Gotta Get Away

I'm almost at a breaking point.

Every moment of "planning time" at work seems devoted to meetings that I shouldn't be having. :|

Anyway, with all this bullshit going on, the fact that I didn't get to do anything fun last weekend weighed on me heavily. My "fun" was Monday, and when you consider the hours I spent bawling my eyes out in frustration and loss, it was hardly "fun" at all.

LEGO Black Seas Barracuda. It sat on top of my doll case for 20+ years.

LEGO Renegade Runner. It served as a stand-in for the Dawn Treader in my Chronicles of Narnia project

Besides breaking down Lego sets, I had to wrap up and protect my ethnic dolls, and also just go through both of my closets, which had been stuffed with things that weren't mine. I eventually whittled things down to personal items.

I'd actually been looking for Tracks for a few years now. Generation One Autobot.

'94 Mustang poster. I think the Bucks are going to take this for Scarlett.

Needless to say, Monday was awful. I spent too much time mired in memories, and had to follow that up with a miserable work week the next four. 

Blue crystal paperweight that belonged to dad.

Three weeks into the school year, and no one seems to be taking me at face value about grade books needing to be aligned. The chemistry teachers aren't aligned, the biology teachers aren't, the environmental science teachers aren't, the astronomy teachers aren't.....better yet, when I convene a group of content teachers together and point this out, it's all a bunch of bullshit "I can't change" crap. Why do I even bother?

I need a magic wand that actually works.

Anyway, last night, Pat said he wanted to go fishing out at Taylor's Landing. I said I'd want to go, too. If for nothing else, I just needed to get out and away.

At the end of the eastern boat ramp

My first several casts were awful. We went upstream from the twin boat ramps, and my experience was vegetation snag after snag.

After a while, I finally moved downstream of the ramps. Pat soon joined me.

Still west of the boat ramps, a spring appears from rocks

It looked like a dead crayfish, but it was actually just a shed exoskeleton.

Downstream of the boat ramps had a lot less vegetation, and more rocks. So, I still had a few snags, but now those snags were in rocks rather than in plants. 

I finally started to get nibbles, and then finally....

It was larger than either fish I caught two weeks ago, and Pat said it was bigger than the one fish he caught today

I had a few more nibbles and a few more snags after this, but never reeled in another fish. 

Pat called it quits around noon, so we went home then. However, I think we have tentative plans to go somewhere next weekend and hopefully there will be better results. :)

Gone Fishin'

End of a long week

This year started off much like last year -- staff being trifling over things that you'd think normal adults could understand are either not acceptable or could work out amicably. As a result, I began the actual first week of school woefully underprepared.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem as if my students noticed. With the new, shorter class periods, things go by very quickly, and my experience with 45-minute class periods probably helps. I've already had students remark that "this is my favorite class of the day," and we really haven't done anything "fun" yet, like a lab. I hope I can continue to fuel their enthusiasm.

The fun doesn't end though, and I will be doing work later today on more scheduling stuff. This is because no one listens to me when I point out problems with staffing and scheduling during the summer, and now, a week into the school year, suddenly it's a problem. :(

In any event, as stressful as things are, I wanted to get out. Friday, I was at work until 7:30PM moving things from a former-science-now-ESOL classroom, and went straight to the Broken Rocker show at Blue Sky to meet up with Kyra. We talked work a little while, and we parted ways after the band's second set.

There was no camping talk from Pat, so I asked him if he was going to go fishing this weekend. He said he was probably going to go to the Dam 4 area on the Potomac River on Sunday afternoon, since he'd been there on Friday afternoon and caught a decent number of midsize smallmouth. I asked if I could join him. He seemed skeptical, but come Sunday afternoon, he loaded up my bike and an extra fishing rod, and we headed up to Dam 4.

Pat set up the rod for me initially, putting a red glitter worm on the jig. I am not good at casting, but I started to get the hang of it early on, and within the first ten minutes, had two near hits. The third time was the charm, though.

