1. http://www.decodeunicode.org/en/data/glyph/196x196/25AA.gif





    Today I'm doing a lesson/workshop on UMBRELLAs...
    as a part of a Math/Science/Technology integration.
     A colloquium on  symmetry.

    Hoping I do ok, I'm nervous.

    Looking forward to seeing what the people make.


    1

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  2. The result of a Math training in Accelerated Math lies below.
    In the program ACC MATH was a math term dictionary.
    I got lost inside.
    With hours of other things I need to do - the words took me away.
    I'm not a good enough writer, but the words are so wonderful:


    A

    Asymptotes

    I am asymptotic, alas
    So far, as you can see, it's asymptomatic
    But I note
    That nothing quite reaches
    Where it is supposed to go,
    My intentions fall short,
    The psychiatrist I consulted
    Suggested lowering the bar
    But it's still missing the mark.



    Apothem

    She drew a polygon
    On her tiny paper
    As we were standing outside by the picnic table,
    On a cold windy day
    It had six sides.
    Then placing a dot smack in the middle
    She exclaimed,
    "Right here, now draw this line straight down to the side.
    That will be for his face,
    whiskers will go here and here."
    She completed her directions.
    After her Apothem,
    All the rest unfolded,
    As it turned into a mighty
    Lion that grew a fringe
    And my lesson was completed.


    Annulus

    One has to watch
    Who one calls
    An annulus.
    There are those
    That just donut say it.


    B


    Binomia

    Some said it was twice the curse
    Of unomia.
    Some said polynomias
    Felt the term
    Binomia was a dual diagnosis.



    Bivariate Data

    In her heart she wondered
    If while she ate Thai
    He might be on another coast laying his head
    On his pillow on the floor,
    Could she be waking
    While he was getting a mid morning cup of tea?
    Perhaps it was crazy- but over time
    She thought she heard
    Echoes of his life
    In hers,
    While both lived different lives
    On a plane of existence
    That would always connect them.



    C


    Conditional Statement

    If
    You ask me to tell you what love means
    Then
    I will tell you I do not have the words

    If
    I ask you to never speak again
    Then
    You will argue with silence

    If
    We grow through the pain of introspection
    Then
    We enjoy the loss of innocence.



    Cartesian Plane

    "We are no longer Cartesian," he wrote on Facebook
    In a joke I read, instead
    Of doing something I should be doing
    And anyway I can't remember except I thought
    He was talking to a sister-in-law
    Or a girl he flirted with, I wasn't supposed
    To be reading it
    But I was.
    He was saying the world
    was not flat, plotted and pointed
    On a surface like a road map
    Bumping that into a snarky, exchange where two
    Very educated, very comfortable elitists
    Reveled in how very dimensional things
    were for them in some understanding
    Between the two of them.

    I pulled out my grid plotting
    Graphing on my axis the clues
    Looking up "Cartesian" carefully in my dictionary
    Seriously combing a book or two
    Wondering if the world
    Was not Cartesian what it had become
    But that is very hard to discover from
    The mayflower.






    Centroid

    The location of perfect pain
    Is perhaps your hemorrhoid
    The site of a horrid growth
    Is undoubtedly the cancroid
    You might marry the daughter
    in the family of the clupeoid
    The surface of your face
    resembling granitoid,
    And it might be said
    Your ear is helicoid-
    But of your balance
    It is really quite centroid, my dear.


    Convert

    When you grow up
     Inches from your neighbor
    Feet from the fire department
    A stone's throw from help
    Cozy, measuring
    Your worth in the King's English
    It's a bit of a shock
    To find one morning that
    You thought you had at least 32 degrees of warmth
    But it's plummeted to zero.
    It was for me brought home
    As I boiled my tea to toasty 212
    Only to see the thermometer,
    Which I was testing for candy making
    Stuck at 100.
    All of it required my conversion
    The miles I went to avoid those deep thoughts
    The pounds of flesh shed

    I would say I became a convert
    When I realized that I could not see the miles ahead in the 15 K race
    I'd gotten into,
    Nor imagine the yards to go running the ball downfield
    Against a stunning defense
    It freed the mind
    From some weighty measurements
    That had been holding me back.


    Cosecant 

    Somewhere in Oklahoma
    Or East Tennessee sits a kid
    With a straight back
    legs stretched out long
    Hypotanual, well, almost,
    Speaking to his friends
    as his little sister struts along the fence line
    He's perched on, she's
    Telling the boys
    as she's a talking
    That AD has to watch her
    ALL DAY so
    "Cosecant go on down to trout fish
    cause he's got me to tend
     for my Aunt Edna's visit later tonight,
    so you boys just go on home now."
    This divided the boys into two minds.
    Those that thought him hen pecked
    And those that knew
    Living adjacent to his sister's room
    was a bit like learning how to
    slip by the eye of that hawk up on the ridge line.


