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dadadaDADAdadadaDADAdadada....ahahahahhah...wipeout... (water scene from Dirty Dancing slipping through my soggy brain)
brain is dead.
Here's a hint: don't teach a full load and have kids. My son is having a birthday party tomorrow. So instead of coming home from school and collapsing from a long and tense week, I'm cleaning house for the party and getting up early to bake a cake.
I need to go sort through laundry for soccer clothes for eldest child and I have so much to grade I don't know why I even bothered to bring it home because I'll never get to it.
This is normal. ;) You should know this is normal.
I got to use a little low tech today--old fashion slide projector, which definitely has fewer problems that powerpoint and a laptop. I have slides by Dalladay which are wonderful. If you don't know about these slides, it's worth beginning your investment now. SUCH AMAZING SLIDES. Go to the NACCP at http://www.cambridgelatin.com. Unfortunately I just checked and the links to the catalog aren't working.
I was showing the Townhouse set of slides plus that of Caecilius' house. Townhouse slides are fabulous. I have more slides than I ever show, half of them presents from my lovely mother, a Greek who admires her Latin-teaching daughter.
I personally like slides because you don't need a workign computer, an internet connection or anything. They won't accidentally erase in an airport terminal nor disappear in a computer crash.
The kids like running the slide projector and I thoroughly enjoy talking about the slides, esp pointing out features of the Roman house--the high atrium, the slant of the floor to the impluvium, the nooks beneath the triclinium couches that must have been for sandals and that big napkin you could use for a doggy bag... the sidewalks, the tiny windows, and the small cubicula. One day I'm going to get pictures of a hacienda to compare.
And while I'm rambling as if drunk (no, I'm drinking a Dr Pepper like a true native Texan), have I mentioned my friend Senex Caecilius? (He's actually my high school biology teacher turned armchair classicist. He has a new logic problem he was testing on me (I almost had it but was too tired to see when my brain slip a couple of gears). Wanna see it? Not all the games on this page are finished (and I rarely get a chance to check out all of his games, but you are looking for #43. So go to http://lonestar.texas.net/~robison/game10e.htm and look at problem 43 for a logic problem on which shopkeeper is where in the insula.
OH, one more thing that's chapped my hide today (ain't that a Texan saying)... a colleague at a high school insulted students in his advisory class (my neighbor's child is in it), being a total arrogant ass, saying the only languages worth taking are Latin and Japanese, that Spanish was the worst language to take, etc. Oh, yes, Hispanic kids were in the room, my neighbor's kid is studying Spanish, etc. We don't need this kind of talk or attitude. It ruins the profession and makes it difficult to have a productive work environment within the foreign language community.
I damn well wish someone had told me to take SPANISH or FRENCH instead of Greek as an undergrad. I really do. Not one person suggested it. Not one. What the heck's wrong with undergraduate advisors? I'm now waiting until my children are a bit older and then I want to be dumped into an immersion Spanish course one summer, then French or Italian the next.
We can learn SO MUCH from our foreign language colleagues. We have such tunnel vision in how we teach if we don't explore ALL avenues of pedagogy open to us. MANY have found that Latin can be taught using many of the methods employed in modern language classes, and with great success. Drill and kill needs to be pushed out of the way. It really does.
I'm about to fall into my keyboard so instead I'll go collapse somewhere near my beloved husband, snakebite boy, who had his finger cored this week in order to remove the last of the dead tissue from his copperhead bite....
brain is dead.
Here's a hint: don't teach a full load and have kids. My son is having a birthday party tomorrow. So instead of coming home from school and collapsing from a long and tense week, I'm cleaning house for the party and getting up early to bake a cake.
I need to go sort through laundry for soccer clothes for eldest child and I have so much to grade I don't know why I even bothered to bring it home because I'll never get to it.
This is normal. ;) You should know this is normal.
I got to use a little low tech today--old fashion slide projector, which definitely has fewer problems that powerpoint and a laptop. I have slides by Dalladay which are wonderful. If you don't know about these slides, it's worth beginning your investment now. SUCH AMAZING SLIDES. Go to the NACCP at http://www.cambridgelatin.com. Unfortunately I just checked and the links to the catalog aren't working.
I was showing the Townhouse set of slides plus that of Caecilius' house. Townhouse slides are fabulous. I have more slides than I ever show, half of them presents from my lovely mother, a Greek who admires her Latin-teaching daughter.
I personally like slides because you don't need a workign computer, an internet connection or anything. They won't accidentally erase in an airport terminal nor disappear in a computer crash.
The kids like running the slide projector and I thoroughly enjoy talking about the slides, esp pointing out features of the Roman house--the high atrium, the slant of the floor to the impluvium, the nooks beneath the triclinium couches that must have been for sandals and that big napkin you could use for a doggy bag... the sidewalks, the tiny windows, and the small cubicula. One day I'm going to get pictures of a hacienda to compare.
And while I'm rambling as if drunk (no, I'm drinking a Dr Pepper like a true native Texan), have I mentioned my friend Senex Caecilius? (He's actually my high school biology teacher turned armchair classicist. He has a new logic problem he was testing on me (I almost had it but was too tired to see when my brain slip a couple of gears). Wanna see it? Not all the games on this page are finished (and I rarely get a chance to check out all of his games, but you are looking for #43. So go to http://lonestar.texas.net/~robison/game10e.htm and look at problem 43 for a logic problem on which shopkeeper is where in the insula.
OH, one more thing that's chapped my hide today (ain't that a Texan saying)... a colleague at a high school insulted students in his advisory class (my neighbor's child is in it), being a total arrogant ass, saying the only languages worth taking are Latin and Japanese, that Spanish was the worst language to take, etc. Oh, yes, Hispanic kids were in the room, my neighbor's kid is studying Spanish, etc. We don't need this kind of talk or attitude. It ruins the profession and makes it difficult to have a productive work environment within the foreign language community.
I damn well wish someone had told me to take SPANISH or FRENCH instead of Greek as an undergrad. I really do. Not one person suggested it. Not one. What the heck's wrong with undergraduate advisors? I'm now waiting until my children are a bit older and then I want to be dumped into an immersion Spanish course one summer, then French or Italian the next.
We can learn SO MUCH from our foreign language colleagues. We have such tunnel vision in how we teach if we don't explore ALL avenues of pedagogy open to us. MANY have found that Latin can be taught using many of the methods employed in modern language classes, and with great success. Drill and kill needs to be pushed out of the way. It really does.
I'm about to fall into my keyboard so instead I'll go collapse somewhere near my beloved husband, snakebite boy, who had his finger cored this week in order to remove the last of the dead tissue from his copperhead bite....
