can use examples, we can read aloud, we can even require them to read...but still, the students who read for themselves will always come out on top. They have an internal knowledge of why it is important that I believe has to be set there very young, or, as others have said, there's a huge amount of ground to try to make up. As a parent, I have one who reads as she breathes-she was a National Merit Finalist and is now Phi Beta Kappa, a double honors major at a well-respected uni. As a first-semester freshman she was approached by English professors asking if she would tutor other students in writing. Her favorite thing to do as a very young child was be read to, look at picture books and listen to books on tape as she followed along. My son had hearing issues and speech issues as a child. For a long while I could not read to him-he didn't hear what I said-it was garbled as it passed through his ears. No speech at all until well after the age of 2. His passive vocabulary was small-when Mommy said "cookie" and you heard "kmnkggg" it's hard to put it together. We could cuddle and look at the pictures, and we did, for brief intervals-again, I could say "look at the dog" but that's not what he heard-but his fascination was sorting and manipulating objects-no speech required because it wasn't there. The problems were sorted out, by age 6 he was almost caught up in language, but went to speech therapy all through his elementary years, and even was part of a high school pilot program for bright kids with reading issues. He tests high average on standard intelligence tests, so should be able to read literature on his grade level. He has been a reluctant reader all his life, and now, in 11th grade, struggles through his English lit classes. Math, Chem, History, Accounting- he's fine, because content reading is simpler and more to the point-but reading early American lit, sorting through the wordiness and the......See MoreFrom Illuminated Manuscripts, via Incunabula to First Editions
Comments (66)Yes, Woodnymph, I had a circle pin after I was married and got quite a few comments about it. I paid $1.00 for my old book, The Shepherd of the Hills by Harold Bell Wright with illustrations by F. Graham Cootes, at a family estate sale. It gives a copyright date of 1907 in the front and says "Published September, 1907." I thought I had made a clever buy but found that there are a zillion copies available. It is in very good condition, and the bookshop owner who looked at it for me said it might bring $10. In it, though, were two postcards with postmarks that I can't make out. They have 1 cent stamps on them and very pretty handwriting. One has a picture of a young couple rowing on a lake and the other of the Masonic Temple in Bloomington, Illinois. That one says the writer is not going to school that summer but is saving herself for San Francisco in 1915. I don't know who either of the senders was but did know the recipient who was the aunt of my aunt-by-marriage. When my daughter was young, we did manage to acquire a complete set of The Little Colonel series, some of them from a private owner who lived in Peewee Valley, the setting of the books. The books themselves are not all of the same set, but some of them are the oldest edition. They are not in good shape, but she is proud of them and keeps them carefully on her bookshelves. I feel like Methuselah on this forum. My mother was a primary school teacher in one-room schools at the beginning of her career. In them, classes ran Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4 every year with 5 and 7 offered one year and 6 and 8 offered in the alternate years. If you started at age 6, you went straight through, but if you started at 5 or 7, you either had to repeat, go ahead and drop back to pick up the year you missed, or skip it and go ahead. Since I was the oldest child, my mother taught me to read at 4 and took me with her to attend first grade at 5, meaning I had to either repeat 4th grade or go to 6th. I did go on and never had 5th grade, which may explain why math was always my poorest subject since that was the year that long division and common fractions were introduced. At any rate, that meant that since my birthday is in July, I graduated from high school at 15, starting college in the fall of 1952. We had the suite-type dorm mentioned above, and my roommate was my best friend from high school (and still is). We had the rules about signing in and out, curfews with later nights on weekends, no one smoked, boys couldn't step foot outside the living room of the dorm. We did our personal laundry in the bathroom sink, but there were ironing facilities in the basement. Housekeeping gave out one clean sheet every week, and you were to put your top sheet on the bottom and the clean sheet on the top each time, taking the other one back to be laundered. We wore stockings and hats and gloves to church and formals to the dances held in the gym. It was certainly another world to......See MorePeace Like a River
Comments (24)I finished this the other day and, although I found it an interesting read I did have problems with some of it. I found the character of Swede who is only 8 at the start of the story to be about 10 years ahead of herself. Not only does she turn out reams of prose and poetry, but is able to cook for and nurse the family, all the while spouting general knowledge. Davy also seemed mature beyond his years. Reuben seems the most 'normal' of the children and I could certainly sympathise with his asthma, having been a wheezy child myself. I did wonder at the mother having upped and left her sainted husband with no reason given and no ill-effects on the children. Surprisingly I didn't find any difficulty accepting the 'miracles' performed by the father, what I had more trouble with was the casual brutality (perhaps too strong a word) of people's relationships with each other, something that I found similar in Plain Song/Eventide. Both deal with school bullies, something that can happen world-wide, but it is the follow-up of summary justice by the father which in Peace... leads to the really cold-bloodied murders. I feel a worrying underlying sense of hardness as though I am looking on at life in a frontier town where justice, if there is any, is of the rough and ready sort. "String him up Boys" a slap on the horse's rump and a pair of ankles are dangling centre screen. I could understand this attitude in inner-city slums but can someone tell me, is life really like this in small Mid-Western towns? I had the same feeling with the dreadful Waltzer and Sarah who had obviously been abused for years. I felt the book's ending was a bit casually 'tidied up'. I was surprised that Roxanna and the father could get together legally so quickly. Her husband had only run out on her on Nov 25th and they were married the following March. But at least she came over as a sympathetic character. Surely in 'real-life' both Davy and especially Waltzer would have been caught and brought to justice? All this must make it seem that I didn't enjoy the book, which I did well enough. It is just that I have a far too practical mind and wonder if I am really getting a true picture of mid-Western life from it . . .miracles etc apart....See MoreElmer J Fudd
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoElmer J Fudd
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoRita / Bring Back Sophie 4 Real
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoElmer J Fudd thanked Rita / Bring Back Sophie 4 RealElmer J Fudd
6 years agoElmer J Fudd
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoElmer J Fudd
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoElmer J Fudd
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoElmer J Fudd
6 years agolast modified: 6 years ago
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