Poetry Friday

I had not written an original poem (other than my haiku reviews for my first Poetry Friday posting) in I don't know how long, until yesterday. It doesn't have a title at the moment. Hope you like it.

I look at everything
with a critical eye--
my eye is quick to criticize.
My fatal flaw
is finding yours.
I will never be satisfied
with anything this world provides
unless I learn
to inspect less
to expect less?
to reflect more
on the greater good
and respect effort
above effect,
rejecting my negative affect.

Quick Update

Man, it's been a long time since I posted last.

Sam is a little over 6 months old now and snarfling down his solids. So far he's tried apples, bananas, squash, carrots, and green beans in addition to his rice cereal. I've had some people tell me that they didn't use baby food, but I'm just a little nervous about giving him stuff off my plate, even if it's squished up. I realize that back in the day their was no "baby food", there was just food, but then again, babies today live longer and I think are generally healthier than babies of yesteryear.

Hannah and I just completed a science project (poster & paper) on macaroni penguins. She did most of it herself, I just assisted with organization and physically putting the poster together. Doing something like this with her definitely sets straight my ideas of what our particular 9-year-old is intellectually capable of. Hannah is a pretty smart kid, but even smart 9-year-olds have trouble focusing on a science project for more than an hour or two, especially if the iceberg is breaking on Club Penguin. "But I've never seen it, Amy!" "I don't think that is quite as important as finishing your science project that is due tomorrow!" Hannah also has a knack for getting songs stuck in my head. All she has to do is sing or hum it once or twice (although she rarely stops there:). During the penguin project it was I'm Blue by Eiffel65. I was impressed by her document formatting skills, though.

I've of course been reading a lot. Right now I'm reading Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher at home and One Thousand Splendid Suns at work.

Back in High School

On registration day for our students, I got my first taste of being a teacher in a gym full of high school students. It wasn't quite like I expected. For one thing, they weren't really all that loud for over a thousand people in one place. Also, I didn't have the same reaction as one teacher, who thought that none of the kids looked like they had put in any thought as to what they were going to wear on the first day of school. While no one was wearing formal wear or even dresses or nice pants, I'm sure many of them spent a lot of time agonizing over their carefully constructed "I just woke up and threw this on" look.
Some teachers are not surprisingly pro-uniform, although from what I've heard, many parents in our community are decidedly against the idea of their child being required to wear the same thing as every other student in the school. From what I remember of high school, I was never distracted by another student's hair/clothing/jewelry enough that I could not focus on the lesson. Also, being hormonally charged would not disappear just because the bodies were covered in uniform dress, although I do agree that parts hanging out would be disturbing and am glad that is prohibited.
I think the most important factor in how much a student will learn in any school is not what everyone is wearing, but rather what is being taught and how teachers are teaching it. Most everyone can probably think of at least one teacher in their school experience who was just so interesting that you couldn't help but learn something. I had several in high school - Coach Altizer - who taught history like he had lived it, Mr. Ramsey - who made geometry proofs entertaining, and Mrs. Ware - a giant personality trapped in a tiny body, who murdered our English papers, and cut us regularly with her wit. I hope to be that kind of teacher that students remember as being passionate about imparting knowledge and inspiring them to absorb that knowledge, seek their own ideas and continue to be involved in creating the future, however they choose to do so.

100 Books List

I saw this at MotherReader and thought it looked interesting. I've read a lot of books so far in my life and went through a short "great works" phase, so I definitely should have read more than 6 on this list. If you want to see how your reading compares --> Bold those you have read, italicize those you intend to read, and *asterisk* those you love.

1. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen


2. The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien


3. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte


4. Harry Potter series — J.K. Rowling (I've read the 1st 3 in the series)


5. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee


6. The Bible


7. Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte


8. 1984 — George Orwell


9. *His Dark Materials — Philip Pullman*


10. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens


11. Little Women — Louisa May Alcott


12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy


13. Catch 22 — Joseph Heller


14. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read Hamlet, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth-Night, The Life of King Henry V, First Part of King Henry VI, Romeo and Juliet, and several sonnets)


15. Rebecca — Daphne Du Maurier


16. The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien


17. Birdsong — Sebastian Faulks


18. *Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger*


19. The Time Traveller’s Wife — Audrey Niffenegger


20. Middlemarch — George Eliot


21. Gone With The Wind — Margaret Mitchell


22. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald


23. Bleak House — Charles Dickens


24. War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy


25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams


26. Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh


27. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky


28. Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck (I read about half of this and then accidentally left it at the beach)


29. Alice in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll


30. The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame


31. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy


32. David Copperfield — Charles Dickens


33. The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis


34. Emma — Jane Austen


35. Persuasion — Jane Austen


36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe — C.S. Lewis


37. The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini


38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin — Louis De Bernieres


39. Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden


40. Winnie the Pooh — A.A. Milne


41. Animal Farm — George Orwell


42. The Da Vinci Code — Dan Brown


43. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez


44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney — John Irving (I tried to read this and got stuck in the first 30 pages)


