which requires me to think a bit.

What was I doing ten years ago?

1998… Living in Austin. Had a five year old and a six year old.

The six year old was in his first and last year of non-homeschool education with a teacher from Hell, or Boston, who made fun of the children’s accents because they were from Texas and turned my little mathematical genius into a user of the number line because he wanted to follow the rules. Er, guess I need to get over that Mrs. Farrar (pronounced fair-uh in Bostonian).

My five year old was in preschool, because he’s an October birthday. He had a great teacher and loved it.

And I was working on my dissertation, which I didn’t actually finish until 2000.

We went to a great church and I was celebrating my tenth anniversary, the only one for which my husband and I have ever purchased each other gifts.

What are five things on my to-do list for today?

Write a proposal for TYCA-SW, a two year college conference taking place in September in OK City.

Buy my husband dress shoes.

Hit the thrift shops for something to destroy.

Do laundry.

Remember to take home Alien Bee.

What are some snacks I enjoy?

Cashews.
Cheese.
Queso made with taco meat, eaten with carrots
BLT sandwiches
(Can you tell I’m doing low carb?)

What are three of my bad habits?
I put off grading student papers. (Not a good idea.)
I surf the net rather than grading student papers.
I am too focused on student papers, especially since I’ve already graded finals and turned in grades and my miniterm won’t start for two more days.

What are five places I have lived?
1. West Lafayette, Indiana (I am a PU grad.)
2. Abilene, Texas (went to undergraduate there)
3. Charlotte, North Carolina (which seemed like a huge city when I lived there. Not so much after living in Houston.)
4. Huntsville, Texas (for grad school, not the prisons!)
5. Hammond, Louisiana (where I went to school when private school in Abilene was too expensive)

What are five jobs I have had?
1. Waitress at Golden Corral (lots of work, no money)
2. Waitress at a low-end steak house (more fun, but still no money)
3. Church secretary
4. Junior high school history teacher
5. High school biology teacher

Turns out I have answered some of these questions before, in another meme. However, I tried to use different answers this time.

Thought I would answer another question from that blog.

What are the last five books I have read?
1. Five romance novels I bought at the book sale yesterday
2. Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs
3. Spanish Dagger by Susan Wittig Albert
4. Small Favor by Jim Butcher
5. Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris (I had read it before, but it was better having read Grave Surprise.)

Five people to tag
1. Ron at Reactuate.com
Hmmm. I tagged my Durham buddy already. I’m not sure who else does memes.
How about this? If you like doing memes (which I do) or you feel like answering the questions above for some reason, how about you consider yourself tagged?

Take this interactive internet quiz and find out your sexual nationality.

It is a fun quiz AND it said I’m wild and unpredictable.

There is one place where you think you’ve started the quiz and you haven’t really; you have to tell it again you want to take the quiz.

Imagine what even a little truth would sound like on today’s campaign trail:

“No, I can’t fix public education. The problem isn’t the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or more computer equipment The problem is your kids!”

from The LA Times

Most teachers who leave the profession, leave because almost all of the attention, most of the perks, most of the privileges, and most of the allowances are given to the students who least deserve it: the disruptive kids.

from Scheiss Weekly

Defenders of the crescent design keep accusing Tom Burnett Sr. of trying to
get an improper “do-over” after failing back in 2005 to sway the design-competition jury.
But who is really seeking the do-over? The American people rose up in
protest in 2005 when they saw that the Memorial Project wanted to plant a
bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag on the flight 93 crash site.

That uproar forced the Memorial Project to agree to redesign the memorial so
that it would no longer include Islamic symbol shapes (whether they are
intentional or not). But nothing significant was changed. Every particle of
the original crescent design remains completely intact in the so-called
redesign, which only disguised the original crescent with a few irrelevant
trees, placed to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent.

The American people caught a hijacker trying to re-hijack Flight 93, and the
Memorial Project told him to go back outside and try again, which is exactly
what he did. Now they accuse Tom Burnett of wanting an improper
do-over?

There were dozens of articles and television segments about the crescent
controversy this week, mostly in Pennsylvania, with some national news
coverage by Fox News television and AP. This
post is an attempt to capture the general thrust of the new wave of position
statements.

The Memorial Project is inverting every moral imperative at this point, and
it all comes from their fervent desire to reverse the results of September
2005. Their embrace of the crescent was rejected by America and they are
determined to undo that defeat, to the point of being willfully blind to
massive evidence of al Qaeda sympathizing intent.

