Shower or Death?

Before I went to South America, someone told me that the shower heads down there were somewhat strange. In order to heat the water, electrical wiring is installed into the shower head. When you step into the shower and look up, you'll see something like this:

There ya go. Ready-made to provide you with some nice, warm water or some nice, warm death. Lucky for us, we mostly showered out of buckets of cool river water, so we didn't have to worry about the so-called "suicide shower". Of course, we weren't exactly clean, either...

Crossing things off of my "to-do" list...

#98.) Get deported.

Been there, done that. Oh yes, my friends, I have been deported. Our trip to Brazil was short-lived, as we were escorted out of the country for not having the appropriate visas. As a result, we spent most of our trip in between Colombia and Peru, which was fabulous, and we did get to spend about 28 hours in Brazil. 

On an unrelated note, I did not see any fruity headdresses or guerilla rebels.

Not your normal bikini wax...

We're going to be in Brazil for the next 8 days or so. Ah, yes, the land of Carnival, topless women, and the bikini wax that brings women from around the globe to their knees. Because of the Brazilian penchant for nudity, packing for this trip has been rather easy...

Ah, but I jest. We won't be anywhere near all the bright lights and lusty ladies. We'll actually be closer to the guerilla warfare going on in southeastern Colombia. Brazil is an equal opportunity country. Equal opportunities to go around topless wearing a fruity headdress and to encounter the FARC. I wonder if the rebels have snazzy outfits, too.  Ha-cha-cha.

Confirm or Ignore.

This is a (relatively) old YouTube video about what it would be like if Facebook was a real-life network instead of a virtual one. I still giggle when I see it. POKE!

It's like a really BRILLIANT joke!

Ew.

A few days ago, our precious little kitty (Stella) was busily tearing the stuffing out of a little toy mouse with her teeth, and I happened to walk a little too close to where the carnage was happening. We generally don't mind when she pounces, because she doesn't have front claws (no comments about what horrible people we are...if you want to read the blog of someone who doesn't declaw her cat, go somewhere else). This time, however, was an exception. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but she pounced on my foot/ankle, a flurry of orange fur, white teeth, and back claws, and quickly ran away, leaving me startled and a little bloody.

As a looked at my leg and swore, I remembered that there is this thing called "Cat Scratch Fever," and it is a real, honest-to-goodness sickness. So I thought I'd look it up online to see if I was at risk. The web pages I saw mostly talked about the same thing. Kittens are more likely than cats to pass cat scratch fever. If a cat scratches you, wash the wound with soap and water. Watch for unusual discolorations or swelling. Don't let cats lick any open wounds.

Did you catch that last one? Because that was the advice of MORE THAN ONE web page. You know what that means, don't you? That means that people have let cats lick their open wounds. You would think that people would automatically assume that cats (or anything else for that matter) should not lick open wounds. Apparently, that is not an automatic assumption, because these web sites felt that it was necessary to note that licking wounds was something to avoid.

Stick a fork in me...

...because I'm DONE! As of today, I am officially retired from the teaching profession. Does the fact that I can't make it in the classroom for more than a year make me a sissy? Probably. But I'm one happy sissy.

As I was finishing grading final projects (a poetry portfolio), I realized that some of my students had progressed quite a bit since the first assignment. In the essays, I saw more complete sentences, fewer run-ons, and there were some actual paragraphs thrown in here and there.  One of my students actually turned out to be a gifted poet, and she's submitting some of her poems to various online contests for publication and whatnot. 

This story is not about her.

Like I was saying, I was grading these poetry portfolios, and I was amazed at the progress of one particular student. Not only did he turn in the assignment, but some of his poetry was fairly decent! I read through the poems under this happy delusion until I came to his free verse poem. This is what he wrote:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Good, huh? That's because it was written by William Butler Yeats.  

Never mind that this isn't even a free verse poem. Apparently, this student had plagiarized his other poems from various internet sites. As I am not particularly familiar with the internet poets, I didn't catch any familiar lines that might cause me to suspect plagiarism. However, I did take a few graduate courses on Yeats. And I have a few volumes of his poetry at my house. So the kid got a zero on his project.

But, don't you worry, he still passed the 6 weeks, because he passed his state assessment. And, in the great state of Texas, if you pass the state reading assessment, you get an automatic 100 for a test grade in your English class -- whether you passed the assessment with a 100 or by 1 point.

As for the 11 children who failed my class for the year (apparently, that's a high failure rate. Whoops.), word on the street is that they will pass on to 9th grade without summer remediation. Because we wouldn't want any of these children to be left behind, now would we?