I'm posting while lying on my back with the laptop on my stomach, which is a very awkward typing position, so this may not be a long post.
Week before the week before last: busy helping a friend move out of her house and clean up/recycle/ebay a basement full of computer paraphernalia that her husband left her and refused to help get rid of when he divorced her.
Week before last: busy moving our own stuff (and leftover computer crap from helping this friend) into our new townhouse.
Last week: on vacation at Lake Superior. Husband broke his leg on second day of trip. Spent most of it in cabin taking care of bedridden husband. We will be a single-income family until he recovers in 4-6 weeks.
This week: busy unboxing and putting away stuff in new townhouse, until my back gave out last night. Today we are a no-income family. Hope I can go back to work tomorrow.
You see why I have been so quiet lately?
Friday, September 28, 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Ah, college days... and grade school days...
I'm reminiscing about college a bit today.
I took an education class once in college, more just to pass the time than because I was interested in learning about education. But there was some interesting stuff there... some of which just made me laugh at how silly people can be.
One article talked about a project in which hundreds of children were encouraged to write poems. A couple paragraphs of it were devoted to talking about a child whose poems were "disturbing"... specifically, that he wrote about "shooting his teachers, and killing his mother and flushing her head down the toilet." He was removed from the class and put in counseling.
Now, I don't know if his teachers had ever been children. I know I was a child once, and I remember it very well, and I remember that when I was a child, at least half of the other children I knew sang some variation of a song that went:
"Joy to the world, [insert name of victim here] is dead.
What happened to her head?
I took it from her body
And flushed it down the potty
And around and around it goes..."
And they also sang some variation of a song that went:
"On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese,
I shot my poor teacher with a 40 MC
Thirty years later he rose from the dead
And I took my bazooka and blew off his head."
I strongly suspect that the poems written by the boy in the article were these ones, or something like them, and that the reason he wrote them was because he had heard them from other children. So he shouldn't have gotten in trouble for "disturbing writing"-- he should have gotten in trouble for freaking plagiarism.
Not that I approve of those songs, mind you. They're so unrealistic. You can't flush someone's head down a toilet. The only toilets that a human head would fit down are outhouses and porta-potties, and those don't flush.
But I digress...
I took an education class once in college, more just to pass the time than because I was interested in learning about education. But there was some interesting stuff there... some of which just made me laugh at how silly people can be.
One article talked about a project in which hundreds of children were encouraged to write poems. A couple paragraphs of it were devoted to talking about a child whose poems were "disturbing"... specifically, that he wrote about "shooting his teachers, and killing his mother and flushing her head down the toilet." He was removed from the class and put in counseling.
Now, I don't know if his teachers had ever been children. I know I was a child once, and I remember it very well, and I remember that when I was a child, at least half of the other children I knew sang some variation of a song that went:
"Joy to the world, [insert name of victim here] is dead.
What happened to her head?
I took it from her body
And flushed it down the potty
And around and around it goes..."
And they also sang some variation of a song that went:
"On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese,
I shot my poor teacher with a 40 MC
Thirty years later he rose from the dead
And I took my bazooka and blew off his head."
I strongly suspect that the poems written by the boy in the article were these ones, or something like them, and that the reason he wrote them was because he had heard them from other children. So he shouldn't have gotten in trouble for "disturbing writing"-- he should have gotten in trouble for freaking plagiarism.
Not that I approve of those songs, mind you. They're so unrealistic. You can't flush someone's head down a toilet. The only toilets that a human head would fit down are outhouses and porta-potties, and those don't flush.
But I digress...
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