45. The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins


46. Anne of Green Gables — L.M. Montgomery


47. Far From The Madding Crowd — Thomas Hardy


48. The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood


49. *Lord of the Flies — William Golding*


50. Atonement — Ian McEwan


51. Life of Pi — Yann Martel


52. Dune — Frank Herbert


53. Cold Comfort Farm — Stella Gibbons


54. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen


55. A Suitable Boy — Vikram Seth


56. **The Shadow of the Wind — Carlos Ruiz Zafon**


57. A Tale Of Two Cities — Charles Dickens


58. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley


59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time — Mark Haddon


60. Love In The Time Of Cholera — Gabriel Garcia Marquez


61. Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck


62. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov


63. The Secret History — Donna Tartt


64. The Lovely Bones — Alice Sebold


65. The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas


66. **On The Road — Jack Kerouac**


67. Jude the Obscure — Thomas Hardy


68. Bridget Jones’ Diary — Helen Fielding


69. Midnight’s Children — Salman Rushdie


70. Moby Dick — Herman Melville (I read part of it for an English lit class)


71. Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens


72. Dracula — Bram Stoker


73. The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett


74. Notes From A Small Island — Bill Bryson


75. Ulysses — James Joyce


76. **The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath** (this is one of the only books I've ever read more than once)


77. Swallows and Amazons — Arthur Ransome


78. Germinal — Emile Zola


79. Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray


80. Possession — A.S. Byatt


81. A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens


82. Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell


83. The Color Purple — Alice Walker


84. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro


85. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert


86. A Fine Balance — Rohinton Mistry


87. Charlotte’s Web — E.B. White


88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven — Mitch Albom


89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


90. The Faraway Tree Collection — Enid Blyton


91. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad


92. The Little Prince — Antoine De Saint-Exupery


93. The Wasp Factory — Iain Banks


94. Watership Down — Richard Adams


95. A Confederacy of Dunces — John Kennedy Toole


96. A Town Like Alice — Nevil Shute


97. The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas


98. Hamlet — William Shakespeare


99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — Roald Dahl


100. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo

I'll say I've read 25 since I can't fully count #14 since I haven't read all of Shakespeare. Some of these books I had never heard of - A Town Like Alice? The Wasp Factory? If you interested in other books I have read and enjoyed, visit my Goodreads.com shelves.

Poetry Friday

We're going to try something new here. Reviews, haiku style. Now, I am just using the 5-7-5 syllable pattern, not a super-strict definition of haiku.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Kids imprisoned by
Homeland Security start
youth revolution

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
Prodigy gets dumped
by Katherines. What's his deal?
Oh, dingleberries.

Now if you can handle it, just for fun, three more original haikus. These are flashbacks from my late high-school writing period. I wrote 39 in one day. I was at the Governor's School for Humanities in Martin, TN and had a lot of free time. I just picked out 3 of my favorites. Hope you like.

My head is full of
static electricity
untapped potential

My feet are naked
sunning themselves like lizards
on hot desert rocks

Sinister insects
buzz around and land on me,
chew my flesh with glee

Thanks to The Well-Read Child for hosting Poetry Friday today.

Sam-tastic!

Here are a couple more videos of the lil Samster. In the first, listen to Sam expound upon the mysteries of the universe in what Hannah refers to as babynese. He's learned to squeal and shriek since this was recorded, which can be cute also.


Now prepare to be amazed as Sam consumes his second ever serving of rice cereal, yum!

Finally Back Online

Ok, so at first I got a little lazy with the posting, but then our PC just quit accessing the internet and it took two visits from the cable company and two trips to the PC Dr. (bout 3 weeks total) before we were back up. Not being able to get online really made us think about how much we used the internet. At least 10 times a day we thought of something we could be doing or reading online. I use it a lot for reference too when cooking, trying to figure out what Sam's deal is, or just looking up anything else I think of that I want to know.

I read a few books in the past month, of course. Here's the lineup:

The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich
Seeker - William Nicholson
Clash of the Sky Galleons - Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart (Edge Chronicles)
Into the Dark - Peter Abrahams (An Echo Falls mystery)
Little Brother - Cory Doctorow
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Wall and the Wing - Laura Ruby (one of Hannah's new favorites)
An Abundance of Katherines - John Green

Right now I am reading Sold by Patricia McCormick and Hannah & I are reading Savvy by Ingrid Law together.

I also had an idea for Poetry Friday - haiku reviews. Hopefully I'll remember this Friday. I thought this might be better for me than trying to write critical or descriptive reviews, as I feel like I tend to ramble. Whenever I try to talk too much about a particular book, especially plot, I flashback to my 5th grade field trip where we met our penpals and I responded to the librarian's request to talk about the book I was reading with what felt like a 10-minute recap of everything that had happened in the story to that point. I swear it was like an out of body experience, like I was just floating above myself listening to myself go on and on and on and on. I think this is my first memory of my fear of public speaking, which I had pretty bad till my first day of teaching. It's hard to believe I talk to groups of people every day when I used to be so afraid of it. Anyway, enough rambling for now.