No-Shows Get What They Deserve
Tonight in class we finished off the last two chapters of our textbook, took two quizzes, and discussed how it’s easy to tell if you need to double the last letter of a word: just see if the last three letters are consonant/vowel/consonant (cvc) and check out which syllable is stressed. If you’ve got a cvc and a stressed second syllable, double the last letter of the root word. (admit – admitted) But, if you don’t have cvc, you don’t double and it doesn’t matter which syllable is stressed. And, if you’ve got cvc but the FIRST syllable is stressed, you don’t double.
This sounds complicated but once you ‘figure it out,’ it makes one more thing a lot easier. Spelling tips? I’ve got a million of ’em.
Also, since only five students showed up tonight, out of the seventeen still enrolled, and being that with only those few students our chapters and lessons didn’t take very long, I got out their final exam and told them every. single. topic. that’s covered, in order.
And then I told them not to share a word of it with the slackers. We laughed at the slackers for a while longer, and then I sent everybody home, 45 minutes early, with a lot of homework that I’m going to grade and count as several quizzes, and which can not be made up.
The students who skipped out tonight will whine about ‘unfairness,’ but I really don’t think they have a legitimate gripe. Life is full of choices, and their choice to skip class tonight was bad timing, really bad timing, but it was still their choice.
Also, a very minor announcement was made about a small change in the syllabus. The final exam was originally scheduled for TWO weeks from tonight, but it’s been changed to next week.
Just a teensy minor change.
It’s been posted on Blackboard for two weeks, and everyone was told tonight. Everyone who was there, that is. Everyone who was there tonight was very happy about the change. Of course, they’ll be ready next week for their final.
My non-slacker students can’t WAIT to see the reaction of the slackers when they come to class next week and find out for the first time – they don’t ever check their Blackboard accounts either – that this is final exam night.
Oh, okay, I broke down and emailed everybody.
Not that the slackers ever check their email, either.
I guess I’m evil for thinking this is more just desserts than anything else, huh.
The Best Municipal Coarse in Indiana
There is a tiny golden kitten living in the flowerpot on the front porch. It runs away when I open the door, but its little face is pointy-chinned and innocent, and its expression tells me that it desperately wants to purr on someone’s lap. It looks like a ball of yellow fluff, with four short wobbly legs, huge blue eyes, small wiggly ears, and really big feet. I think it was born next door, but since all those cats are now hanging out on my deck, I’m wondering if maybe the people next door have stopped feeding their cats.
That’s not something people can do. Animals are not something to be discarded when it becomes inconvenient. I hope I’m wrong about the reason all the next-door cats are now at my house, because I hate to think the neighbors would be that shabby.
I can’t keep any more cats. Does anyone need a kitten?
Silly question. EVERYONE needs a kitten!
When we get home from work, after a long, long day, and we sit down and sigh that long sigh of relaxation we’ve been holding in for hours and hours, there’s just nothing like a soft purry little cat curling up in your lap to really make you understand what contentment is.
I’ve shifted pronoun ‘persons’ in this post, but I’m past caring. Finals are next week and the final research paper is due the week after that, and then I’m off duty for a couple of weeks, grammatically speaking.
Except that I’m never off duty, grammatically speaking, because bad grammar and poor spelling hurt me, they really do. And when I find them right down the road, in letters six inches high, they hurt me even more. This sign has since been corrected, but the memory lingers on.
Bulbous Bouffant. Macadamia. Gazebo. Blubber. Galoshes. MUKLUKS!
Between classes tonight, I met Hub at McDonald’s and we ate INSIDE. This means, it was a real date.
Across from us, crammed into one smallish booth even though there were empty seats nearby, was a group of people who had obviously NOT been raised by my mother. They were loud and obnoxious, and it was impossible not to hear almost everything they said. Or, rather, everything the old man said, because his voice rose above the others.
You know, there are some topics of conversation that really have no place being discussed loudly in public, and this old man may have hit on every one of them.
First of all, and I know that this statement will offend a few people, the appearance of these people was offensive to me. The old man, the younger man, and the boy were all dressed normally, in nice khakis and attractive shirts, but the old woman, the younger woman, and the two girls were all wearing Disney t-shirts, long dowdy denim skirts, anklets, and huge tennis shoes. The older women had the bulbous bouffant hair, and the two girls had long stringy hair with highly teased top hair and huge bushy bangs. Everyone has the right to dress as he/she pleases, but my point is, the men looked fine and the women looked like cartoon characters. Why is it that some churches allow their males to look nice but require their women to look dowdy and ridiculous?
The old man expounded loudly on his contention that he could tell, at a glance, the approximate income of everyone in his church, and that there were people, and he named names, who were not tithing as much as they should. He was also really angry because he’d asked a man to pray last Sunday and since the prayer lasted less than five full minutes, he knew that God had not heard it.
He was also telling everyone at his booth, and all the other booths, the names of the people in the church who had drug/alcohol problems, and how if they would only pray sincerely, God would heal them. The fact that these people still had the problems was proof that they weren’t praying properly and God was ignoring them until they learned to pray correctly.
It’s little wonder that so many people are turning away from organized religion. I know these people are not typical, but they were OUT THERE where people could see them, which made them into an example, the worst possible kind of example. The old man’s loud prayers, in a McDonald’s, didn’t help his cause, either.
To paraphrase Emily of New Moon, “Giving God advice, and abusing the devil, is NOT prayer.”
My eyes still ache from those Disney shirts on a 250-pound elderly woman. Ouch. Also, their basic table manners were terrible: they talked with their mouths full and waved french fries in the air to emphasize their indignation.
The mother and her two very well-behaved sons in the booth just behind these people, on the other hand, impressed me very much with their silent grace, indoor voices, and excellent public table manners. If I knew where they went to church, I might give it a try again. Also, she was wearing jeans and a sweater.
This should not mean anything to me, but it does. I consider the dowdy outfits a kind of pretension, a “Look at me, I’m better than you” kind of condescension, and I resent the hell out of it. Especially when coupled with the decently-dressed men. Bah.
All of those dreadful people crammed into one booth. . . can’t you just see them driving up to the gates of Heaven and laying on the horn?
Incredible.
