Warning! This Post May Make You Itch!

Warning: today’s post is gross, but I really need some help with this one! As I've stated before, I love to garden. It's kind of like a creative release for me. I get to paint a palette with colorful flowers, nourish the future with an edible landscape, nurture my "babies" any way I see fit, rejoice in their growth, and share the harvest with others. I grew up in California, and before we left had gardened for many years in the hot, dry, inland area of Southern California. 

The summers were brutally hot, with temperatures around 115-116 degrees for weeks at a time. Many beautiful plants would not survive the heat, and I looked longingly at pictures in gardening catalogs showing plants that would grow as far as USDA zone 7, but never had a chance in my zone 9 garden.

When we moved to Tennessee, I thought, "YES!! Now I can grow anything I want!" I bought bare-root fruit trees in January, potting them up until the ground and weather were ready. In April and May I planted flowers and herbs, looking forward to the butterflies and hummingbirds that would come, I knew. Sweat and dirt were my friends, because they were the precursors of beauty, and I COULD NOT WAIT for summer!

Then came July, and the mosquitoes and katydids kept up their noisy whine. Irritating, but the mosquito plant outside the back door would keep us safe from the bloodsuckers, I reasoned. But then came something I'd never experienced before, in all my years in the sunshine state.
Suddenly, I was getting bitten in the daylight hours!

Worse still, I never saw or heard any mosquitoes, but by the time I was done gardening for the day, my legs and arms were covered with itchy red welts. They looked sort of like mosquito bites, but each bite had a raised core, and all of them itched to distraction for TEN DAYS, no less! What in the world! Never had I experienced such itching! Why in the world, I wondered, did these Tennessee mosquitoes pack such a wallop?

I decided to look it up on the Internet. At http://www.healthline.com/health-slideshow/chigger-bites I found pictures that showed exactly the type of bites I had, but they were not mosquitoes causing this mayhem. They were something called "chiggers" which I had heard about from my mom when I was little. I found out that they are microscopic red spidery things that bite. They don't suck your blood, either. Instead, their saliva dissolves your skin cells into a liquid form. Your body reacts by hardening nearby tissue, resulting in a hard center core through which the chigger sucks up its meal. YUCK!!!!

You can't see them, but they will bite you. I spent the rest of the summer last year spraying bug spray on my extremities several times a day, AND I stayed out of my garden. Anybody have a solution to this problem? I miss gardening!

Thank in advance for any help or advice you can offer!

"Where's the Chocolate?"

“I’m sorry. The brain you are trying to reach has been temporarily disconnected. Please try again later, after its owner has consumed vast quantities of peanut butter and chocolate.”

This is how I feel after a school day filled, not with real teaching, but with IEP meetings, staff meetings, grade level PLC meetings, and/or most district-level in-service training meetings. Numb. Zoned out. Mentally disconnected. Certainly not rejuvenated, empowered, or engaged, ready to go back to my classroom with renewed enthusiasm and energy.

It wasn’t always this way. When I first entered the teaching profession, almost 16 years ago now, I LOVED any kind of training meeting. I always came back from them with new things I’d learned and that I could use immediately in my classroom. It was exciting to share a classroom with other teachers from all over the district, share our successes and our failures, make new friends, and continue to share with one another years after the training day.

It started every September with the new training day classes booklet. Inside were lists of classes for each range of grade levels, where the classes would be held (never in the district office, BTW, almost always in the classroom of the teacher conducting the training), the times/dates for the training classes, and the number of teachers allowed in each session.

We were allowed to sign up for a total of five classes each year (although we wanted more), and we could wait as long as the week before a training class in order to sign up, if we wanted. However, we knew better than to wait. The best classes filled up fast, so we signed up as fast as we could. We’d meet with our teacher friends during lunch in the staff room (yes, we actually sat down and ate lunch daily) to discuss the classes we wanted to take, and we’d all call in our choices by the end of the week.

On training day, we’d carpool from our school, then sit together in the training class, not to waste time with idle chatter, but to talk about how we would use the strategies or supplies in our own classroom when we returned. If there wasn’t enough room in our class for everyone we knew who wanted to attend, we’d take notes, or make extra copies, to share with other teachers back “home.” We didn’t compare test scores, or try to pinpoint who was the best teacher. We just shared, and helped each other.

Principals did not show up at these trainings to check on us. There was a sign-in sheet, and we were trusted to take a reasonable lunch, as well as breaks when we needed them. There were bowls of chocolate on the tables, and we shared handfuls with each other, grinning about the mood-lifting properties of chocolate which were extolled by researchers. We were sharing not just the chocolate, but also a love of teaching and learning, a love of sharing our enthusiasm with each other, a love of the difference we were making in the lives of our children.