The new face of the Memorial Project: Edward Felt’s wife and brother
take the lead

Sandra Felt, one of the Flight 93 family members who helped select the
Crescent of Embrace design, admits
that she never paid any attention to warnings about Islamic and terrorist
memorializing symbolism in the crescent design:

Sandra Felt has
known for nearly three years about complaints that the design of the
proposed Flight 93 National Memorial allegedly contains Islamic symbols, but
she never gave them any credence.

“I don’t even think about it,” said Felt, whose husband, Edward, died on …
United Airlines Flight 93.

And nobody blames her. It shouldn’t
be on the Flight 93 families to investigate evidence that any one of us can
easily fact check. But Sandra and her brother in law Gordon Felt, now
President of Families of Flight 93, are going further, pretending for some
reason that the charges people have made against architect Paul Murdoch are
actually being leveled against them.

How could that be, when three of the features that our petition lists
as unacceptable–the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, the 44 glass
blocks on the flight path, and the giant Islamic sundial–were not even
discovered until after the crescent design was selected? Nobody blames the
family members for approving design features they had no inkling were there,
yet Gordon Felt says that warnings about the design are “quite hurtful, to think
we would want to create a memorial to those who murdered our loved ones.”

Nobody ever suggested any such thing, but Felt is getting as much mileage as
he can out of this excuse NOT to look at the facts, telling Fox News television:

I was outraged, for anyone to
infer that family members who have been such an integral part of this
process have in any way been involved in memorializing the murderers of our
loved ones. I find it extremely offensive.

This after expressing
his anger at Tom Burnett last week for Tom’s failure to submit to the
Memorial Project’s “dem
ocratic process.” Tom lost the jury vote, so in Felt’s view, he is
apparently supposed to shut up now. Strange view of democracy.

Along with Patrick White (brother of Louis Nacke II), Gordon Felt sees Mr.
Burnett as trying to get an improper “do over” by raising all these new
concerns. Presented with evidence of an enemy plot, Felt acts as if this new
information is cheating. Like Sandra, he is positively hostile even to the
idea of taking this information seriously.

Not surprisingly, this slope is slippery, and Gordon Felt now seems to be
deliberately misleading the public about the 44 inscribed translucent blocks
that are to be placed along the flight path.

Memorial Project misinformation, covered up by the media’s refusal
to check the facts

One of the claims in our petition is that there are 44 inscribed translucent
blocks, or “glass blocks,” to be placed along the flight path. Asked about
the 44 blocks by AP reporter Ramesh Santanam, Mr. Felt denied
it:

Opponents also claim there is a plan to have 44 glass
blocks, for the 40 victims and four hijackers, in the design.

“That’s an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as
fact,” said Edward Felt’s brother, Gordon Felt, president of Families of
Flight 93. “It’s misleading and helps drive the conspiracy theory.”

He said he is insulted people would believe he would participate in anything
that honored his brother’s killers.

Santanam presents these
directly opposing factual claims, and that’s it. No fact checking, when all
he has to do is open up the design
PDF’s and count the translucent blocks. It takes literally two minutes.

Open up the Sacred
Ground PDF and on the right side you see this:

At eye level, are 43 “glass” (or translucent marble) blocks, built into the
two part Memorial Wall that follows the flight path just above the impact
point. Forty are inscribed with the names of the 40 heroes. Three are
inscribed with the 9/11 date. (The blocks can be counted in an elevation
view at the bottom of the PDF.)

For the 44th glass block, go to the Entry Portal
PDF, which shows a giant glass block, marking the spot where the flight
path breaks the circle in architect Paul Murdoch’s description:

>

44th block sits at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway, which follows the
flight path at the upper crescent tip. Murdoch even has the brass to tell us
that it marks the terrorists’ circle-breaking crescent creating feat. To be
inscribed: “A field of honor forever.”

They have been covering it up for two years now.

The Memorial Project has known about this terrorist memorializing
block-count since April 2006, when Project Manager Jeff Reinbold argued that
the giant glass block at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway cannot be
counted with the others because it is so much bigger (Crescent of
Betrayal, download
3, p. 146). As Tom Burnett wrote in his February 1st advertisement in the Somerset Daily
American:

What? Because the capstone to the terrorist
memorializing block count is magnificent, that is supposed to make it
okay?

But regardless of the merits of the Memorial Project’s
rationale for not being concerned about the 44 translucent memorial blocks
on the flight path, there can be no excuse for telling the public that this
claim is false. No one ever said that all the blocks would be the same size.
We have been explicit: the 44th block is the giant glass block that
dedicates the entire site.

Maybe Gordie Felt has a different dodge in mind. Maybe he is caviling over
the fact that the 44th block is made of slightly different material than the
other 43, being designated “glass” while the others are labeled “translucent
marble.” That’s like caviling about the size difference.

