Quotation Saturday: Summertime
Mamacita says: . . . and the livin’ is easy. . . .
Sadly, when I think of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, what comes to my mind first is the inexcusable misprint in our local small-town newspaper several years ago about the modern opera being presented in the college town thirty miles to the north, called Porky and Bess. I don’t think anybody but me caught it, for there was never a retraction, correction, apology, or letter to the editor. Ever since that headline, I somehow expect the last line of this opera to be something along the lines of “Th th th th that’s all, folks!”
Next up: my viewing of Madame Butterball. I mean, what else could we call it when the woman portraying Cio-Cio San weighed at least 250 pounds?
I love live performances, really, I do. I could go every night to one, if I had any money. But certain characters are meant to be portrayed in certain ways, and it pretty much ruins the show when too many liberties are taken. Like the Phantom of the Opera we saw, with a Christine twice the size of Eric. He could not pick her up and carry her back to the boat, so he just spread a blanket over her as she lay in a faint in front of the mirror. Neither character was “right,” and it spoiled the show.
Whatever. I’m weird, and Letterman is funny.
1. We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. –James Agee
2. Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing “Embraceable You” in spats. — Woody Allen
3. Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it. — Russell Baker
4. Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you. — Erma Bombeck
5. Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.–Hal Borland
6. The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.–John Burroughs
7. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.– Albert Camus
8. People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.–Anton Chekhov
9. People take pictures of the Summer, just in case someone thought they had missed it, and to proved that it really existed.– Ray Davies
10. It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.– Rebecca H. Davis
11. A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.– James Dent
12. It amazes me that most people spend more time planning next summer’s vacation than they do planning the rest of their lives.–Patricia Fripp
13. It will not always be summer: build barns.– Hesiod
14. Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught. — Sydney J. Harris
15. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.– Langston Hughes
16. The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco.– Mark Twain
17. Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.–Henry James
18. If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance. –Bern Williams
19. Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability. –Sam Keen
20. All we need is the truth in our hand. Someone to call a friend. Never fear the darkness. All we need is just the sun in the sky. And the hope of a summer to come with the meaning of love.–Unknown
21. The summer night is like a perfection of thought. –Wallace Stevens
22. I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year. –Edna St. Vincent Millay
23. Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time. –John Lubbock
24. What a beautiful, sunny morning. It makes you happy to be alive, doesn’t it? We can’t let the sun outshine us! We have to beam, too! –Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata,
25. Many public-school children seem to know only two dates: 1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.- Mark Twain
26. Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains…- Diane Ackerman
27. The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.- Tennessee Williams
28. It’s a sure sign of summer if the chair gets up when you do. –Walter Winchell
29. There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart. — Celia Thaxter
30. A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.– St. Francis of Assisi
31. Dirty hands, iced tea, garden fragrances thick in the air and a blanket of color before me, who could ask for more?– Bev Adams
32. Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.– Warren Buffett
33. Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.– Ada Louise Huxtable
32. To believe in life is to believe there will always be someone who will water the geraniums.– Flavia
33. What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance. — Jane Austen
34. To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides. – David Viscott
35. I played as much golf as I could in North Dakota, but summer up there is pretty short. It usually falls on Tuesday. –Mike Morley
36. Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain. –Author Unknown
37. Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. –Roger Miller
38. My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather. –Loire Hartwould
39. I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains. One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness. –Adeline Knapp
40. Pity the poor creatures in warmer countries where the seasons never change.Where summer is eternal and they never know the pain of waiting and the joy at last when summer comes. –Ray Guy
41. To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment. — Jane Austen
42. How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! — Emily Dickinson
43. It will never rain roses. When we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses. – George Eliot
44. The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. — Galileo Galilei
45. When I see that first, minuscule, curled, pale green wisp of a sprout poking up between a couple of grains of vermiculite, I hear God speaking. – June Santon
46. This very act of planting a seed in the earth has in it to me something beautiful. I always do it with a joy that is largely mixed with awe. – Celia Thaxter
47. One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds. — Dan Bennett
48. Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration. –Lou Erickson
49. The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. –Hanna Rion
50. Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. –Mrs. C.W. Earle
An Example of What Excellent Parenting Really Is
Mamacita says: I know it’s not a brand-new article, but when I read Mrs. Bluebird’s post of May 26, I wished she had submitted it to the Carnival of Education yesterday; however, to be quite honest, I think it deserves a place of its own on every blog in the entire Blogosphere. I’ve never read such a fantastic display of excellent parenting in my life. Seriously.
Check out Mrs. Bluebird’s post, y’all. And if you’d comment both here AND there, we’d both appreciate it very much.
Honestly, I’ve still got goose bumps at the very thought of such an excellent parent. I’m not being sarcastic, either. This mother KNOWS.