We didn’t need to be policed because we WANTED to be there. We talked. We laughed. We LEARNED: from the classroom teacher,  from the trainers, and from each other. When we returned to school we were enthusiastic about what we learned, eager to share new lessons and new materials with our students. Years later, we still shared new learning materials we had stumbled upon, or which had been shared with us by a colleague. We sent them by district “pony mail” to other schools where other training day friends worked, because that’s what they were to us: Friends. Colleagues. Teachers. Never competitors.

Unfortunately, this is not the way we are trained today. I can’t remember the last training day where we were allowed to choose what interested us, where we learned from Master Teachers, shared ideas with other teachers, or came home excited to share what we learned with our students. Today’s trainings usually involve district bureaucrats, corporate trainers, and principals acting as police officers to ensure our compliance. 

When asking fellow teachers what they thought of the training there is usually much eye rolling, groaning, and exasperation. Today there is definitely no sharing, no enthusiasm, and definitely no eagerness to apply what has been learned.

Today I ask, “Where’s the chocolate?”

Where Do All the "Isms" Come From?

I am not a young person. Since I had children later in life (and especially since they are quickly approaching their teenage years) I sometimes feel much older than my physical years.

(My great-grandfather, Mclelland Barr, with Sarah Jane Sharps)

My mother grew up in West Virginia, a Southern state, but also one which broke away from the South over the issue of slavery. Mom grew up in a small town, mostly white, and rural, although they owned and lived above the family store. She grew up without a television, though she remembers sitting around the radio to listen to the President's weekly messages. The Internet was not even an idea yet. She did not have many of the advantages that others in more "civilized" areas had as far as food, clothing, and education. She walked the two miles to school each day, as the family had one car, which her father used sparingly. Mom didn't even leave this little Southern town until she turned 18. She said later that she was tired of "everybody knowing everybody else's business."

Yet with all these disadvantages, Mom somehow learned not objectify others. Maybe it was because her parents were teachers, and their parents were teachers, and so on, back many generations. I don't know, but I am grateful. If racism and sexism and all the other "isms" are learned behavior, why didn't she learn them?

My parents moved to California before I was born. I know, I know . . . California is a dirty word to so many here in the South. The land of "fruits and nuts" I've heard it called, by people who haver never been there. And while I'll admit that there is some truth to that, it makes me sad to hear people here in Tennessee make those accusations. It makes me sad that while I am sitting in a cafe among supposedly educated people in a Barnes and Noble in a large city, who have access to the Internet, T.V., and excellent schools, that I hear grumbling about our President (though they don't use that title of respect to refer to the leader of our country and the free world) and those "damn liberals who are ruining our country," or the destruction of our way of life due to "all the damn lazy immigrants." My heart aches when my 12-year-old daughter reveals that her social studies class talked about the disappearance of the middle class, and that most of the other students espoused the idea that this was "a good thing" because it "shows that people who don't work won't get ahead."

I know that part of the reason why I am subjected to these loud conversations taking place at the tables next to me is because their proponents see what is on my computer. They see me working on a TpT product about President Obama, and it offends them. I'm a teacher planning to teach my students some of the facts about their President, and perhaps encourage them to reach for their own dreams, to know that in the United States of America, a democratic country, they need not be limited by the color of their skin or their family's financial position. If asked, these people who are so outraged by my work would probably say they would defend our country and the American dream to their deaths. Then they go on to try to cut down everyone who is not the "right kind" of American.

This is not to say that only people in the South engage in this type of behavior. I have been personally attacked and bullied by others on the other end of the political spectrum, as well. I don't like to talk politics, yet there are others who would seem to want to bring politics into EVERYTHING. One teacher even said on a forum that any parent who didn't agree with her political views "should find another venue" if they didn't want their children taught that teacher's political views while at a public school. What? Her way or the highway, she made it clear.

As I said at the beginning of this topic, I feel so old now, so tired of all the incivility. Don't get me wrong, I think there are still many kind and generous Americans who are capable of allowing others their own freedoms without getting angry and trying to force their opinions on them, but it seems to me that it has become acceptable to bully others into silence in order to get your own way in what should be a national conversation.

What Makes Me Laugh

After spending all week on the computer working on TpT Store business, I have to admit that I've accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING today! I've been sitting here looking at funny pictures on Pinterest and not been doing any work. Ah, well, it's Saturday! :) Here are some of the pictures that made me laugh:

Children and animals...always make me laugh! Carol