I Don't Get It

A couple posts back I talked about how my body doesn't know the difference between two hours of sleep tired and six hours of sleep tired. It's still true, don't get me wrong (although with all these two hour delays I'm actually getting eight hours and it is glorious) but I noticed something else that my body does not differentiate and it makes me sad.

Cold. 

My body does not tell the difference between "wow I went from chilled to cold" and "you can get frostbite in ten minutes and die" cold. True story. We have some god awful cold right now...wind chill warning on top of a wind chill advisory...schools are freaking cancelled because it is too cold for kids to be waiting for buses! I left work tonight absurdly dreading this supposed -23° cold...only to realize that it just felt cold. It didn't feel like dealth or some metaphor for the coldest thing ever; it felt just as cold as it would if it were thirty degrees warmer. 

Now I can't tell if this is arbitrary or not. You know how like pain is arbitrary...current pain is the worst pain you've felt because your mind can't replicate the memory of pain...I wonder if this is like that. Because although all cold is cold, what was once cold is now tolerable. I mean, in November 20°-30° is god awful, but in January it's a freaking heat wave! 

Realize that I said my body can't distinguish between degrees of COLD, as opposed to degrees of temperature measurement. 

It's all just so...

*sigh* can't I just say I'm over winter and be done with it? Bring on the heat!

Dem Show Choir Feels

Ok so I was always sad that our show choir never did a full tap number the three years I was in the choir. In fact I loved the two tap numbers they did the next two years after I graduated!

I just saw this video and all I want to do is e-mail the choreographer for Plainfield and be like "you HAVE to do this! It's too awesome!"

Here's the video:

Not to mention that there are some KILLER covers that have amazing vocal harmonies to the song.

It's just....AHHHH. Beautiful :)

Going Down in History

Ok, so I've already ranted about the fact that Facebook stalking is a thing. Well, what happens when you take it to the next level? What happens when you're not ok with just Facebook stalking, you are now cross referencing two/three different social medias in order to find out as much as pertinently possible for your misguided desires?

Well ladies and gentlemen, I will tell you what happens. You win. You win at life for eternity, and all shall bow down to your epicness.

...or look at you like you're crazy because you just spent ten minutes doing all this for absolutely nothing gained.


So here's what happened: I came home from work and was having extremely engaging conversations with my lovely roommate. It was getting late, and there was one point where we started to get up and migrate towards our separate dwellings, only to continue talking, and sit back down because who really has energy to stand up and talk for as long as we were :P I was planning on watching The Help and contemplate throwing out my current reading list in order to reread the Harry Potter series just because it had been so long since I had read any of them. No. Instead, we got on the topic of middle school teachers, and that led to both of us getting out our yearbooks, and then we started wanting to know what people were doing with their lives that we graduated with, but did not interact with on a regular basis.

Thus...the Facebook stalking began.

Of course, that wasn't enough because sometimes you weren't friends with someone on Facebook so you could only see certain things, or nothing at all. We would use LinkedIn at times to see if we could find more information there (and most times we could) and it was all going fine and dandy (did I mention that there was absolutely no alcohol involved?) when we realized it was 2:00am (we started talking around 9:30pm and were once again trying to go to bed. Closing our year books, my roommate saw a note and signature from a girl she didn't remember and couldn't find. Once I saw the name, it took me a minute but I remembered who she was. And thus, the search began.

First off, she had a pretty generic name. Not to mention this was upwards of six years ago so she might not go by the same shortened form of her name, she might have gotten married (we also knew that she had gotten pregnant at least once)...the odds were stacked against us. Also, we knew that she had moved a time or two so we couldn't even use our hometown as a home base. Things were not looking good for the home team and my roommate was not yet invested enough to persist much longer.

I then remembered a critical detail: We were friends on Myspace back when that was a THING. And the thing about Myspace is most people simply outgrew their Myspace but rather than delete it they just kept it around and never used it, myself included. So I get on my Myspace, wipe off the dust, and behold, we're still friends! I click on her profile and find that the top person on her friends list had a profile pic of her and a kid! I also realized that her profile had a current city on it. Her name was still too generic to search on Facebook, so I then searched for him, found him based on the city that was in HER profile, and then searched his friends list for someone with her name. BINGO!

We had absolutely no mutual friends and most of her profile was blocked. But! I could see quite a few pictures and gather some inferred details of her life.

I'm not sure how I should go about talking about how satisfied I was for succeeding. I had the hugest grin on my face. It was such a convoluted process but I found what I was looking for and that made it worth my time! I'm not sure how I'm going to look at such an accomplishment in a few years, so I needed to document this as soon as possible.

Oh, and by the time we were done it was 2:40 am. We spent 40 minutes tracking down this girl. Insane? Probably.

It's absolutely amazing what the internet can you for you.

Do You Want to Build A Snowman?