Mrs. Bluebird, I think you should submit this post to the Carnival of Education every week. I really, really do.
Carnival of Education
Welcome to the Carnival of Education, where parents and instructors and good citizens find out what’s actually going on in the world of education by actively participating in the sharing of ideas, information, and suggestions. Remember, if you don’t keep up on what’s happening, you won’t KNOW what’s happening. And if you don’t find out what’s happening, you forfeit all whining rights. Yes, ALL of them.
Steve Spangler has posted the results of his fantastic and generous Teacher Appreciation Award 
Winners – thank you, Steve, for recognizing and acknowledging the excellent teachers in our nation. Don’t forget to register for Science in the Rockies! It’s July 8-12, and all the information is right HERE.
Mrs D presents Things I’m doing well: Grammar and Punctuation posted at Footsteps of Aristotle. What did she learn from this lesson? Many things, among which are the fact that . . . grammar and punctuation can be fun. Students can learn it and not need to be constantly retaught it. 
Over at The Education Optimists, Sara Goldrick-Rab presents Sorting, Selection, and Success. Access does not equate with success, and partly as a result, U.S. higher education is perpetuating a lot of inequality. What do we do about this?
Joanne Jacobs wants to know if an additional year of schooling is really going to make a difference in the lives and futures of our students at Compulsory schooling to age 19? posted at Joanne Jacobs. Robert Pondiscio, at the Core Knowledge Blog, is wondering the same thing at The Core Knowledge Blog.
Nui Loa still loves children’s music and thinks you might, too, if you check out Our Five Favorite Kids’ CDs for Grownups posted at Boston Children’s Music.
Religion, which ought to be bringing us all together, is instead tearing us apart in many areas and aspects of our lives. Perhaps if we learned more about each other, we’d be able to understand each other. Sarah Scrafford, at Related Colleges, thinks so.
Are your students twittering during class? Why not learn to use it to your advantage?
You really don’t want to get me started on how our gifted students are shafted every day, but blogger Sarah Robbins of Parenting the Gifted has some great ideas on how to bypass some of the ridiculous barriers against advancement in our schools.
Tom DeRosa posts about skills for the new millennium at What 21st Century Skills Should Mean over at I Want to Teach Forever.
I’m just wondering if Mister Teacher, who is one of my favorite educational bloggers, is even CLEAN today! Read all about it at School’s out for summer, is hot water in my future? posted at Learn Me Good.
Mary Ann Zehr presents a two-part post about tracking at The Problem of Tracking in Middle Schools posted at Curriculum Matters and again here.
I will have to agree 100% with Nancy Flanagan, for I’m in full support of our musical students; it is my opinion, based on experience, that they are some of the most superior 
kids in any school. Nancy Flanagan tells us about a curmudgeonly letter to the editor criticizing the band at My Small (Minded) Town posted at Teacher in a Strange Land.
I usually skim off any submissions that are just trying to sell us something, but I’ve read Visiting Volcanoes with a Scientist and loved it. So, since I’m hosting this week, I’m including this submission: Kim tells us all about Nonfiction Monday: Visiting Volcanoes With A Scientist posted at Wild About Nature.
Is it true that many administrators are afraid to have meetings wherein ideas are exchanged openly because they don’t want to be blamed for anything? Kimberly Moritz was wondering, too, as she sends us to read about Why Do We Do It This Way? posted at LeaderTalk.
Want to learn some cool stuff for free? Alvina Lopez presents 100 Excellent Lectures to Improve Your New Media Literacy posted at Clear View Education Blog. Alvina also shares some facts about high school.
Under Assault presents The NY Teacher and agita posted at Under Assault: Teaching in NYC. I read a lot of blogs by NY teachers, and things in that state seem to be out of control and getting worse.
I will have to agree with Carol Richtsmeier at Bellringers when she says that there is never really a last day of school for teachers! Read her post at Rock Stars, Dr. Seuss 
& Why The Chicken and I Belong posted at Bellringers.
Charles H. Green’s post is to be trusted. Really. Read it at Can Trust Be Taught? posted at Trust Matters.
There is always that small group of teachers who refuse to learn new things, particularly when it comes to software. Next time they start to whine about how you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, etc, refer them to How to learn new software posted at The Wise Curve.
oldandrew was eventually told that the school was on fire. Oh, and that he stinks. Read all about it at The School’s on Fire « Scenes From The Battleground posted at Scenes From The Battleground.
Rick Sincere honors his Latin teacher and shares a dirty joke with us over at ‘Ave, Greenwald’: MUHS Latin Teacher Retires posted at Rick Sincere News and Thoughts.
Dr. Bernard Bull posts a list of textbook alternatives, many of which our students are already using, at Five Technologies / Movements that Will Turn Textbooks into Antiques posted at Etale – Life in the Digital World.