About ten inches

The stupid fish had damn near swallowed the hook though, and there was blood seeping onto my hand as I tried to get it out without killing it. Pat came over to help, and the fish did swim away under its own power, so I guess it was alright.

I ended up snagging the lure a little bit later, and on my first cast with the new one, snagged that one too. Unamused, I put a green worm (with red glitter) on the next jig, and moved about twenty feet to the left. The next cast saw success again!

Probably just about twelve inches

The second one had the hook in its mouth, so it was easy to remove, though the fish was feistier. It was thrashing around enough, even out of the water, that it took a few tries to grab so that I could pull the hook.

I didn't really catch anything except snags after that. After losing three more lures (including one that I evidently didn't tie properly :( ), I didn't have enough line left on the reel to continue. I put the rod down and watched Pat wading in the water downstream until he came back to switch to top water lures.

He let me use his other rod while he put a top water lure on the "backup", and I still just caught snags, so I was allowed to switch to a top water too. In the meantime, he caught a fish with his setup.

In the end, we both caught two fish, which was a far cry from what he'd racked up on Friday afternoon. Still, for the most part, it was peaceful and quiet, and that was the point.

Looking upstream towards the dam.

Pat also wrote about the trip on his blog. :)

Another Day, Another...

...fill-in your own blank. It's the new year, calendar-wise, but it's still the same old year, school-wise. We're heading into the end of the second quarter, which means two things :

1) students whining about "how can I bring my grade up?"

b) final exams are starting at the end of the week.

The final exam thing is sort of nice. It means a bit of a break for me, as they are all mostly multiple-choi... I mean, "selected response," and so they are easy to grade. Since we don't hand them back to the students (can't, in the case of the county exams), I don't even have to really write intelligible feedback on them either.

#1 is a bit more bothersome though, especially with our administrative push to get rid of a student's "zeros" at virtually any cost. My snap answer is, "invent a time machine, go back nine weeks and kick your past self into doing the work and studying for tests to begin with." Needless to say, they generally don't like that answer ("they" being both students and administration). My alternative answer is, "don't screw up next time you take the class." This one goes over even more like the proverbial lead balloon.

I don't understand the idea that a student who waits until the last week of the quarter should have the opportunity to make things up, when they've had x weeks to do so already. It's not fair to the students who do what they are supposed to do (ie, turn completed work in on time, or ask for things the day they come back from an excused absence), and it teaches nothing about responsibility to let a student make up things whenever. Talk about setting a kid up for failure...

The grading policies and my school's implementation of them are disgusting. I can understand the need for consistency from teacher-to-teacher, when dealing with the same subject. However, the requirement to allow for retaking of quizzes or redoing labs, and the "minimum 50%" rule that are mandated by the county do nothing but allow students to acquire underdeveloped study skills and allow students who really haven't mastered material to get credit for a class. When I have a "top science student" in my anatomy class who routinely scores an uncorrected 30-40% on quizzes, and retakes every one of them to boost his score up to an 80-90%, but then bombs the chapter test with the usual, uncorrected 30-40%, this tells me that the policy is not beneficial.

This sad state of affairs is only compounded by the complete lack of motivation on the part of most of the non-honors students. Attain a 30% on that last quiz? Obviously, that's something to brag and laugh about with your friends! At least most of my honors-level students have the decency to be ashamed of their poor grades. Unfortunately, though, too many of them simply accept the grade and move on, without ever asking themselves "why?" and more importantly, "how can I do better next time?"

These students are the future, and already they are caught in a vicious cycle of repeating their own history, over and over again. Worse still, the obvious is pointed out -- behaviors have to change -- and yet, nothing is done. I can't force them to self-reflect, and I do my best to open their eyes, too often for naught.

Enough venting for now though. I have papers to grade, and a hockey game to watch tonight. Maybe that will elevate my mood.