The Malicious Monocle

  Edublogs has been slow today for some reason. I’ve been trying to get on for a while but was only getting error messages. Oh well, I’m on now and have just enough time to ramble on before leaving to grab some dinner and get to class.

Breakfast at Frank’s was nice this morning. Lamb was a bit late as always, but not as late as she was last time. I tried the cinnamon swirl french toast this morning. It was really good. I may have to add that dish the rotation of stuff I order there.

I managed to get most of the reading done for tonight as well as getting a ton of work done on the lesson I’m teaching tomorrow. I’ll probably be up late after class tweaking and fine tuning things, but I think I have the major ground work done. Of course, now I have to hope my Power Point slides will work on the Macs at the school.

Today was new comic book day as well. Happened across a hard-bound copy of all of the comics that were online last season for Heroes. They’re all collected into a very pretty edition that is going to look nice on the bookshelf. I just wish I had the time to read it right now.

  I’ve been working on a lesson plan for later this week. I’ve decided what I’m going to do and how I want to do it. Now I just need to get the prep work done so I can actually do it. I also have a book on reading analysis to get through. It’s just before 11 and I’m feeling pretty wiped out and I want to go to sleep but I’m not going to. I can’t even sleep in tomorrow morning as I’m meeting a friend for breakfast at my favorite local diner.

The best diner in the world: Frank’s Diner

Oh well, I guess I’ve screwed around enough for a bit. Back to the grind.

Today is when children will be permitted to go from door to door and beg for sweets in my town of Kenosha. I have some candy here and I even went out and bought some more today. Rather than horde the candy all for myself, as I might usually do, I will place the candy in a bowl and pass it out to the urchins. The weather is nice today so I want to get some more painting done on my minis before the weather starts being foul as a rule rather than an exception. Hopefully the neighbor kids will come over for some choccies. Rustlan and Juli are sweet kids.

This morning I went out to a coffee shop and got a bit of homework done. I finished up reading a book on den Hitler Jugend and started a book about a foster kid during the Great Depression. I also managed to get the most recent episode of the Malicious Monocle written and make some decisions as to the directions the story will go over the next few episodes.

I’ve managed to get mostly caught up in my DVR viewing this weekend as well. I still need to go back and catch up on some episodes of Flash Gordon and the Bionic Woman, but they won’t take too long. I managed to get caught up on my first tier shows like Heroes, Numb3rs, NCIS and Criminal Minds.

I arrived at my co-operating school today only to be told by the secretary that there is standardised testing occuring in all of the 8th grade classrooms today. I set this day and time with the my co-op teacher a few weeks ago. Why couldn’t he email or call me to let me know it wasn’t going to be a good day?

 I finally managed to fall asleep last night. I’m feeling pretty rested actually, so I must have pretty much fallen into a coma when I dozed off. The mug of coffee in front of me will take care of any remaining issues I might have with staying awake this morning. I get to leave work in about an hour to do some classroom observation. I really hope it goes well. I have three more lessons that I need to teach and I just want to get them over with and move on to the student teaching portion of the game show.

I realized that my Monocle post from early this morning may end up being out of sequence. Oh well. I’ll put them in order on the official page.

      Tonight marked the end of our Classroom Management class. These classes have been really informative and I’m sure will prove to be helpful down the line when I have my own classroom. I have to say I’m still kind of happy the class is over if only because it marks one more class down before the student teaching semester begins. The professor was great and I honestly think I may pick his brain in the future when I need help.

As with his other class sessions we did a role play. The role play concerned the topic of a firearm being brandished in a classroom. The scene was that a student who has been picked on constantly has brought a handgun to school to teach the bully a lesson. I was the student with a gun.

My teacher handed me a toy gun during a break and I put in my belt in the small of my back under my shirt. No one knew  I had the gun on me and when I decided to pull the gun, no one, not even the people sitting next to me realized that I had pulled it until I drew attention to the fact I had a gun in my hand. I think that scared some of the other people in class. It sort of pointed out just how easy it is to sneak a gun into a classroom and how easy it is for someone to start shooting before anyone even knows there’s a shooter. The student role playing the teacher did an excellent job in handling the fact a gun was in her class.

After hearing about the Madison cohort I don’t think my professor would have asked me to be the student with the gun if he had known I’ve been present at a shooting in real life. I’ve also had a gun pointed at me before. I can’t say I wasn’t scared when those things happened, but I’m still here. At least I know I can handle myself with a certain aplomb in a crisis situation.

Don’t Blink!

George Lucas has announced that he is developing a live-action television series set in the Star Wars universe. Yay. He gets another chance to destroy my childhood. No matter what he says, I know the truth. Han shot first.

The angels have the phone box.

  Managed to get everything taken care of this morning.  At least I hope I did. I’m not too sure about a part of one of the assigments, but I’m not going to worry about it any more this afternoon. There is very important work to be done that I need to get to as I have meetings out of town tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be back soon enough to get my check and hang at the KAC for a bit to judge their Challenge games.

    Sally forth! Compose those memos! Slay the fiend that is Fax!

    Don’t Blink.

Once again I spent the weekend working on homework. I had to take a lesson plan and convert it over to a different format. I also had a journal entry to do, and a poster to make. I was pretty sure I also had CMP project due as well, but as it was never mentioned in any of the emails that shot back and forth in the cohort, I’m going to pretend I’ve never heard of that project. I have most of what I need for tomorrow night finished. I plan on finishing up the last little bit tomorrow while I’m at work.

I ordered t-shirts for my friend’s girls. They’re identical twins and have just as much of a twisted suite of interests as their mother. They’ll love the fact that they have staff t-shirts from a haunted house. The only warning I had on the subject of the t-shirts is to not include any weeping angels.

“The angels have the phone box.”

“Don’t blink!”

The early winter fog crept inland from the lake. It’s spread was slow, almost incremental but in the end it still blanketed the city of Southport in its muffling cover. The fog wreathed each gaslight along 1st Avenue in a polychromatic nimbus that guided the few people out for their evening constitutionals. These will o’wisps brightened the fog without actually illuminating it.

I took my Praxis II tests last month. I wasn’t too worried about the tests, as I tend to test well. ETS sent me a pretty little certificate saying that I kicked all sorts of butt on the Elementary Content Knowledge test. I called my parents to let them know and offer them the chance to hang it on their refridgerator. They declined, but are very happy and asked the usual questions as to why my grades back in school and undergrad didn’t reflect this knowledge. *rolleyes*

Now I’m wondering if the people from Cardinal Stritch are going to want me to redo my student teaching resume to include this. If the test was for Middle School I’d be more sure, but I don’t want to teach elementary school so therein the confusing lies.

At this moment I’m attempting to complete an assignment for my Methods class, but I can’t make heads or tails of the assignment from the syllabus. Hopefully someone from my cohort will answer the e-mail I’ve sent out asking for help.