We can’t go repeating “44 inscribed translucent blocks on the flight path”
all the time, so we shorten it to “the 44 glass blocks” or “the 44 blocks.”
Is that Gordon Felt’s excuse for evading the fact that there are 44
inscribed translucent blocks on the flight path? We use a necessary
shorthand and his instinct for evasion says “aha!”?

Sorry Mr. Felt. That is NOT how you live up to your fiduciary responsibility
to the American people. You have accepted a position of trust and you trying
to hide the truth, not expose it.

The fourth petition complaint: that the giant crescent is STILL
THERE

One of the intolerable features of the soon-to-be-built memorial was known
to everyone involved in the jury process. That is the crescent and star
configuration of the original Crescent of Embrace design. When outrage
erupted in September 2005 over this the planting of a naked Islamic flag on
the graves of our murdered heroes, the Memorial Project was adamant they did
not want to change it. They had talked about the
likeness to an Islamic crescent during jury deliberations and decided that
they wanted to choose it anyway. When controversy erupted, they felt the
critics were trying to override what they thought was THEIR decision to
make.

That position collapsed when Congressman Tancredo insisted that, intentional or not, it was
unacceptable to build the Flight 93 memorial in the shape of a symbol that
the Flight 93 terrorists claimed as their own. Pretty obvious one would
think, but the backers of the crescent design were bitterly angry about
having their preference overruled, just as they are now. They didn’t want to
change the design, and they DIDN’T change the design.

In the original, the terrorists break our liberty-loving circle, turning it
into a giant Mecca-oriented crescent. The Park Service describes
the so-called redesign in the exact same terms:

The circle is
broken in two places that mark the southeastern path of the plane to the
crash site. The circle is broken at the entry to the memorial and at the
crash site.

It is still a broken circle, and it is still broken
in the exact same places. The only change is that, instead of the broken off
part being completely removed, a chunk of the broken off part of the circle
now floats out across part of the mouth of the crescent:

border="0" alt="Crescent Bowl35%"/>

Except for the re-coloring of the redesign image (right), the only change is
the “broken off” arc of trees to the left of the crescent.

Both thematically and geometrically, nothing is changed. The unbroken part
of the circle (the crescent) remains completely intact. In particular, it
still points to Mecca, making it the world’s largest mihrab (the
Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built).

Sandy Felt seems pretty clear that the issue is still the giant
crescent:

Sandy Felt, Edward Felt’s widow, was on the second
jury.

She said … that the issue of the crescent shape came up during discussions
because of a public comment card submitted.

Jurors were not willing to dismiss the design because of the name, “Crescent
of Embrace,” or the shape.

“There’s no particular ownership of this shape,” she said. “… We felt
confident with the notion that the void in the embrace was representative of
loss.”

She and the other crescent defenders claim that it is Mr.
Burnett who wants a “redo” on this point, but it is actually THEY who are
looking for a “redo.” On this very point–on just the crescent shape itself,
without taking into account the numerous other Islamic and terrorist
memorializing features–it is the DEFENDERS of the crescent who lost the
popular vote in September 2005, not Tom Burnett.

Democracy

Do the nine people who voted for the crescent design (the vote was 9 to 6)
really think that they have a greater claim to represent America’s
democratic voice than a United States Congressman, speaking for a national
uproar? Do they really think that it is THEIR prerogative to plant a
terrorist memorial mosque on the graves of our murdered heroes, no matter
what the rest of the country thinks?

America stood up in September 2005 and said OVER OUR DEAD BODIES. The
Memorial Project pretended to accede to this rejection, promising to remove
the Islamic symbol shapes, but they DIDN’T remove the crescent. They only
hid it.

Democracy is the will of the American people, not the will of nine family
members, misguided by grief, who have fallen in love with a giant Islamic
shaped crescent. It is bad enough that an inflated sense of prerogative
makes these family members think it is okay to try to sneak their giant
crescent onto the crash site even after it has been publicly rejected. Worse
is their using their bitterness at being rebuffed as an excuse not to
witness the numerous further Islamic and terrorist memorializing design
features that have been discovered.

Every American feels tremendous sympathy for the grief of these families,
but that does not absolve those who have stepped up to positions of public
responsibility from the need to BE RESPONSIBLE. As much as the families may
want peace and healing, our nation is in the middle of what promises to be a
very long war with those who attacked us on 9/11. To be willfully blind to
evidence of an al Qaeda sympathizing plot is DANGEROUS.