It doesn't have to be a snowman ;)

So let's face it: Frozen is a cinematic phenomenon. I don't care that I'm almost 23, I've seen it about five times and would see it again if presented the opportunity.

I had a friend ask me if I would rank it above Lion King. While the answer is no, It's definitely a close second. This is a movie that I fully intend to buy the day it comes out, overpriced or not.

I just read the most fantastic article and I wanted to share it!

http://www.policymic.com/articles/79455/7-moments-that-made-frozen-the-most-progressive-disney-movie-ever

I really don't think too deeply into movies like this. You could say I'm like a kid in that I watch it because it looks good and I like it because it was good. All these "themes" and "symbols" when looking back I definitely see them in the contexts of the movie, I just didn't notice them and that's not what brought me back time and time again. But realizing their existence just makes the movie that much better :)

Vive la France!

I have to start this out by saying that I am extremely happy with where I am right now. I have two fantastic jobs that I absolutely love. I'm an assistant manager at the movie theater where I've been for the past four years, and I'm a facilitator for English Language Learners...using both my degree and my licenses...I really could not ask for that to be better right now. I'm getting new tastes of independence: I have my own car with my name on the title and my own insurance policy. I share an amazing apartment with my best friend and we seriously are getting exactly what we want from it. All relationships, family, friends, romantic, and otherwise are going well. I truly have nothing to complain about or want for more.

And it's not that I want for more. It's just...I got an e-mail from TAPIF (teacher assistantship program in France) saying that tomorrow is the deadline for the application to teach this year. And with all the commitments I have here I can't really apply. On one hand I'm not that attached to the idea but on the other I always liked having the option. You know, if teaching doesn't work out here I could just go to France. I liked having an escape plan. It's a little weird to think that now going to France would be the irresponsible thing to do...

Need to Get This Out There

I think more teachers need to know how to teach English Language Learners.

The school where I work has just under 500 ELLs. They have two full time teachers, two language aides, and several other teachers and aides that help out with the curriculum for those students. Every teacher in this building has (or has had) an ELL in one of their classes. This is not an uncommon thing. And yet, very few of these teachers have any professional experience or development about best practices for ELLs. "It's not my concentration" or "That's why we have certified teachers in the building" are excuses that I'm very much tired of. 95% of these students are of Chin/Burma descent and I guarantee you I have no previous experience, concentration, or certification in that culture or language. I'm a trained French teacher, do you have an idea of how many of these students speak French? The ones that are taking it for the first time in this school.

So then what am I qualified for that the rest of the teachers aren't? I took the time to study best practices. I understand the standards these students need to achieve and I work on breaking the language barrier and creating a bridge in its place. I took the time to study the interrelationship of language and culture and how simply acknowledging and identifying the cultural differences is enough to a positive environment where the student does not feel so terribly lost or out of place.

Don't get me wrong; I love what I do. I actually enjoy the part where I get to dispel myths to other school personnel because maybe then they'll get to pass the conversation to someone else and create a snowball of accurate knowledge. I love working with these students probably because it comes easily to me. All my students want to learn English. All my students enjoy the lessons I bring to them and actually try to retain them. This is the environment I want my French classroom to be, and I probably prefer ELL to French for that reason. Maybe if I went to France to teach French to Americans I'd get the experience I'm looking for, but I don't think the market is big for that profession :P

I understand why ELL is so often linked with foreign language; the strategies are so often the same because they both derive from taking an acquirable skill and turning it into conscious lessons and concepts. But, there's no reason for any other subject teacher to not be able to do this. I was talking about synonyms and antonyms with an English teacher and we came to a word and she said she didn't think my students would know that word and all I wanted to say was "Well teaching them words they already know would be a little redundant now wouldn't it?"

Here's what really confuses me. Students read The Great Gatsby in 12th grade English. This book has several symbols, metaphors, and underlying meanings within the text. ELLs struggle with seeing these because they are most likely still concentrating on finding the meaning of the printed words, let alone concepts underneath said words. As an ELL teacher, I would spend time showing them different resources they can use to help understand the text better. There are websites that dedicate themselves to understanding specific works of literature. While one might associate them with students who try to get out of reading the book, they can be used as facilitators for the book. With that being said, there are several natural born students that don't think to use these resources, don't understand the book, and end up doing poorly with the unit. If both natural and foreign born students can use the same skills and lessons to do well with the unit, then why is it not being incorporated into the unit by the English teacher?!?

I promise it is not that hard of a concept. I promise I am not a godly teacher because I think of things like this. I just wish other teachers would take a minute to conceptualize how they think they are coming across to their students to see how they could tweak their lessons for the greater good.

If Truth Be Told

If truth be told, I do miss him. I miss talking and I miss hearing his opinions. I'm glad I got my space but I've come to so many conclusions on my own about what we were that I just want to talk because I feel like we might finally be at a point where we can talk without the drama resurfacing.