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invite codes
May. 17th, 2009 12:01 amHey, I just got two Dreamwidth invite codes. Is anyone interested in them?
May. 17th, 2009
I taught RE on May 10, but I seem to have forgotten to write about it. Last week's lesson was Love You Forever, by Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw, which is the creepy, creepy book about an obsessive stalker mother who infantilizes her grown son and passes the dysfunction on so he continues the pattern with his own daughter. You know, the one where she's always crawling across the floor and climbing a ladder into his window and singing,
"I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living,
My baby you'll be."
The sentiment is good -- the strength of familial love through time and generations -- but the actual execution is just Epic Fail. The kids thought it was kind of stupid and full of logic holes, which is completely true. Kids will point out logic holes adults never catch, because they don't have the cultural training about when to suspend disbelief and just go with a story because it's meant to teach a moral lesson. They don't care about lessons; they just want the story to make sense.
But that was last week.
Today's official lesson plan was, basically, "Go over what you did during the year and talk about the lessons you learned," to which I said, "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," and brought in my copy of Just So Stories instead. I read "How the Whale Got His Throat," complete with dramatic hand gestures and occasional pauses for explanations (the definition of 'sagacity,' for example) or interactivity. Those stories are a joy to read aloud -- unlike many other people who try writing children's stories, Rudyard Kipling really knew what he was doing.
Some of the stories in that book are kind of sketchy on racial/cultural grounds, but on the other hand, Kipling treats Africa, India, Australia, and South America as if they're perfectly normal places to set stories, and as if the non-English names he uses are perfectly normal and unremarkable, which is refreshing. There are also gender issues -- women either left out or forced to conform to Victorian gender roles -- but all the human children seem to be girls, which is nice. And it's easy enough to fix the 'absent women' problem by just changing pronouns refering to some animal characters. There is no reason, for example, that the Bi-Colored Python Rock Snake can't be female.
Then we drew pictures and had pretzels and water for snack.
---------------
On the way home from church, I saw the Cascadilla Creek ducks out for a swim. They have two ducklings this year; last year, I think they had five. The ducklings are very small and fluffy, but they're growing fast. I first saw them on Monday or Tuesday, and they are noticeably bigger and less fuzzy already.
In other creek-watching news, the fish have mostly finishing spawning and have therefore left off hanging around between Tioga and Aurora streets. A couple weeks ago, I saw a water snake swimming downstream between Tioga and Cayuga streets. And while I think yesterday's storms washed away several flimsily rooted plants, the patch of grass just upstream from the Sears St. footbridge seems to have become well-supported over the past three years, and may eventually grow into a tiny island. That would be cool.
I love running water. :-)
"I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living,
My baby you'll be."
The sentiment is good -- the strength of familial love through time and generations -- but the actual execution is just Epic Fail. The kids thought it was kind of stupid and full of logic holes, which is completely true. Kids will point out logic holes adults never catch, because they don't have the cultural training about when to suspend disbelief and just go with a story because it's meant to teach a moral lesson. They don't care about lessons; they just want the story to make sense.
But that was last week.
Today's official lesson plan was, basically, "Go over what you did during the year and talk about the lessons you learned," to which I said, "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," and brought in my copy of Just So Stories instead. I read "How the Whale Got His Throat," complete with dramatic hand gestures and occasional pauses for explanations (the definition of 'sagacity,' for example) or interactivity. Those stories are a joy to read aloud -- unlike many other people who try writing children's stories, Rudyard Kipling really knew what he was doing.
Some of the stories in that book are kind of sketchy on racial/cultural grounds, but on the other hand, Kipling treats Africa, India, Australia, and South America as if they're perfectly normal places to set stories, and as if the non-English names he uses are perfectly normal and unremarkable, which is refreshing. There are also gender issues -- women either left out or forced to conform to Victorian gender roles -- but all the human children seem to be girls, which is nice. And it's easy enough to fix the 'absent women' problem by just changing pronouns refering to some animal characters. There is no reason, for example, that the Bi-Colored Python Rock Snake can't be female.
Then we drew pictures and had pretzels and water for snack.
---------------
On the way home from church, I saw the Cascadilla Creek ducks out for a swim. They have two ducklings this year; last year, I think they had five. The ducklings are very small and fluffy, but they're growing fast. I first saw them on Monday or Tuesday, and they are noticeably bigger and less fuzzy already.
In other creek-watching news, the fish have mostly finishing spawning and have therefore left off hanging around between Tioga and Aurora streets. A couple weeks ago, I saw a water snake swimming downstream between Tioga and Cayuga streets. And while I think yesterday's storms washed away several flimsily rooted plants, the patch of grass just upstream from the Sears St. footbridge seems to have become well-supported over the past three years, and may eventually grow into a tiny island. That would be cool.
I love running water. :-)