Since these family members are embracing every excuse to evade evidence of
radical Islamic intent, they simply have to be overruled, and this time for
good. No more do-overs for terrorist memorial mosques.

To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

Mental Floss offers the origin of superheros and supervillains. Did you know Lex Luthor used to have a full head of red hair?

Orson Scott Card rakes JK Rowling over the coals for suing an author for writing something that she herself read, used, and found valuable while she was writing the Harry Potter series. Turns out she’s done quite a bit of lifting herself. I think that Card is making an argument of HP to Ender that isn’t really relevant/useful, but it is an interesting insight.

This is the thing I am talking about. If the students don’t know what they are looking for, they won’t find it.

That was the topic of last week’s lesson and when I wrote letters to God, both this week and six months ago, I could not remember. But tonight, I was reminded of how God was active in my life much earlier than I had been thinking.

When I was 13, I read the sermon on the mount one morning before school. At the time I was impressed by Jesus’ teaching to “turn the other cheek.” I got to school, went through my day, no problem. Then I got to gym and God had known what was coming.

There was an argument over a mat and Cookie, God bless her wherever she is, hit me. I actually stood there and thought, “Did she hit me on the right cheek? If she didn’t, I can hit her back.” But she had hit me on the right cheek. She asked me if I was going to hit her and I said no “he told me not to.” He who she asked? I pointed to heaven. She looked up in the rafters of the gym. Then she asked me if there were somebody up there. I told her no, God had told me not to hit her. “God told you not to hit Cookie?” she asked. Yes, I told her. When? This morning when I was reading the Bible. It said in the Bible not to hit Cookie? she asked. Yeah, I said. Sort of.

That wasn’t me. That was God witnessing himself to Cookie. I’m expecting that she’ll be in heaven and we can sit down and talk about the day God was in the rafters. I’m looking forward to it.

Then, when I was in high school, our preacher died. It was sudden, unexpected, and horrifying. He was 33 and had three young children. Our church decided to continue to pay his widow the salary for a year and allow her to continue to live in the home that had been supplied by the church. During that year, regular members of the congregation led singing, preached, and prepared the communion thoughts. And during that year, every week, the Holy Spirit led them to dovetail perfectly together. If we sang “Angry Words,” then the sermon was on an unbridled tongue and the communion thoughts were on the importance of Jesus’ words. It was like that every week. And every week one of the elders would get up and remind us that the Holy Spirit had orchestrated that.

He also told the high school class (Laura and I) that we went to church with a prophetess. She had called the elders and had told them that she had a vision and she thought Jim was going to die. But she couldn’t believe it. And since she didn’t really believe it, neither did they. Then he died…. Don’t know what the prophecy was supposed to make different, because it didn’t. But it made me believe in the modern day working of the Holy Spirit.

And those were some of the earliest times when I could personally see God working in my life.

Pew Research on teens and writing technology. It includes
47% of black teens write in a journal, compared with 31% of white teens.
37% of black teens write music or lyrics, while 23% of white teens do.
49% of girls keep a journal; 20% of boys do.
26% of boys say they never write for personal enjoyment outside of school.

Weblogs in the Writing Classroom

The Tech-Savvy English Classroom, a book to order from Amazon.

Autumn Crocus, as per Scribal Terror

In the first century Dioscorides (fl. ca. A.D. 50-79) employed a drug made from autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale L.), the very plant investigated by A/ P. Dustin in 1938 as an antitumor agent. Dioscorides recommended that the plant (kolchikon) be “soaked in wine and administered to dissolve tumors (oidemata) and growths (phumata) not yet making pus.”
. . .
Mattaeus Platearius (d. 1161?) and Avicenna employed the plant in ways that suggest antitumoral activity. . . . Abu Mansur (fl. 968-977) said that the drug concocted from it is poisonous but dries up old sores. In light of this evidence one can conclude that prior to the thirteenth century autumn crocus was employed as an anticancer agent, but that its use was not widespread. The reluctance may have been due to the belief expressed by Hildegard [von Bingen], who said that it was more of a poison than a medicine.

Which of course it was, but all medicine is a balancing act between killing and curing, and the ancient and medieval doctors who used autumn crocus apparently knew what they were doing and got results that were promising enough for them to recommend its use to others.

Dielli

Congressman Ramstad comes out in opposition to the Flight 93 memorial

Congressman Jim Ramstad (R-MN) gave a House speech this month, supporting Mr. Burnett’s opposition to the crescent design. The speech is entered in the Congressional Record here, along with supporting statements from Tom Burnett Sr. (father of murdered Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr.).

That makes two Congressmen now who have come out publicly against the crescent memorial. (Tom Tancredo took the lead last November, asking the Park Service to choose a completely new design.)

