TURN OFF YOUR CAMERA

 

I’m taking a class online. 

It’s not my first online class, more like my one hundredth. I’ve mastered the fine art of having my camera on when necessary and when not to have it on. For example, I’ll have the camera on during a curriculum meeting since I’m one of the hosts. But, during a faculty meeting, I am prepping to get the hell out of Dodge, so I keep the camera off.

Oh, sure, occasionally I might add something to the Chat to remind people I’m “really participating.” But mostly I just go about my other business. If my camera is on during a meeting, you can bet good money that I’m working with a split screen and totally doing something more constructive with my precious time.

This particular class that I am taking is rather interesting, fun, and totally interactive if I so choose. It’s worth points toward renewing my professional teaching license, so I sort of want to pay attention, although the teacher is zooming through the information so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. Boring is not a word I would attach to this class.

So it must be sheer exhaustion that would cause anyone to doze off during a forty-five minute interactive class. But, for the love of all things sane, shut off your camera.

For real.  SHUT. OFF. THE. CAMERA.

This gal, and I tried to disguise her as best as I could in the attached picture, totally slept during the class. She leaned back in her chair and started sawing wood like there was no tomorrow. Part of me felt sorry for her, but mostly I was disappointed. How can you be a teacher and not have mastered the fine art of knowing when and how to nap during a meeting? Online format is totally made for napping through meetings. It’s almost a given.

This is the difference between amateurs and professionals. Professional meeting nappers remember to shut off the cameras, and truly gold-medal pros will also throw a sticky note over the camera lens on the monitor just in case that camera icon should activate again while we are napping.

ODE TO SPRING

 

Dear Spring, you fickle bitch:

Quit your shit right now.

Quit your sub-zero wind chills;

Quit your hellacious spring snowstorms;

Quit your torrential sleet;

Quit knocking out my power;

Quit fracturing my hips on black ice;

Quit frosting up my car in the morning;

Quit pretending you’re really here then

Pulling the grass carpet out from under my boots.

You fickle bitch.

Quit your shit right now,

Or I will invite winter back to kick your lily-tempting ass.

With love,

Every person in New England right now

MATH FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS . . . ENGLISH FOR MATH TEACHERS

We are traveling teachers. We have carts, and we zoom from room to room to room to room (etc.) while most of the students remain stationary in their desks and homerooms throughout the day. Most of the time we leave zero trace of our existence as we go, including wiping our fingerprints off of any surface we have touched or breathed on. In other words, we are the DNA-less teachers, criminals-in-training.

Occasionally we forget to eliminate every trace, though. Sometimes we leave behind a paper, a coffee cup, or, in my case, my own traveling bar stool that I attach to my cart with a bungee so that I do not have to stand all day long as I teach in-person and remotely five or six times a day in five or six different rooms.

The other day the math teacher left a math problem on my board. At the end of the day when I returned to my classroom, I saw the board but decided that I would worry about erasing it later because my erasers live on the cart, the cart is bulky and cantankerous, and I was just too plain exhausted to care. The next morning, though, I took a closer look at the problem, which basically referred to something or other and then solve for 25% of what, the “what” being the variable.

I used to teach a math course, but it was only 20% of my day. I was at the time an 80% English teacher. I am now 100% English teacher (who still keeps college algebra and trig and pre-calc texts because it’s fun to solve equations – don’t judge me). I immediately set about solving the equation but not mathematically; I solved it linguistically.

You see, 25% of WHAT would be either W or H or A or T, because each letter is ¼ of the word. Since the W is first, it would be, if reading it as we Americans do, ¼ of the word. It would be 25% of the word WHAT. Therefore, the 25% of whatever number was on the board had to equal W. I looked at the math teacher’s directions and –

GUESS WHAT!  (W-H-A-T)

Even she had written that the answer would be:  25w.

Therefore, my solution is valid and I stand by my answer. Class dismissed!

AND I CAN'T GET UP

Twice in a month I have fallen in the driveway: once on black ice and once over a piece of rebar in the wood chips that I have to cut through because the landlord put up a fence across my stairs … in case someone should fall.  First time I fell, I smacked my left hip (and knee and wrist because, despite years of judo training, I put my arm out to stop my fall) and then I smacked my right hip black and blue (but remembered my judo training and did not put my arm out to break my fall).

The second fall I seriously thought I busted my hip. I have a bruise the size of a pineapple and the color of a thunderstorm. Make no mistake – that bad boy hurts like a mother-freaker. I can’t sleep on it, cannot touch it, and the seat belt lock sits right on it. However, I still have full range of motion and can support my own flabbiness, so it must just be a deep tissue injury.

It annoys me that at my age, and I consider myself relatively young, I am falling on my hips. Seriously. I suppose it beats a head injury, but really – two hips in a month. I only have two hips, so I had better get this under control.

The first time I fell, I laughed pretty hard. The second time, I didn’t laugh so hard. I felt like that old lady on the commercial: “Help! I’ve fallen . . . and I can’t get up!” My youngest son had to lend my two hands and a hefty tug to lift my fat arse off the tar.

Currently I live on a busy street right in the center of town. If I fall again in the driveway, eventually someone will come by and find me. But, I’m moving soon, and my new apartment will face the woods. If I need to call for help, I might be lucky and get a squirrel or a chipmunk or a skunk or maybe a blue jay or, appropriately enough, a mourning dove. 

I will be kind of near the highway, though, so if you’re driving north on route 93 and you hear the faint cry of, “I can’t get up,” it’s not Ralphie’s brother Randy. It will be the voice of an old lady with no hips left to bust.