    D


    Deleted Neighborhoods

    You internalize stories and situations
    From your life of listening,
    watching, reading, then in discussions
    Of what once happened
    Some are vivid, others like a wallpaper hung
    On your consciousness

    Sometimes it is as if you were a moving picture creator
    Some piece of your hearing playing inside seeing when a ghetto was formed
    From those rounded up, that is me suddenly,
    You just imagine it really,
    The barbed wire, the rawness on your skin, the loss of property, status, paintings
    The identification with oppressed firmly (not oppressor for me)
    Fixed within that inner window, flipping

    One place that happens 
    In the deletion, the eradication from the all of us
    The neighborhoods, homes, lives, of some of us that somehow
    In forward momentum we still are able to remember, not yet totally gone
    To actually sit back
    Think about how our boundaries
    Or lack of limits, took someone's presence away
    Forever.

    And there you are- with a life reduced to a box
    Or a bundle, then to a group on a train
    Or a scrap of a mattress or a spot under a ledge
    out in the elements, a relationship lost
    My mind has to collapse to be just inside my body, my mind
    Feeling responses or a set of conditions
    This is how close I have come to
    You, without truly being you.


    Delta

    Fertile soil
    Uncertain times
    Travelin' country frog
    With his pants
    Pulled down
    Cigar box strumming
    The delta blues



    Del Operator

    Imagine being a bestman
    But never the man
    a bridesmaid
    Never chosen
    For the white dress
    Never having the actual
    force, direction
    But standing there
    On a page
    Symbolic notation.

    Del can
    commiserate with all the rolling
    Font on the internet
    Typed out to mean
    Things no one does.



    Discrete Data

    Discretion is the better
    Part of valor-
    Might be why the four star generals
    Resigned
    After the voluminous data
    Revealed spikes in email
    During deployments
    In foreign lands
    That heated up
    Burned, and showed
    Digression, but not a drop
    Of discrete 
    Norms.


    E


    Extremum



    Go to the ends
    Of Heaven and earth
    Questing
    Here to there
    The function of  maintaining
    Secrecy is complete privacy
    Zen in your extremes.


    Empty Set

    What we have
    Is a set of parenthesis
    Not to harp on it
    But is that enough?
    After all?


    F


    frustum

     His bite
    bit 
    my 
    ice
    cream cone
    His tongue
    laved
    the 
    pistachio
    across
    the 
    plane

    Gone.
    Truncated



    Flip


    Wilson used to crack me up
    as Geraldine
    How a man
    Could so project
    The fine powerful
    Busty womanhood
    Of Black America
    So that she could tell it
    Like it is
    Was Flip.



    Fortnight

    The rendezvous
    a fortnight away
    Was anticipated
    in a 14 day
    journey
    Through the
    Cumberland Gap.


    G


    Googol

    No, don't google it
    A googol.
    It's beyond comprehension
    So we write it
    Like this:
    10100

    We
    Always write the
    incomprehensible
    Comprehensibly
    In our math.
    Think of
    The simplicity of



    My Sylvia at four nodded in perfect understanding.



    GLB

    I try to stay away
    From this but
    For David Cox-
    I'll wade in,

    I knew the gay men-boys-
    Of my town
    As artists, friends
    In the years when AIDS was emerging,
    When my artistic nature was
    The curse of blooming creativity
    The monthly cycles that came every three or four really,
    Bleeding me nearly to death,
    My father rejecting me to walking roadways
    In the dirt shoulders
    Of country roads.
    (Not only the art
    But my existence-he denounced)
    On some level then
    I deeply understood shunning,

    Several gay men
    Including and especially
    David, Chris and certainly Peter
    My cousin Bob
    Wrapped me in their humor
    Love
    acceptance
    Confidences
    I never broke that
    Except now to say
    No men
    Treated me better
    Ever before, or since.

    That said, I also had the love and
    Support of lesbian
    Women friends.
    Even as locker mates.

    So, I was ahead of the curve
    Not in acting on my sexuality
    But in forming my
    friendships.
    They say
    In everything there is growth,
    Because I saw
    the GLB community not as the far out, when out,
    But
    As focused on
    Understanding why
    We seem to be attracted and love
    Out of order-
    The brain's
    Reasoning the last to know,
    I grew.

    I accepted that.

    It is, after all
    About acceptance.

    David Cox
    Lived in an old Victorian
    Rented by Carol's Dad.
    (My brother loved her),
    That house apartment divided
    In a roughshod
    Rental lord's greed.
    Wasn't even running the water
    In the shower down the drain.
    (he had me over to see THAT-
    David never knew the degree of my poverty)
    He and I liked to play
    "Go to the antique stores",
    Dress me happily in all I could afford from a Goodwill,
    Small, happy days.

