Tangental, but I wrote this on the spur-of-the-moment, and am going to give it to my students after their finals. I just sat down and thought about how much I have loved my first year of teaching, and all I have learned from my experience.

What I Learned From My Students This Year:

How to say “shut up” in Spanish

Reggaeton is really cool music

How hard it is to be a teen mother, and how gracefully and well some girls do it

What a coyote is

That hot Cheetos, lime juice and hot sauce is really good…and KILLS my stomach!

You taught me about 17 new cuss words in Spanish…my freshmen next year will hate you!

That teenage girls can put one more makeup in one 50 minute class period than I did from age 20 to 30

That not all teenage boys are jerks – some like to learn, love their parents, and are secret romantics

How important good parents are to everyone…and that I am more grateful than ever for mine

How cool a quincenera is, and how much I wish I’d been a Latina girl so I could have had one!

That grammar still puts all high school students to sleep

I finally figured out why my high school Chemistry teacher hated me for sleeping in his class

I learned so many fabulous things about Latinos, including the importance of family. All kinds of family.

That my Spanish accent sucks, that you will ALWAYS laugh at me when I speak my awful Spanish, but that it’s cool that I try.

That my car is a hoopdee.

What MiGente is

How to say “Your son/daughter is very smart, but is very lazy. S/he needs to study more” in Spanish. To about 8 million parents.

How much fun dancing is…and that my body simply doesn’t MOVE that way anymore!

That Mexican schoolgirls in telenovelas dress kind of…well, DARINGLY

How to hold my temper better

How to think before I speak

That what I say and do affects other people in ways I didn’t think of

That it’s really darned HARD to go to school and learn in a new language

That I love being a teacher, even when my students make me want to strangle them

How much one student can grow in 10 short months – physically, emotionally, intellectually

And finally, and most importantly, I learned to care – a lot – about what happens to all of you. You made my first year of teaching really wonderful.

Gracias y te amo, Ms. G

Reggaeton is really cool music

Joe asked me a couple of weeks what type of music Raggaeton is. I told him that, to the best of my knowledge, it was a sort of Latin-based raggae. He asked how one culture could take over another culture's music and make it their own. I reminded him that it's been happeneing since music was invented. He pondered that, and decided he was going to create Irish-based reggae and call it Reggae-ish.

Oh, Erin, that's beautiful!

For sarameg: FAQ about Ripley the Hairless Cat.

He pondered that, and decided he was going to create Irish-based reggae and call it Reggae-ish.

Ask him if he remembers House of Pain? And also, does he know Sinead O'Connor put out a FAB album of reggae covers recently>

Thanks, JZ. I have fucking LOVED my first year teaching, and got a little sniffly composing that list.

Hairless cats just looks so...worried. It's the wrinkles. I can't help but pity them their lack of fur, as cats are (usually) so freaking picky about it. Also? Fur covers a multitude of sins. Like Devi's belly waggle or Mister Kitty's wrinkles or paunch. Someone go knit them a coat!

The students from mom's first year of teaching (first grade) graduated a few years ago. She can still name all of them, and hell, even I remember Adrian. Scary thing? She's already had one of their children in her class (head start, then.) She's vying for a professional development position next year, as she's winding towards retirement and just doesn't have the energy levels any more. I hope I'll still get stories of the kids, because I've always loved the exasperation and delight she takes in them.

Oh, Erin. That was lovely.

So I cleaned the cat scratch playground with alcohol and applied fix-y goo to it. Now I took a picture too. [link] . Should I be doing anything else?

Oh, and it looks like an artistic flower much more in the picture. In person it is more flayed flesh and then just one bit that still looks like a blossom. I think that is the one that is going to bruise spectacularly.

Cass, just keep it clean (scrub even if it hurts the first couple of days) and peroxide/neosporin it frequently. If you have the slightest allergies to cats, I'd suggest benadryl tonight, at least. Keep an eye on it. You'll probably have some swelling, just from the trauma, but if it gets noticeably worse, doctor time.

I've had some nasty wounds from my clawed ones, and I've never had issues, but I've seen people react very badly. And YOWCH, that's a stingy place to get scratched. I'm betting it's going to be pretty uncomfy for a bit.

RIGHT ON JESSE!!!!!

Dammit, y'all wait until I'm not around to malign the poor (yet pretty) hairless kitties....

Also, a few years back slashdot had a poll on the pronounciation of daemon. The results were almost exactly split between 'dee-mon' and 'day-mon.'

In conclusion, hairless cats rule.