7 February 2010
Mag-Neato

Filed under food + reading + sport + work

Well I guess I couldn’t have been more wrong about the Super Bowl. I’m disappointed, but at least it was a good game. Props to the Saints who played well, and props also to Peyton Manning who was total class in defeat. Yeah, you know that’s Archie’s boy.

I made myself finish the other book I was in the middle of before getting into When You Reach Me, Craig Ferguson’s American on Purpose. Excellent bio, I have to say. It is a really good telling of his story, mostly staying away from details about The Drew Carey Show and The Late Late Show because I get the feeling he’s saving that for another book, but he hits enough of it all to really make you see what you already know if you watch his show regularly: this guy loves America. I was moved to tears more than once.

I’m midway through When You Reach Me and it’s everything it promised, so far. Can’t wait to get some time to get into it again.

Something you might not have heard of if you haven’t been in a high-school English class for more than a decade is a word wall. Lots of language teachers create them, and they get created lots of different ways. I haven’t done word walls for a few reasons, but the main one is that I suck at teaching vocab. The vocab workshop I attended at the beginning of last summer gave me tons of good ideas, though, and it had me thinking of ways to approach a word wall in my English class. One other obstacle was that my walls are covered with posters and signs and cool stuff like that, so a word wall is tough to find space for.

Then one day some of my silly juniors were goofing off with the round magnets I keep on my whiteboard. My room’s ceiling is acoustic tile, that dry, crumbly stuff that comes in panels of about two feet by three feet and rests upon thin metal brackets, and above which all the wiring and fire-alarm stuff is strung. The silly juniors took the magnets from my whiteboard and stuck them on the metal braces. They thought I was going to be mad or at least miffed, but I looked up there and saw a hundred cool, fun ideas, including a possible place to put my word wall.

The configuration of my teaching space has left one whiteboard pretty much useless except for doodling space for my students (I love to let them play around with the whiteboard) and my weekly to-do list. I’m thinking of printing the vocab words on cardstock, then cutting each word out and sticking adhesive magnet strips on the back of each. Then the whiteboard becomes my word wall, and if I decide I can find a way for them to do it safely, I’ll have the kiddies use the ceiling space for some of our vocab activities.

Yeah, baby. That could be so neato. I went to Walmart this evening to buy the adhesive magnet tape. Something that specific can be tough to locate in a place like that, and it was, but I had a really good feeling it would be there, and it was. I’m kind of amped about that.

McD’s has a new dipping sauce for the McNuggets. Sweet chili sauce. It’s pretty good. Why doesn’t McD’s do that more often? You’d think it’d be easy to introduce, say, a new sauce each month, and rotate them in and out periodically. What about a hoisin sauce, or a Chinese plum sauce? Or a katsu sauce?

2010-02-07  ::  me