The Carnival of Education is up and running, so please head on over there and take it all in. If you don’t keep up on what’s going on in your child’s schools, how can you have an intelligent voice in it? You can’t, that’s what. So keep up! The Carnival of Education, right HERE.

In every one of my five new classes, there is at least one student who must work harder than anyone else, and who must ask more questions than anyone else, and who seems to have more of an invested interest in education than anyone else, and who seems to want to learn more than anyone else. I want those five students to know that it is because of them that I love my job so much that I go in early (unpaid) and stay late (also unpaid) so that just in case any of them needs me without the audience of the other students, they can find me. Those five students are also the reason that I put my home phone number on the syllabus.

No, I’m not extraordinary. I like to think, however, that I am good.* Those are merely things that all good teachers do.

It’s the ones who teach only on the clock that you’ve got to beware of.

*. . . at TEACHING. Why, what were you thinking?

Darn right. DARN right.

Am I the only person in the known universe who has never, ever seen Oprah’s show? Is there anyone else out there who has never, ever seen a single Survivor show? Did anybody else hate Raymond?

It just seems like every season, the shows are dumber, nastier, more violent, and glorify people who are actually nothing but whores and pimps and murderers and semi-illiterate louts. Why would someone WANT to watch a saga about a person who hops from bed to bed, hurting person after person in search of her true self? The true self of such a person wouldn’t exactly be gratifying, now would it? Really? Why would anyone CARE about such people? Is there really such a thing as an endearing hit man?

As for shows about women who are obsessed with shopping and shoes and who can sleep with the most men. . . . oh dear LORD, what are we coming to? I have students who are like that and I think they’re dumber than a box of rocks. Shallower than a griddle. And cheaper than second skimmings.

Discount people. Yeah, that’s who made our country great. Words of more than one syllable? Sure. “Whatever.” Ask Miss South Carolina: now THERE’S intellect!

Don’t mind me. I’m in a bad mood because apparently our local power company and the Mothership power company don’t communicate well, and my online payment wasn’t recognized locally so the guy came out to shut off my service. Fortunately for me, I was home and went out on the deck to ask him what was going on. Unfortunately for him, this is my day off and even at 1:30 p.m. I still wasn’t dressed, so he had to look at me in my genuinely horrible nightie. He was a really nice man, and turned my power back on to give me a chance to find out what kind of error had been made and who might have made it. Thank you, Power Guy. Amazingly, it wasn’t my error this time! Everything is fine now, even though I had to, once again, start my computer in safe mode and go to system restore to get it going.

Duke Energy, please get your act together. Encourage the Mothership and the Locals to communicate. Fire everybody who doesn’t know how to use the internet.

I’m nervous now about making my payments online. I’ll still do it, but I’m nervous.

Oh, and of the two separate phone calls I had to make to Duke Energy this afternoon. . . .I talked to two different women. The first was hateful and condescending, and the second was helpful and understanding. Please fire the first and give the second a big, big raise. Yes, the difference was that much.

I can SEE! I have POWER! My computer is working, even though it believes it’s three weeks ago!

Living in the past. Yeah, I’d do it myself if I had the technology. Way to go, computer.

Why? Why do I have to go back to system restore, via safe mode, over and over again? What am I doing wrong that is upsetting my computer this badly?

I am amazed by people who regularly wash their cars. Where do they find the time? Isn’t that what rain is for?

We haven’t had much rain this summer, which is why the grass is brown and crunchy and I have no roses, but even so.

I am amazed by people who regularly run their cars through the automatic carwash. That thing costs TEN BUCKS. I have never in my life ever had ten bucks to “throw away” on washing my car. If I had ten bucks, I would waste it on something like, oh, say, food. Or something for my kids.

Ten dollars for the carwash. Wow.

I know I’m extraordinarily cheap, to the degree that people sometimes point and laugh, but I just can not imagine spending ten dollars to have my car washed. That’s forty dollars a month!

Sorry. When you’ve never had any money, and now you’ve got less, it’s easy to become flabbergasted by simple normal expenditures more because I know I can’t have them, than for any other reason.

But you know, if I won the lottery tomorrow, I wouldn’t change much about my life, other than getting out of debt so I could sleep at night, and eating out in nice restaurants all the time.

By “nice restaurant,” I am referring to one that doesn’t have a drive-through window.