While taking a walk with Owen and Charles tonight, I saw the first fireflies of the season.

Even I, with my semi-severe insectphobia, am delighted with fireflies...probably because you don't ever see their ugly squishy buggy bodies, only their cute little light up action. They were very pretty.

They were also very pretty when I saw them as I was driving on the freeway...for a short moment.

After that short moment, my windshield was almost impossible to see out of because of all of the dead firefly guts smeared across it. I must have killed two hundred in the first five minutes. It was like a plague. Worse, they would sort of flicker right before they hit.

Why must the world be this way? Can't I just indulge in beauty for a moment? Why must the universe so insistently remind me of how gross things are.

Another example of this is the television show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" where they go to a poor person's house and fix it up beautifully for them. I cry at every episode. It seemed nice enough, right? It doesn't have the moral delimmas so inherent in the body version of Extreme Makeover.

But then I read an article about how the show leaves these poor folks with tens of thousands of dollars in tax liability and how they may have to file bankrupcy and how most of the stuff in the house never really works at all.

Please indulge my comparsion of reality tv and dead fireflies.   ¶ 10:01 PM

  Yesterday, two of my students told me that I was looking "sexy".

I guess there goes another outfit from my "teacher clothes" wardrobe. I really didn't think the outfit was too sexy at all. Just a skirt and a tee-shirt, but I guess at this late date in the year they just couldn't handle it. I dealt with it using my standard, "That is completely inappropriate. Never say anything like that to a teacher again."

There is nothing more uncomfortable than a bunch of thirteen year old boys lusting after you while you try to teach them about punctuation. They kept needing "help" at their desks and I felt really weird about being close to them.

Very uncomfortable.  ¶ 6:53 AM

  Atlanta was awesome. I don't feel like I really saw a lot of it, but that is partly because we were only there for about one full day and two half days... and on the last half day, M and I were so hung over that we were seriously a danger to ourselves and others.

We stayed in a hotel called The Georgian Terrace, which is this really old hotel (the Academy Awards reception for "Gone with the Wind" was held there!) and really beautiful. It felt very fancy to be there. The bartender in the hotel bar was in love with us and gave us free things...like magnets and drinks and pens. I think he was a little confused about how to show his affection. We loved him back-- when he was giving us drinks. But when he talked, he was pretty boring, so we loved him less.

We ended up spending most of our nights at a bar called "My Sister's Place". It was a pretty fun place where we were offered drugs within the first twenty minutes (I politely declined), we saw a pretty cool band, and I was hit on by the lead singer of that band...who ended up being a very hot drag queen. This last bit of information I wasn't sure of until I went to her website upon returning to North Carolina. All I knew was that I gave her my number after leaving the bar that first night and she never called. Sigh...

Being with M makes me even more want to get back to the Bay. I am happy that I have two more months here, but I am also very happy that things are wrapping up. School ends next Wednesday (a week from today!) and I really should be packing.  ¶ 6:48 AM

  The Atlanta trip was awesome and I will post about that soon. I realized that it wasn't nice to make a big production about my test scores and then not share the results. So here goes...

On average, my kids language arts scores went UP over 3 points! Yippee! Ninty-two percent of my students passed on the first try! The few that didn't are going to retest tomorrow and I am hoping that they pass. It would be super cool if they all passed. Unfortunately, they didn't do nearly so well in math. So that is going to hold a couple back, probably. I hate that, but I am trying to let go a bit of my control freak tendencies. I know that I couldn't do anything about their math scores...that was the job of the math teacher, who didn't do his job very well.

I feel like the universe is conspiring to keep me a teacher. I feel really good about it right now. I am certainly not a big advocate of these tests, but I can't help but feel good about my kids passing it. They worked so hard and they were so cute and proud of themselves when I told them their scores.

I also had my students write letters telling the students I will have in the fall about me and my class. I am going to try to have a pen-pal exchange between these guys and my new ones. Their letters were funny-- they were giving advice to my new students. One of my kids wrote, "Ms. is nice when you are nice. When you are mean she freak. She hate mean more than bad. She hate words like fag and retard. It hard not to say them but you figure it out right quick and she happy and you too."

Again, while I wish I had been more sucessful at teaching them plurals and puctuation, I can be happy that they just learned to stop saying mean things.  ¶ 7:19 AM

  I changed the template back. I just wrote a whole post but then I lost it and I am so tired from my trip to Atlanta, I just cannot write it again...

So more on all that later...  ¶ 3:11 PM