    I moved away.
    Without a phone for years
    No way to know
    Where David landed.
    What his art became.
    One day,
    -in an extended parent conference
    With a parent from West Virginia
    Step-momma to a dozen Mormon kids including
    My student, Hazel Ann- she spoke of David.
    Our David.
    Best friend to her sister.
    I knew about his red-headed girls down in
    The southern county of their birth in West Virginia.
    But here was one sister red hair across a country in a hood
    Stuck...

    She told me he died of AIDS not
    Long after I left.
    Before all the medicines arrived.

    I've held that story close to my heart
    But,
    Because he found a way to tell me
    Like the quilt he wrapped me
    In our friendship
    As loving as he could,
    I know there is something to love.

    I can't put a label on someone based on their orientations in sexuality
    And love.
    No more than I can say in words how that day felt.
    Love is unbounded
    In a world still labeling it.


    H


    Hexaflexagon

    Ultimately it comes down to just how many triangles is enough
    People have preferences, of course
    Workouts, drill, preparations for geometric gymnastic-thons
    (thons, not thongs, pay attention)
    Until last Wednesday
    Hexaflexagon was my baby,
    All dolled up in that veneer of tightly bound compacted order
    Until I turned on my television to the trials
    And spotted coming across the dais the newest thing-
    Trihexaflexagon.
    Oh baby it's all in those threes.
     


    Histogram



    I don't know why he kept throwing in my face I deleted him,
    Because he certainly knew that he was acting badly
    And my reactions were not the reasons he was on the net
    Romancing, flirting-and causing me to ask him what was going on
    But I kept looking at the patterns in the interactions, what it evoked
    So I said " history."
    Which was true, I deleted him based on what happened
    Just as quickly adding him back, he mattered to me.

    He just deleted me
    There was no search for understanding or re-adding in his actions, I'm gone.
    Just as earlier I guessed I was as replaceable as finding two other Sara's he added
    On the day he told me he was turning to other venues,
    It actually is there in the historical data
    Another graph, in a timeline of my life.



    Hole


    Man in a Hole Underground
    It has a haunting refrain
    Jack had a burst of creation around our becoming lovers
    Writing beautiful love songs
    Man in A Hole Underground was one of these
    -Was about a man with a finger on a nuclear trigger all day and night.
    Locked in, ready to respond with our ultimate end.

    He sang these in a cafe hallway in Monterey, on the linoleum at night
    Once being heckled by a conservative old drunk Australian woman
    For what she saw as the Hole's liberal biases.


    I

    Improper Fractions

    Are they the entrepreneurs of the fraction world?
    The elite, or anti-elite?
    Do they take it to the limit,
    Blow the mind with their brazen disregard for the norms?
    Just how are we to take 4/3 rds of a pie, on two dishes or just piled on one?

    Shall we label them a creative class? The avante guard?
    Or are they just inappropriate in mixed company?



    Inequality

    Less than, greater than

    The premise of with, without
    Is life as we know it

    But when we condone it
    We have an equation
    Balanced, maybe even true,
    But nothing to live by.



    Incenter


    Look to the middle point of your triangle
    There where the in radius meet
    Carefully plot your way, bozo
    Take a seat
    Wait for me to track you down
    You unrepentant clown.


    J

    J

    J for math
    is just beyond the imagination
    It sits waiting for the next variables
    Brilliant minds of the future
    will fill the letter with their jewels
    But for now-just cool your heels.




    K


    Kite


    "Why don't we ever do anything
    Just read about it and take a test, test, test, test? "

    Paola was leading a small mutiny
    "I want to actually build a kite."
    These are the moments when I know the heart of American ingenuity
    Demanding- even at seven-
    More than a multiple miss test,
    Don't undersell that spirit.
    It's flying a beautiful design over Oxnard right now.


    L

    Limaçon

    Looped, dimpled, convex
    I've found my family
    The curvacious one.


    Lemniscate

    Let me skate
    This figure eight.


    Lemma

    He said to me
    This is what I do,
    I've been studying lemmas
    analemmas, the works.
    I started to point out
    That it seemed
    Different,
    But decided
    To postulate it
    Another day.

    Sophia says in the background,
    as I try to write my math poems,
    "There is a program on called Unleash the Power of the Female Brain.
    My god, she says, it's just a man on talking."



    Latus Rectum

    So here it comes
    In math,
    Bums,
    Once named
    Latus Rectum
    You can no longer see
    Any other possibilities.