News coverage revs up confrontation at this Saturday’s public meeting

Ramstad’s speech, and our ongoing petition drive, netted a full width banner headline on the front page of the Somerset Daily American, with the story continuing full width on an inside page as well. This high profile local news coverage should make for an interesting Memorial Project meeting at the Somerset County Courthouse this Saturday. Several critics will be speaking during the public comment period, and the first batch of petitions will be delivered in bulk (over 5000 signatures to date, 4700 online and 500 on paper).

The Daily American article includes lots of powerful language from Mr. Burnett and other critics of the crescent design, along with some remarkably disingenuous evasions from the usual defenders. Most egregious is Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, who tries to pretend that the criticisms of the design are all about Mr. Burnett trying to get an undemocratic “do over” after failing to stop the Crescent of Embrace design when he served on the design competition jury.

While on the jury, Mr. Burnett only complained about the giant Islamic shaped crescent and the minaret-like Tower of Voices. No one on the jury, including Mr. Burnett, knew anything about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent; or about the placementof the 9/11 date in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag; or about the 44 glass blocks on the flight path; or about the fact that the Tower of Voices turns out to be a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial.

Not that the jury is beyond reproach. It was bizarre for these family members and design professionals to plant a bare naked crescent and star flag on the graves of our murdered heroes, but given everything that the jurors did NOT know, this configuration at least COULD have been an accident. What came out after the design was selected is absolute proof of terrorist memorializing intent, with every Islamic and terrorist memorializing feature being repeated in the Tower of Voices portion of the memorial.

One example is the 38 Memorial Groves. (There were supposed to be 40.) By itself, it is merely suspicious that the arc of 38 groves can be seen as a set of 19 nested crescents: one for each 9/11 hijacker. But architect Paul Murdoch proves this terrorist memorializing intent by surrounding the Tower of Voices with a second set of 19 nested crescents. And on it goes. EVERYTHING gets repeated in the Tower of Voices, and the 93 foot tall Islamic sundial is itself a very precise structure that could NEVER occur by accident.

Patrick White wants to dodge all this by pretending that the controversy is about the initial jury decision, instead of the ensuing blindness to voluminous evidence of terrorist memorializing intent. No one exemplifies this willful blindness better than Patrick White himself.

Patrick White denies the Mecca orientation in public while admitting it in private

At the July 2007 Memorial Project meeting, a critic of the crescent design engaged Mr. White in private conversation, asking how he could be unconcerned about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. White’s reply was to suggest that this orientation cannot be seen as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.” (The crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca, ±.1°.)

But this isn’t what White was telling the public. That same week, Patrick White told the press that all of the claims about Islamic symbolism had been thoroughly investigated and been found to be untrue and “preposterous.” In private, White was acknowledging the almost exact Mecca orientation of the crescent and making excuses for it, while issuing sweeping denials in public.

He is still doing the same thing. He KNOWS that the giant crescent points almost exactly to Mecca, yet claims that such “assumptions,” have been “repeatedly shown-to-be-false.” In fact, not a single factual claim about what is in the design has ever been rebutted. If the crescent did not point to Mecca, it would be trivially easy to demonstrate. This is a simple geometric claim. But all the Memorial Project has ever offered is unsupported denials, denials that they acknowledge in private to be FALSE.

Patrick White’s dishonest attack on Tom Burnett

The jury process is irrelevant. No one is criticizing it. The jurors bear no responsibility for hidden Islamic and terrorist-memorializing features that they knew nothing about when they chose the crescent design. If it were not for two ugly bits of misinformation, put forward by Patrick White in his effort to make the jury process the issue, there would be no reason to mention the jury process at all. Both of White’s falsehoods are aimed at discrediting Tom Burnett Sr.

1. In the Daily American article (half way down) White claims that Mr. Burnett: “gave his consent to support what the majority picked.”

Mr. Burnett was incensed in 2005 when the Memorial Project announced that the jurors had united behind the majority choice. Without ever consulting with Mr. Burnett, the Memorial Project wrote in their jury report that: “By consensus the Stage Two jury forwards this section of the Flight 93 memorial to the partner [Paul Murdoch] with the full and unqualified support of each juror.” Tom has been trying to correct the record ever since, and Patrick White OUGHT to know it.

2. White also claims that: “No one agreed then with Mr. Burnett’s preferred choice for a final design.”

“To the contrary” says Mr. Burnett, “the vote not unanimous; it was 9 to 6.” Five people were with Mr. Burnett in rejecting the crescent design. This on a jury made up of 8 design professionals and 7 family members. It could even be that a majority of family members opposed the Crescent of Embrace. Tom requested the vote tally in a formal letter to the Memorial Project which was never answered. Now Patrick White throws the vote tally in Tom’s face, and completely misrepresents it.

