So, you know you want a Christmas card from me. XD (Holiday card for you non-Christmas people.) And I will say I blatantly (and unashamedly) stole this from Betty. But it's such a DAMN good idea, how could I not? When the place is literally in my backyard? And several of my dear friends are in the military and it could BE them there.

Okay, so - here it goes.

Send me your snail mail addy (if you trust me. (; ) and I will send you a Christmas card. Instead of sending *ME* one in return, you send one to a wounded soldier (sailor, marine, airman, you get the idea). Or - you can be all: "Since she's an OBVIOUS stalker, I'm just going to send one to a wounded military person." That'd be great too. (;

Email me at GMail.com"> with your snail mail to get a genuine Capital Christmas Card! (ooo. C Cubed! You know you want a C Cubed!!!)

Here's where you send the Christmas Cards (or even just normal mail!) to wounded military personnel.

Walter Reed Army Medical Center
c/o Red Cross
6900 Georgia Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20307-5001

Now. Accoding to Betty, you can address it to "Any Soldier" (Or, I imagine, Any Sailor, Any Marine, Any Airman, etc) if you like, but by putting the 'c/o Red Cross' - they'll know it's for the wounded people.

Let's all send some cheer this year, eh? I need to see what else I can do.

(Edit - I can't spell. Someone get me a spellcheck! STAT!! Words like soldier are doing me in! AHH!)

Posted by: Pandora - 11.11.2005 - 10:11am - Permalink - Comments (3)
Posted in: Real Life

It's not an official meltdown, but - I'm going to rant anyway. ::le sigh::

It's about work. I work for a Public School system. For the most part, it's fine. But - there are certain things, directives as it were, that come from the county board which really make me unhappy.

Last year, the county mandated that reassessments be available for students who received a 'D' or an 'E' on an assessment. It was very vague and we had to try and figure it out on our own. To be honest, the teachers hated it. To tell us we had to allow our students a chance to reassess ANYTHING they failed was - well - it was hard to accept due to the fact that it was going to be an enormous amount of extra work. Because not only did we have to allow them a reassessment, we had to re-teach them the material beforehand. More work. Great.

Don't get me wrong. The policy is not a bad policy - on paper. The idea was to help out students who failed just one test out of a quarter due to a bad day, illness, just not grasping that one concept right away. It was for trying to balance out the grades for students who had strange outliers - and to help those who were not doing well at all, giving them a chance to do better, and perhaps pass. And it was pretty much something the majority of teachers were doing. A professional judgement could be used to allow a student a chance to rectify something that was out of the ordinary for him/her.

However. The students soon learned how to 'work the policy.' They started failing things on purpose so they could be 're-taught' and then re-take the assessment and get an 'A', rather than the 'B' (or 'C') they would have gotten before. Now, teachers were getting students fighting to have MORE points taken off their assessments so they might reassess them. Great. Wonderful. Because, in the fall of last year, anyone who took a reassessment could receive full credit on something they utterly failed the first time. Which, to me, seems unfair. If you receive a 58% on something, why should you be able to have the 95% you later? It seems to me that an accurate depictation of your grade would be to average the two grades. But what do I know, mmm?


The policy was changed somewhat in the spring of last year to try and stem the tide of students reassessing. If the student had not done the homework leading up to the original assessment, then that student was *not* eligible for a reassessment. That did help. Two-fold. Students who didn't do anything could no longer fail and re-do. And students were now doing the homework, practicing the material more, and therefore doing BETTER on the original assessments. Some, anyway. Also, the highest grade possible for a reassessment was an 80%. This made me feel somewhat better - as far as giving an accurate report of what a student was doing.

The new year, fall 2005, started with the same idea in mind. Homework needed to be done. Students who received below a 'C' on an assessment could be re-taught and then reassess. We were once more supposed to allow anyone taking a retake to receive all possible points. An entire quarter has passed with that policy in place. And I've felt badly for the students who receive a 'C' on the quiz. They do not get a chance to reassess at all. So how fair is it for those students who fail to have a chance to get a 100%?

Well, now the county has decided that *any* one should be able to reassess. If a student receives a 'B' - he/she can reassess to get an 'A'. Does the county *not* know how grade obssessed these children are? Do the people down at the board - the ones who create these policies - not realize how much work they are thrusting upon us? My only thought is - no. They have no idea because they have been out of the classroom for too long. I understand they are trying to make up the huge issue of fairness to all. However. Every single one of my students is obssessed with getting an 'A' in every class. If, nay, when, I tell them anyone is allowed to reassess something, I will have students in my classroom, all the time, trying to reassess. I will get nothing done because I will be constantly re-teaching, making up reassessments, giving reassessments, grading reassessments.

There have been solutions suggested. Only allow students to reassess one quiz/test (depending on the policy, which is different for each department) per quarter. While this will make students think more about failing on purpose and choose which quiz to take more carefully, for those students who actually really need to retake nearly every quiz to just barely pass the class, it will make them mroe likely to give up period. If they cannot improve their grade, why should they keep trying? The other suggestion I heard was to make the reassessments have the retakes be unbelievably hard. Again, this would help discourage those who are doing well as it is and are only trying to get that 100%. However, what about the student who received a 53%? Or lower? I'm not against making the reassessment more difficult, but the whole point of it gets lost if the questions are too hard.

So - in the end - the teachers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We *have* to be in compliance with the policy, or we will get reamed for it. Yet, placing ourselves into compliance gives us so much more work, I want to cry thinking about it.

