Scheiss Weekly

Monthly Archives: June 2010

How Well Do You Know Your Fairy Tales? Not Disney Versions; I Mean, REAL Fairy Tales?

Mamacita says:  It’s quiz time again!  This time, our topic is fairy tales, which were, as everyone once knew but few people remember now, never intended for children at all.  Don’t get me wrong: I love the Disney animated fairy tales, but I’m also a fairy tale purist, and the cleaning up of those gory [...]

How We Spend Our Days Is, Of Course, How We Spend Our Lives *

Mamacita says:  “Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?” –Frank Scully I’ve always liked that quotation. I also believe it is absolutely true. I think about it whenever I’m feeling particularly cowardly. It helps me overcome it. Words help me overcome it. I’ve always stood in awe before the [...]

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy

Mamacita says:   My father died several years ago: a long, slow, drawn-out process that left my mother and my siblings and me drained and sad, and grateful when the final ending finally ended. I loved my father, with all his faults, and charms, and whimsicalities, and more faults, and understanding, and lack of understanding, [...]

Is Your Child A Civilized, Sentient Person?

Mamacita says:  Don’t get me wrong. I believe in testing: to a point. I do not believe that a student who can’t pass a simple test of basic skills should be graduated from high school. I do not believe that a student who can’t pass a simple test of basic skills should be promoted at [...]

It’s True. I’m A Snob. You Should Be, Too.

This is from several years ago, but it’s been updated, and it’s still true.  I don’t suffer fools gladly, and I don’t think you should, either. A great deal of the world’s problems stem from suffering fools. Mamacita says:  When people’s lives are focused primarily on television shows, celebrity antics, pizza delivery, Nascar *, sports, [...]

Quotation Saturday: Never Give Up, and Never Surrender *

Mamacita says:  We all need to be reminded sometimes – probably more often than we ARE reminded – that we are only human, and that we can’t do it all by ourselves. Fortunately, as John Donne liked to remind us, no man is an island.  This is the key to all education, no matter what [...]

My Killer Instinct vs. My Safe & Even Useful Outlet

Mamacita says:  I own a pair of gardening gloves.  Really, I do.  I bought them after the ripping-poison-ivy-out-with-cloth-gloves-and-getting-resin-all-over-my-hands incident of a few weeks ago.  They’re very pretty, and still in the package. The thing is, I don’t schedule my ventures into the savannah that is my yard.  I start ripping into the weeds at random [...]

Get Thee to a Conference, for Those Who Hone Not Their Skillz are as Useless as a Shoehorn in a Proctologist’s Office

Mamacita says:  Whatever you do for a living, and particularly if you work in education, I think it is of vital importance that you try to keep up with what’s going on in that area.  I work in education and social media, and I go to every conference I can afford, and even some I [...]