3. Bonus badness. White claims that: “Jurors gave all of Mr. Burnett’s concerns a complete airing.”

In fact, the design professionals on the jury tried to shut Mr. Burnett up. Tom Sokolowski, director of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum called Mr. Burnett “asinine” just for noticing that the crescent is a traditional symbol of Islam. This overt hostility to Mr. Burnett’s concerns is not what most of us would call “a complete airing.”

So no, the jury process is not the issue here, but if it were, it couldn’t stand up to scrutiny either.

To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

A post on your life in six words.

A post on My Hero, including research, about someone who fulfills the definition of hero that I give. This would have to be a significant post but it could be used to replace 5% of a low grade.

My husband showed me “Twitter in Plain English” from Common Craft, but I liked this as well. Hmmm. I might use the Twitter video as a “other things to think about” on the last day of class.

I want to submit four proposals to four different conferences in the next year.

I will submit the first to CCCC (disadvantaged students and the internet). The second to TYCA-SW (introducing politics). The third… I don’t know. And I will submit one to CCTE (how to use a blog in the classroom).

I’d really like to get accepted to 4Cs. I may have to call DW and ask for feedback on the proposal. Or talk to her about it. I wonder if it should only be about 300 words, since it is not a panel. I might want to go ask at CC1 and find out if someone there is working with the internet in class.

I want to weigh 145 again this year and maintain that weight for the next twenty years, with twenty to twenty-five percent body fat.

What resources do I have now?
I have used three good eating plans and lost weight on them. I have just lost 12 pounds. I am still eating well on that plan.

I have learned to enjoy bicycling and have always enjoyed walking. Both of those will help me with the body fat.

I know how to use weights for maximum growth.

I have several good books to encourage me forward.

I have enough money to buy whichever kind of food I need.

What resources do I need to acquire?
I need to know that I can meet this goal. I have met this goal before, even after having children. So I can, in fact, meet this goal.

I can see myself standing on the scale and having it read 144.8 and 145. I can see it calculating body fat and saying 22%. And I get off and dance around the room!

Have I evidence of achieving this before?
I need to lose 20 more pounds. I have lost 20 pounds before. I lost more than that on Quick Weight Loss and on Body for Life.

I lost down to 145 when we lived in Abilene, after Elijah was born. So I have weighed 145 as an adult and as a parent.

What happens if I act as if I have the resources?

My weight will drop. I will continue to lose weight. I have done it before and I can do it again.

I will maintain the weight because I have often done things for years: driven, studied, walked, etc.

What is the real purpose?
To look good for Ron.
To be healthy.

What will I lose or gain if I have it?
I will lose weight.

I will lose excuses.

I will gain a new wardrobe.

I will gain a healthier body and a longer life.

I will gain more self-confidence.

What will happen if I get it?
I will look hot.

I will get new clothes.

I will act more self-confident.

What will not happen if I get it?
I will not get old and fat.

I will not die young.

I will not develop medically-caused bipolar disorder.

I will not attract creeps because I’ll still be older. But I will look good.

What will happen if I don’t get it?
I will weigh more.

I will be more likely to develop adult onset diabetes.

What won’t happen if I don’t get it?
I won’t ever get my pictures taken.

I won’t get a great new wardrobe.

I want to weigh 145 again this year and maintain that weight for at least the next forty years, with twenty to twenty-five percent body fat.

Happy Catholic tagged me. Well, sort of. She said I could answer if I wanted to. That’s almost the same as tagging me.

What was I doing ten years ago?
Living in Austin.
Just bought a house.
Planting a garden with my dad.
Going to a non-denominational church that actually, really, had no politics.
Watching my sons play soccer.
Homeschooling my sons.

Five things on my To Do list today
1. Grade papers for Monday morning’s class.
2. Grade papers for Monday evening’s class.
3. Grade papers for Tuesday morning’s class.
4. Grade papers for Tuesday evening’s class.
5. (Nope. I already graded Tuesday afternoon’s papers.) Read NLP for Dummies.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire
Call my husband’s boss and tell him R quit.
Take my kids to live in a few foreign countries for the next year or so.
Endow two chairs at my alma mater.
Give big bucks to my alma mater’s library.
Hire someone to do my lawn.
Have someone make my clothes.

Three of my bad habits/qualities
1. I am quick to anger.
2. I am easily bored.
3. I am becoming a procrastinator.

