OH!! OH!!!

SHE WROTE HER NAME TONIGHT! E and M.

(nice mom. tell the story about the slashy superheros. forget about the actual literacy.)

I knew Batman was gay (hello! Boy Wonder!!) But Superman!?! OMG!

clearly, one who has never seen Smallville.

no biscuit for mommy.

GO EM

I started a 4th grade book club at the library - trying to steer them back to the book - herding cats

Emily is really right. I try to differentiate, but sometimes I just can’t. I tend to use the “offer assignments that can be taken to different levels” approach. It’s easiest.

I really appreciated it when teachers did this. I remember in tenth grade English, before we had levelled courses, the schedule worked out that the class I was in was about 20 people who would end up in lower-level English the next year and 5 who'd end up in honors English the next year, with seriously no one in the middle. The five of us were getting incredibly frustrated. We had a vocab quiz each week, and after a little while, the teacher would start writing questions or comments to think about on each of our quizzes when we got them back, things about whatever we were reading. We'd usually end up discussing them with each other during study hall.

Definite contrast with our teacher from the previous year: Ninth grade, we read "The Monkey's Paw." The teacher told us, "the moral is that you're not supposed to tempt fate." I raised my hand and asked, "But if fate determines everything that's going to happen, then hasn't fate already determined that you were going to do what looks to other people like tempting fate?" Teacher replied, "No. That's not how fate works."

My absolute favorite math teacher ever would do similar things -- when she saw that I was getting bored, she'd drop a piece of paper on my desk and say, "Take a look at this." It would be some question about the same basic topic that were were studying, taken a few levels further. (Or, she'd turn the other way when one of the other kids and I would sit in the back of the room trying to program our graphing calculators to play Pong. She generally had a very good idea of how much of the material each kid understood, and she'd let us do stuff like that when she knew that we completely understood whatever that day's activity was supposed to teach.)

GO EM! That's really cool, Aimee.

I really appreciated it when teachers did this

So know what I did earlier tonight? Threadsucked the F2F2 thread and read the lead-up to the DC F2F. I hadn't met any of you then, which just seems bizarre to me. It was fun to read. I have also determined that I was much wittier back then.

She tucks them in, says, "G'night Ba-man. G'night Soopman."

And then she makes them kiss each other.

Hee! Wow, so DCU is going to be her first slash fandom?

And look at the various Buffista babies, with the writing and the signing of things. Neat!

Wow, so DCU is going to be her first slash fandom?

It's looking like. Unless I start sharing the Remus/Sirius stuff with her.

Sigh. I'm reading about elementary school math programs. (Long story -- started out as looking up the program that a girl I might be tutoring uses, then started getting interested and reading about others.) One of the ones that gets a lot of press is Saxon Math -- it's a much more traditional approach than a lot of the others currently popular. And the word problems tend to be kind of fanciful things -- like, if there are five gnomes in the vegetable garden, and six gnomes in the rose garden, how many gnomes are there altogether? Anyway, I just found a page with someone objecting to this program because some of the word problems around the upper elementary and middle school levels involve medieval weaponry, and that's clearly a scheme to bring kids into playing D&D, which is just a front for devil worship.

(I remember in fourth grade, we'd keep a count of how many names from each ethnicity turned up in word problems in each chapter. It was exactly the same count in each chapter. Even at age nine, we thought this was incredibly condescending, that they thought we'd all be racists if we didn't have a perfectly balanced math book. I'm not sure that was the reasoning, but that was how we all interpreted it.)

automatic weapons don't lead to devil worship

I knew Batman was gay (hello! Boy Wonder!!) But Superman!?! OMG!

I think Supes goes both ways.

Really really fast.