The pro-party people I've seen on the Gawker network talk about the inefficacy of the vaccine, primarily, the incredible risks of contracting as an adult, and the triviality of contracting it under some unspecified age.

You'd think I was licking random desks and pens or something, but no.

Okay, I laughed hard enough that I hurt my portacath, so I hope you feel *really* bad. Because I read "licking random dicks and penises". Possibly I could have skipped that last fic.

A Harvard Business Review blog gets some corrections: [link]

I'm teaching Othello this year instead of King Lear and I am totally enjoying it. We're doing more close reading for performance than we are doing just plow through and read.

I really wish we had done this in HS. I never really had a class that taught us how to get to the meat of the play.

My university college class was taught by a first year prof who decided to teach us more of Shakespeare's contemporaries than Will, and then proceeded to teach us the feminist criticism of every play. (The focus of her recently completed PhD, unsurprisingly.) Frankly, I think I needed some close readings of plays before I wanted to get into all those meta-layers of criticism. My dramaturgy class was far more valuable for understanding the context of the play.

The best was sitting around listening to actors at the Shakespeare festival where I worked one summer, some of whom had acted Shakespeare for decades talk about the plays, and about the research they had done. They made the plays come alive more than any class.

I had Actual Chickenpox at 5 (a "safe and mild" age), and it was really serious. I might have been hospitalized, except my parents were a primary care doctor and a nurse, so they sort of had that stuff taken care of. I was happy to get my kids vaccinated on that one. (And, you know, everything else, though I boggled a bit at Hep B for a newborn.)

I am voting today. At lunch, hopefully. One of the ways I'm trying to deal with my inner Doom Troll is to do stuff that I can do, as much as I can. So, I am voting today.

I say this, here, so I will remember that I'm voting today.

I'm voting today, but I have to scavenge up something official with my new address on it, so as to avoid a provisional ballot. Argh. (No, we have not gotten drivers' licenses yet.)

And while I completely understand person with those limitations wanting to become teachers, it's not the best idea to be an immuno-suppressed person working in the petri dish of direct work with kids.

But the immuno-suppressed kids GO to school anyway, so an immuno suppressed adult might not find it that bad.

Most of the illnesses that run rampant through our house actually seem to originate with Grace and not Noah. Because of her diet, Grace seems to handle them okay (cutest thing ever? When she sneezes or coughs through her trache, she STILL covers her mouth) where Noah and his steady diet of chicken nuggets, takes longer to bounce back.

Frankly, I think I needed some close readings of plays before I wanted to get into all those meta-layers of criticism.

Technically, because of the Eliot-dominated New Criticism nature of the AP exam, I'm supposed to teach close reads of everything. And I do and I don't. Depends. Invisible Man? We look at everything around the text (DuBois and Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington, Jazz Age etc) and do a close read of certain sections. Jane Eyre? Close reads of certain pieces otherwise plow through. Dorian Gray? That's a read quickly book.

With Shakespeare, there is so much to untangle that I do tend to focus on making the plays accessible more than big literary criticism After Act 2, we'll speed up a little, but if I can get kids reading aloud for semantics and not line breaks, then I'm good.

After this it's Handmaid's Tale.

Kat, I love how you teach. Even in your insanely large classes, and from way across the country, I feel like you're teaching for the good guys, and giving more than a few kids the opportunity to love books and reading.

With that said, I read the above and the first thing that ran through my head was way off on another track, but I'm going to post it here anyway, and probably re-think it after coffee.

Here it is, my brain without coffee, but inspired by Kat's curriculum :

Fools Run when a good Kat goes to war.

This article says you can't win an online argument

Ooh, is that a challenge?

Well I mean, if you are pro pox party I'm not sure what your argument is against the vaccine.

Chicken pox is NATURAL. Chicken pox vaccine has TOXINS.

Nobody is ANTI-VACCINE, they just want vaccines to be SAFE. And mothers should be defining safe, not the CDC. Who are all corrupt and in the pocket of Big Pharma, you know. And have no Mommy Instinct, which is way more important for making medical decisions than that icky science stuff.

Sorry, I just threw up in my mouth typing that.

I can't remember which medical blogger (Mark Crislip?) pointed out that sending a live virus through the mail is essentially bioterrorism. I'm stopping just short of hoping someone winds up in Guantanamo for this idiocy. Just.

[eta - found it, it wsa David Gorski [link] ]

I'm really hating my new boss right now. He sent me a mail last night, "It was decided that we must comply with the standard below." This was in spite of the fact that I already explained to him how onerous it would be to bring us into compliance. He just blindly accepted the directive from above with absolutely no pushback, and then dumped all the work onto me.

Passive aggressive jerk.