dang

it's almost march! i'll say it again, i'm busy. i know everyone says they're busy.

and people can say what they want about financial responsibility and maturity and stuff, but i know teachers almost twice my age who have the same problem as me: i make enough money for me, but not for everything that my classroom needs. and there's nothing i can do about that. anyway, yeah. i've been on a rant about that lately, when people want to say that teachers make enough for having three months off every year. but do they know how much money teachers spend on kids every year?

oh, and then there's totally inappropriate testing procedures. here's an example:

Fill in the bubble next to the sentence with the incorrect spelling word.
1.
O These lemons taste sower.
O I would like a few apples.
O My friend is nice.

okay that's fine, if you really think standardized tests require that students become acclimated at an early age, okay. but today after we did this test, i asked three students how to spell "sour." two of them said: "sower" without hesitation. it was the last way they had seen it spelled and they latched onto it. grrrrrrr.

i've been reading jane yolen books cuz i have an author study about her. it's funny, by researching her, i realized that she is not at all a fan of jk rowling. wow. jane yolen is pretty well respected and stuff, i like the books i know by her. i had previously thought she wrote only picture books, but i've learned she's done a lot of chapter books.

well, apparently jy thinks that jk's works bear similarities to yolen's works from 8 years before hogwarts hit the scene. the similarities are striking, but no more than harry potter's likeness to any other wizard-based work, such as lord of the rings... i don't know. i can't list a lot of specific examples, but many concepts in harry potter don't seem all that new. however, it seems that works of art of all kinds borrow from each other. if you want to see a pair of books that are identical, check out fahrenheit 451 and the giver. the first was written by ray bradbury and was written for adults and the giver was by lois lowry and was written later. both have as the central theme the "dumb-ification" of the masses and the control of intelligence for the "greater good." in both books, the main character ends up having power to change the balance of power from the elite to the rest, and that main character chooses to overthrow the "powers." the entire works are parallel, not just the themes. but lois lowry won literary awards for her contributions.

okay, gotta go.

see ya.