Dear goddess, help us all. I'm hoping someone does not die before the semester is out.

(Let's seriously hope it's not me.)

Posted by: Pandora - 11.04.2005 - 12:12pm - Permalink - Comments (3)
Posted in: Real Life

So, the Italian Angel was up to mischief last week. Silly boy.

Since the weather has turned so cold once the sun goes down - and I've been a whiny 'you-know-what' about it to anyone that asks - that silly boy sent me a package.

It contained the following things:
A blanket
Marshmallows
A candle

Now, apparently, I am to wrap up in said blanket (which has Nemo on it and is so fuzzy it's down right pettable), light the candle, and then toast marshmallows over the candle flame.

If he'd included graham crackers and chocolate, it'd be a party in a box! ::giggles::

But - I am much warmer. What a silly boy, eh? (;

Posted by: Pandora - 11.02.2005 - 8:11am - Permalink - Comments (1)
Posted in: Real Life

So, I got some terrible news when I arrived back to school on Monday. It's the kind of news you never, ever want to hear about one of your students. It breaks your heart.

One of the students I taught two years ago had died in a car accident while driving home from college to visit her family here for her fall break.

She was 19 years old. Nineteen. She'd barely begun to live. And now it is over for her.

It always strikes a chord in me when someone so young dies. And yet, it's always so much harder to bear when it is someone you had in class for six months to a year. Someone you saw every day, whom you helped learn those tricky trig formulas, showed how to graph that pesky sine curve.

She was quite a girl. An athlete, but one who wanted to do as well as humanly possible in class. Social, but knowing when to focus.

She will be sorely missed. I visited her college website - news of her death, and life, were posted on the main page.

This isn't the first one of my students to die - I had one last year. But, this is the first one I knew more than a student in the class. I cannot even imagine what it would be like if it were one of my Crewbies. Inconsolable, most likely. (Not going to dwell on that. Not. NOT. Gah.)

My thoughts go out to her friends and family.

Posted by: Pandora - 10.12.2005 - 1:10pm - Permalink - Comments (0)
Posted in: Real Life

Like - seriously sick. So sick, I went to the doctor.

Yes, that's right. *I* went to see a doctor. I hate doing it, but I will go if I feel like I did Thursday night. Oh my lord, that was not fun. Let's do the chronology, eh?

Wednesday, I was feeling slightly icky, nothing overly worrying. Thursday, it was somewhat worse, sore throat and coughing. The sore throat is the one you get from having all that phlegmy crap drain down the back of your throat. I've had it before and it usually just goes away just fine. Thursday night, I attempt to go to bed. I lay down, and it was like having someone sit on my chest and then press down. I couldn't breathe properly. The longer I lay there, the worse it got. I wandered around my apartment, trying to make it better. I sat in my circle chair, since I thought that sitting up would be okay. No dice. It was the same as laying down. The only relief was standing or sitting up straight. I took some Tylenol Cold and Sinus. I tried my bed again and I think I finally just passed out from exhaustion. Lots of fun.

Friday morning. I get up and take a shower. Go to work. Breathing is still not fun. Think about how you feel after running your hardest for a while. That out of breath, can't catch up feeling. Yeah. That was me. All day. It was kinda like trying to breath through socks or a sheet or something. I've talked about being a teacher before. As a teacher, your job is to talk. A lot. And to move around. A lot. When you can't get enough air, it is really, really hard. And sitting down to teach only made it worse. I couldn't sit on my stool and teach from the overhead projector - even though I kept trying.

After talking to my coworkers, I called the doctor's office and they managed to squeeze me into the afternoon schedule. Yay. Maybe now I could sleep, right? I finish up at work. And I feel bad. I don't think my students got the best instruction they could get. And I feel like I scared them. What with all the coughing and the wheezing and the needing to sit down or lean over. They kept asking if I was okay. Or telling me I should have stayed home. Poor kiddos.

I go to the doctor. The nurse takes my pulse. It's 109. My pulse is usually somewhere between 70-80. 109? I nearly flipped out when I saw that. The doctor comes in and asks me the usual questions. He listens to my lungs. He got a nice earful of my coughing when he asked me to take a deep breath. That was fun. And then he tells me I have acute bronchitis. Say what? Acute bronchitis. Greeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaat.

But - I got some good drugs. Antibiotics, an inhaler to open my lungs, cough syrup, Sudafed. But I feel better. I slept very well last night. Course, I went to bed at 8 pm and was up at midnight again. But the two applications of the inhaler helped. I went back to bed and slept until 9:30 am this morning. Woo. And then! I took a nap. I've not done so much sleeping in for a long, long time.

I then spent most of the day watching a marathon on the Food Network about the 'Next Food Network Star.' Yes, I knew who won, but it was fun to watch anyway! And Roomie called. She wanted to get together and do stuff - and go to aerobics tomorrow. I told her about the bronchitis and she says "Guess you won't make aerobics." Kinda - not. Doc says nothing strenuous. That's definitely strenuous. I told her we'd have to do it another day since I didn't want to get her sick. But! She came over to my house and brought me soup. I love her. She's so thoughtful.

Anyway. Tomorrow I have more of the same planned. Sleep in late. Sit on my duff and just watch TV. Do a little surfing from the laptop. Woo. I love it. I cannot wait.

How are you all?

Oh - by the way. I feel much better today. I haven't needed the inhaler at all today. YAY!

Posted by: Pandora - 09.17.2005 - 11:09pm - Permalink - Comments (1)
Posted in: Real Life