Five places I’ve lived
1. Armonk, New York
2. Flagstaff, Arizona
3. Durham, North Carolina
4. Geneva, Switzerland
5. Covington, Louisiana

Five Books I’ve recently read
1. Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn and
2. his Skybreakers
3. Patricia Briggs’ The Hob’s Bargain (finished it last night)
4. Robert Aspirin’s Dragons Wild
5. 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper

I tag Bev G because she is my friend, she blogs, and she might actually do it.

The Hindu says a good teacher needs knowledge, communication skills, and aptitude. They define aptitude as wanting to do it.

Ad Prima: Toward the Best Education Information says good teachers:
are good at explaining things
keep their cool
have a sense of humor
like people (especially those in the age range they are planning to teach)
are inherently fair minded
are practical
have a command of their subject
set high expectations and hold their students to those expectations
are detail oriented
are good time managers
can lead or follow
don’t take things for granted

A blog, Ripples of Improvement provides a list of the Top 10 qualities of a good teacher.
1. Confidence
2. Patience
3. True compassion
4. Understanding
5. Ability to look at things in multiple ways and explain things in more than one way
6. Dedication to excellence
7. Unwavering support
8. Willingness to help student achieve
9. Pride in students’ accomplishments
10. Passionate

Commenters added “understand learning” and “sense of humor.”

Tomorrow’s Professor from Stanford, offers these characteristics:

Wants to teach
Take risks
Never have enough time (because they are too busy doing teacher-related stuff)
Tries to keep self and students off balance (meaning they are always stretching themselves)
Do not trust student evaluations (because they say too much nice about them)

If the above is Chris Morgan’s list, it is complete and online at Learning Matters at Lingnan, which includes other things about good teachers
have a positive attitude
think of teaching as a form of parenting
try to give their students confidence
try to motivate their students by pointing out incentive systems (like the raise lost because the person didn’t know how to write)
listen to their students

Marshall Brain says good teaching is knowledge, communication, interest, and respect for the students.

Nelson Guirado says a good teacher
Plans
Corrects work consistently and return it on time
Doesn’t sit down during class

Teach Kids Attitude 1st is another blog with a simple answer to what it takes to be a good teacher. A passion for teaching and a supportive teaching environment. That’s it.

JSTOR offers an article from Bioscience that says a good teacher must have enthusiasm for their subject and enthusiasm for their students.

I prayed that God would put me where I most needed to be. So I’m staying home.

I interviewed yesterday for six and a half hours. There was no scheduled time for lunch, so I brought a bar and peanuts, thinking that I could eat them on the run. That wasn’t as necessary as it looked, since I had 15 minutes between each part of the interview.

The president mostly asked me questions about my life. Of course, I was only there for ten minutes, so… He asked how I got to Texas from New York, why I chose my PhD alma mater, what things influenced me. Then he asked me three times what my research was going to be… He asked it three different ways, so it is possible I wasn’t answering what he was asking or he wasn’t understanding what I was saying. (I think now, looking back, that he was asking me where I was submitting proposals and papers. I would certainly have changed my answer, since I didn’t answer that at all.)

I told the chair that. She said she thought it might be X issue. I said I had thought about X issue and had presented a paper on it, back when I was teaching full time. I also said I had brought a copy for the president, but had not had an opportunity to give it to him. She went right out, put it in a folder, addressed it, and had it delivered to him. Doubt he saw it, since he was so busy, but…

I found out that there is a new chair for the department. I liked that. The new chair is the woman who supported me in the first interview. She is also the woman who took me around for my interview and introduced me to, it seemed like, everyone on campus. She becomes chair June 1.

The interview seemed to go fairly well. I am not the high profile candidate the president would like to hire, but I am a solid teacher and could, I believe, do presentations on a regular basis. I’ll just have to remember that it is part of my job description. Maybe I can get in touch with some people from my old college and present panels. Have to think about that.

I believe the chair likes me. I got on well with the dean, who is an easy-going person.

I think I got on well with the provost, too. While I’m scrutinizing it with a microscope I wonder if perhaps I didn’t seem a little too eager with her. As I was leaving she said, “You seem to have a lot of interests.” Now that would be good if she were talking about my teaching, but it came on the heels of my saying that her desk, a huge beautiful wood work with hand painted flourishes, was beautiful. I had already commented on how much I liked the blue glass, telling her that I collect it. And, when I came in, I asked her if she were born in September, because she had on a sapphire necklace (and earrings and wedding ring, but I noticed the necklace). So I’m now a little less sure about that.

