superstars

for my teacher comrades... do you ever have a day go JUST the way you want it to? it happens very rarely for me (seriously), but today was about as close to ideal as possible. yay!

my juniors are studying "the lady of shalott" by tennyson. first of all, can i say that this is one of the few victorian poems that i actually enjoy? so, we read it together last week and we talked about it. today, i played them loreena mckennit's version while they freewrote, and then they worked in groups to analyze the changes between a previous version and the one that's printed in the textbooks. they had to look at language, structure, order, and punctuation and explain why they thought tennyson changed each one. i knew that they were smart enough to do this, but some of them have been such slugs that i expected them to kick and scream the whole way. they rocked the house with their answers. blew me into the next county. i listened to them and thought, "is this how real english teachers' classes go all the time?" it was awesome. woo hoo!

on the boys-of-a-non-student-variety front ~ yeah, nothing serious happening. i met a very nice, hot fireman this weekend, but unless he calls the policeman who took my statement (i was a witness to an accident) for my number, there's nothing happening there. another man - the one who doesn't actually talk to me but watches whenever i'm in sight - actually spoke to and laughed with his friends near me, and i now have proof that he's only quiet with me. hmm. am i that scary???? and then, finally, the current preacher-man-from-afar crush emailed me back today ~ coincidentally, more words than i've exchanged with him in the past two years. so, basically, i have bad crushes because i don't talk with any of them. there IS a creepy guy at the gym; he keeps talking to me, and i talk back out of politeness, but i find myself wanting to ask him if my head is going to end up on his stove. if i disappear, it's the guy at the gym...