Scheiss Weekly

category archive listing Category Archives: teachers

Show and Tell

Mamacita says:  Many years ago, I was teaching Public Speaking in a small farmland high school in southern Indiana. My students’ assignment, one week, was to give an informal “how-to” presentation, a brief demonstration of something they personally knew how to do. That week, we all learned how to crochet a chain stitch, how to [...]

I See Stupid People

  Mamacita says:  It worries me that so many of our students don’t have enough schema to make simple connections – at least, what were once considered simple connections. You know.  Those people, places, events, and stories that EVERYBODY knows? Or, rather, these days, knew. . . . The universe is incomprehensible only to those [...]

Testicles. Testicles and Thighs. And Angels.

Mamacita says:  I am a ‘word’ person. A language person. In my classes, I jump on almost any excuse to highlight a particular word and force my students to take it back to its point of origin. I’ve done this for a zillion years, and I’m still doing this. It is , of course, the [...]

Not To Mince Words: Some Parents Are Scum

Mamacita says:  I used to look at my young students every day and wonder what they went home to every night. Sometimes I did know, and my heart broke for them daily. With others, I had no idea. When a child comes to school in rags, shoes held together with tape and rubber bands, it’s [...]

Where Were You When The Planes Hit?

My tribute to Craig Damian Lilore can be found here. Mamacita says:  I’m guessing that many most bloggers will be posting tributes this weekend, and telling the blogosphere ‘where we were’ when the planes hit the World Trade Center. Here is mine. This is actually the second third fourth fifth sixth seventh time I’ve posted [...]

Helicopter Parents of College Students? You’ve GOT To Be Kidding!

Dear Helicopter Parents of College Students: Your kid is raised. Stop raising him. If he’s still an immature weenie, let life hand him/her some consequences. It’s about time somebody did. Love, Professor MeanJane P.S. Your kid is nineteen years old and still can’t remember to bring a pencil to school. And no, he can’t borrow [...]

To Literally Pinch a Loaf. . . .

Mamacita says:  I never hear the word “loaf” without remembering the last junior high dance I ever chaperoned.  I always loved to chaperone those little dances, even though we were not paid for doing so, unlike the teachers who worked the ball games and got the big bucks. . . .Okay, let’s not go there. [...]

Are Our Children Really Overprotected? I Think They Are.

Mamacita says:  Are we protecting our children too much?  Everything is so bland, so effortless, so sanitary, so entitled, so sterilized, so soft, so completely without risk, requiring little or no talent or skill, so full of self-esteem and so lacking in merit, that it is little wonder so many of our young adults wouldn’t [...]

Good Teaching Is Like Good Stand-Up.

Mamacita says:  I love children, and I love students of all ages, and I love teaching, and I love genuine education in all of its 6-degrees-of-separation wonder. Everything is connected – everything in the known and unknown universe is connected. Nothing exists only within the four walls of a classroom. It often happens – I [...]

Teachers and The Knack

Mamacita says: There is a knack to teaching middle and high school students that some teachers never quite learn. I’m not sure it can be learned; it might be an art, a talent one must have at birth. For want of knowledge of this art’s actual name, I will call it ‘the knack.’ I have [...]