I told the chair that, for a year or two, I would be willing to teach four sections of freshman English, if that was what needed doing, but that I did not want to do that for twenty years. She laughed and said no. She asked me what my dream job would be and I had trouble articulating it, even though I have written about it before. She kept asking me if I were going to be happy not teaching literature. I’m a writing teacher, primarily. But, having taught six to nine classes of freshman comp a year in the last six years, I am ready for a change. I am more than willing to teach business writing or something else, if that is available. (It doesn’t go to adjuncts at the community college for sure.)

We also discussed when in the day I would want to teach. Of course everyone wants to teach in the mid-morning (almost everyone). I said I’d prefer to teach a night class rather than a 4 pm MWF. Can you imagine being in Houston traffic at 5 three days a week? I would not enjoy that. But now that I’ve thought about it, I’m not sure when I would rather teach. Something else to think about. They schedule their classes early, so if I have a different opinion than what I told her, I should let her know if they call to hire me.

I think that my freshman comp class went very well. I taught for thirty minutes. The students were engaged; they laughed in the right places; they answered my questions. I did a little more lecture than student involvement, but I think it went all right.

However, in the tech writing class, while I showed that I know technology and I gave some good points, I was so busy presenting what I had prepared, that I didn’t engage the students. And that is the class the dean sat in on. (In fact, only the chair and the adjunct whose class it was were in my freshman comp teaching.)

I will try to remember that the teaching isn’t so they can find out what I know, but so that I can show them my best teaching style. That they did not see.

The chair said that she would let me know by June 1, hopefully. We’ll see.

If I don’t get the job, it will be God’s decision. When I started this search, with three colleges to apply with, I told God I needed him to be clear where he wanted me to go.

Kingwood was hiring developmental writing only and so I didn’t get in. There are plenty of adjuncts who have done that for them on a regular basis. And they might have gotten someone from outside. I don’t know.

Montgomery didn’t call me back after the phone interview. I thought they would, but I was wrong.

So whether I get an offer or not, I feel confident it will be what God has in mind.

Other things discussed:

The future graduate programs… MFA, JD, etc that are being envisioned and made part of the vision.

What the school is known for now. It is a SLAC, but at the rate they are changing, it won’t be that for long. Right now they’re strong in pre-med. Three of their sophomores were admitted to medical school, assuming they keep their grades up and graduate. They also have a very strong nursing school. In addition, they have a very strong bilingual education emphasis. They got $1.5 mil from the government for scholarships for that.

Developmental writing. The chair and I discussed this. I brought it up with the provost and the dean.

My considered response

After the phone interview, I almost withdrew my name. I loved the idea of working at a college like this one, which is why I applied, but the interview was problematic. However, I decided it was worth continuing because I did want to work there.

After the on-campus interview, even given that it went all day and had no lunch break, I really want to work there. I will be disappointed if they don’t offer me the job. There is a financial issue, though, because I need to make enough money to make it worth driving across town for. We probably won’t move. (I’ve considered it, but right now it would be unpopular with my family and financially foolish.)

I want to work there. It looked like a great place to be. Right now it’s small, but it is booming and will be growing like crazy. Being there in the transition stage would be good because I’ll get to know people across the campus and because I’ll then be in a nationally recognized school.

Besides teaching, which I love, I will also need to get re-involved professionally. That is a little harder to do because I have been out so long, but I am already moving that direction.

I need to talk to R about the whole thing. I want him to be more enthusiastic than he is about the prospect of my working there. And, unlike others, this job would probably be very supportive of us moving to New Zealand for a year to teach.

This semester I’ve actually had my freshman composition course reading blogs (for their compare/contrast paper on the presidential candidates) and my English blog (on their various assignments). As the semester winds down, they are creating links’ posts (with six good links), commentary posts (using topics from their documented papers that they are well informed on), and a narrative post (about their life).

I am grading these posts on timeliness of execution (did they get posted by the due time?) and the quality of execution (did they match my criteria?).

The links’ posts have come in already. And they are an improvement over what I was expecting based on the first one I saw. (He used Wikipedia and had quick-Googled sources. So he’s not doing well.) Most of the posts, however, are very well done.

wants to hire SIX new English teachers for the fall… No wonder the President and Provost are busy. If there are even half that many plans to hire in other places, they are stretched.

I guess that is why they were hiring last year and this year. And next year.

They doubled their freshman class from 2006 to 2007. It is expected to be up another 20% this year.

I guess I am a little weirded out that there might be six new teachers in one section.

I just read through an entire year’s worth of the campus newspaper online. Doing that is part of my prep for the interview on Tuesday. I’m also re-reading my dissertation, so I’ll be able to talk about it.