Pinyo shares with us how scary it is that so many young teens can’t wait to get a credit card so they’ll 
be “financially free!” Check out his concerns at A Credit Card Is Not Your Ticket To Financial Freedom posted at Moolanomy Personal Finance.
Want to learn to speak Spanish? For free? Check out Elburi’s videos at Introducing “la rana video blogs”.Learn Spanish vocabulary through our Videoblogs. – Spanish conversation CLUB posted at El buri.
If you are looking for some fun games to help your students learn sight words, check out Denise Bossard’s post at Top Ten Sight Word Games posted at sight word games. (I’m a firm believer in phonics, but I do know that some words are used so often, we know them by sight.)
Larry Ferlazzo wonders why more teachers don’t ask their students to evaluate them, at Results 
From Student Evaluation Of My Class And Me posted at Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day….
siobhan curious asks the very important question, What’s To Like About School?, and gets some answers at what’s to like about school? posted at siobhan curious: classroom as microcosm.
And yes, I do believe that a poor teacher can make a fascinating subject boring. I also believe that administration can require a good teacher to dumb down the fascination to the point that every single spark is gone.
Is what you get out of college really worth all the money you pour into it? Jim has some thoughts on this topic at Is College Worth the Cost of Tuition? Yes. posted at Bargaineering.
Mathew Needleman understands that social networking is here to stay, and that an educator who doesn’t learn how to navigate it is well on his/her way to becoming a dinosaur in the system. Check 
out his post Navigating Social Networks: You Can Pick Your Friends posted at Creating Lifelong Learners.
Does your child need tutoring? Before you get out your wallet, check out some of the great free tutoring suggestions from Erin at Note from the Teacher: Free Tutoring posted at Note from the Teacher.
Tweenteacher is now a veteran teacher, for she has hit her “memory wall” at last. How about you? Check it out on The New Definition of Veteran Teacher posted at tweenteacher.com.
Liam Goldrick tells us to stop whining over at Whining Vouchers posted at The Education Optimists.
Mamacita (Jane Goodwin) at Scheiss Weekly (hello, I’m your host!) is always ranting about 
something, it seems, and since many schools have just had their graduation ceremonies, what better time than to bring out her annual whine about school systems that select the valedictorian and salutarian after the seventh semester, instead of waiting until the last minute.
Guusjem, who is a school librarian in Texas, asks whether or not a librarian can be a 21st Century Teacher.
Pastor Jeff posts about talking with our children – and ourselves – about unjust laws. We all know they exist; why don’t we do anything about them?
Over at Polski3’s View From Here, they’re using interactive notebooks. Why are we out of glue already?
3σ → Left has an attendance issue that beats anything I’ve ever heard of. 
NYC Educator asks the question: The Para or the Teacher? Go check it out.
Over at A Shrewdness of Apes, Ms. Cornelius tells us about her latest experience with cheaters. Personally, I’ve always loathed cheaters. They’re just petty criminals with braces on their teeth. Or “adults” who want the acme but without the climb. The pay without the work. The trophy without the run. You get the picture. Lazy gits who can’t be arsed to lift a finger themselves, but who feel entitled to the glitter. I’ve obviously been watching too many British movies lately.
That’s it for this week’s Carnival of Education. I hope I haven’t left anyone out, except for the free essay people and the salespeople and that idiot who submits his political views every week. I also didn’t include any posts that did not accept comments, because the Carnival of Education is about interaction, not lecturing. If anyone would like to duke it out over any of these factors, bring it on. If I have omitted a perfectly good post, however, please let me know immediately, for it was not my intention to leave out anyone who actually had something relevant to say.
I’m very tired. I’m actually too tired to use my good manners. My apologies for the bluntness. And for the choppy sentences. And fragments. Cheaters suck, and so do free essay dealers.
I know that many people feel that the state of education in our nation is beyond repair, but I do not agree. I do believe, however, that unless intelligent, knowledgeable, and caring people get up off their keisters and start doing something about it, and DEMANDING that something be done about it, then we’re screwed. Keeping quiet and hoping things will change next year just ain’t been working. It seems as if the more we put up with things that should not be happening, the more such things happen. We then get so used to them being ‘that way’ that we forget that we, the people, have always had the power to make changes in this country. Somehow, we’re forgotten that, in the case of our schools. We must all remember that the public schools belong to the public, and that WE ARE THAT PUBLIC. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of MY SCHOOLS being overrun with hoods, criminals, selfish elitist pigs, dangerous crackheads, bullies, rapists, people who can’t keep their hands off other people, and sexist pigs, and that’s just at the administrative level. It’s even worse in the classrooms. Public, we must take back our schools.
I don’t know who’s hosting the Carnival of Education next week, but you can send your submissions here.
Thank you all for stopping by!