    M


    Modus Tolens

    (If p then q
    If p is false
    Then q is false)

    If someone I'll call Martin loves someone I'll call Sarita then the world turns on an axis
    If Martin likes to change his mind then

    No, no, no

    Stop it.
    This is a class in logic
    Not in your imposing self and stupidity on centuries of thought.


    If Sarah is writing about math then the math training inspired her.
    If Sarah is not writing,
    Then the math training was useless.


    No, no, no


    Mensuration


    Every year
    The geometric figure needed to
    See his tailor
    For a good fitting,
    As he aged, like all of us
    Things settled.
    So he got in
    Friday for a measurement-
    length, angles, area, volume
    the works.

    This year he got off easy
    Not a minute's difference.


    Matrix

    Look I never watched The Matrix
    The closest I've come is the brains in a jar
    On Star Trek,
    And some vague memory of pods where people were
    Being sucked dry, which was a very bad dream.

    A world based on sentient machines
    Jesus.
    It's like the science religion
    Yikes.
    Since Wiki says the matrix can't be described

    I'll leave it to your imagination.



    Moire Pattern

    When you think of your mother-in-law
    You get the drift
    Of the Moire Pattern.

    First you've got his way
    Then you add to that her patterns
    Both the families combine

    But the ultimate expression
    Of what will go wrong
    Can be predicted and seen in their mothers.



    Minuend


    Who does not love a minuend?
    On an evening dressed
    In the fog and doldrums- as it lifts the spirits
    Something to take away from the blues.



    N

    n-tuple

    I like to think
    This 
    n-tuple
    Represents our relationship
    across the
    eons
    The life force
    reincarnating
    In our relating.


    Negative Numbers

    Negative numbers
    Put me off
    With all that minus this,
    Take away that-
    always getting small.
    They never move in a positive direction
    It's just let's see
    What would be a little bit less.
    What downers.


    O


    Oblate Spheroid

    Dear  oblate spheroid,
    Mother of us all
    The form we call home
    carry us this day
    on another journey
    The perfect spaceship
    we call earth.


    Odds

    When we met
    He was playing the odds
    Rolling the dice
    Giving it the "only live once"
    Trials.
    But somewhere close to Christmas
    He tallied
    Deciding that his chances
    With me
    Were less than a million to one
    So he
    Discarded the game.

    Because he'll always insist
    He come out ahead.


    P

    Pentomino

    5 squares
    Meet, in a bar
    They become fast
    Friends
    Sitting side by side
    Telling jokes
    About
    Their
    Wives.


    Q

    Q1

    My students
    Fall here
    In the opportunities
    Affluence
    even lower
    In the concern
    Of those in Q4

    With that in mind
    I'm blamed
    Reduced to data.

    Poem blooming
    As the peach put her first blossom,
    On this February day.


    R

    Radicand

    I was born under the sign of a radicand
    Undivided
    At birth by
    Evil or good
    A whole.



    S

    Subsitizing


    Hold out your hand Jack
    Look down
    As I place these magic beans inside
    Just a few
    Don't count
    Look quickly
    What do you see?

    Can you imagine
    What will grow
    From that fist
    of seeds
    A golden goose
    And a Giant
    Fi Fi FO FUM



    Surd

    Why would I
    Try to write reams
    To express
    the irrational
    feelings
    Of your loss.



    T

    Torus

    Powdered
    With sugar
    Creme perhaps
    Oh Jelly filled.
    Sprinkles?
    Crispy Cremed
    How will you take your Torus?



    Tautochrone

    Perpetual motion machine?
    If I have a frictionless wire
    And release a bead
    And another
    And another
    And another
    And another
    And another
    And another
    And another
    And another
    At the same time
    Different spots
    They'll meet
    For tea
    At the bottom
    At precisely
    The right moment.




    U

    Union

    We formed a country
    Based on the notion
    Of a More Perfect One
    Marriages rest
    Upon them
    Can we unite
    As one?


    V

    Vinculum

     A stranger
    To us all-
    Never named-
    A line of demarcation
    Drawn in the sand
    Numerator
    Demoninator
    And
    Vinculum?



    W

    Washer

    An O ring
    Brought us down
    Brilliant scientists lost to
    A washer
    That
    Doomed a mission

    How could this be?





     X

    X is off his axis
    Again
    Y we do not know
    The triggers seem embedded in
    the cross he
    Carries.



    Y

    Y-intercept

    Y intercept
    A message
    In a bottle.



    Z

    Zero


    The Mayans
    Invented it
    A conch shell
    In their world
    In ours
    What symbol?
    An
    0.

    all of these written by S. Puglisi.
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  3. http://www.decodeunicode.org/en/data/glyph/196x196/25AA.gif 

    I am often intending...
    Intending to tell this story or relate that thought from my teaching, to do this lesson or that, to fulfill my mothering roles, or wife roles, caretaker for a paranoid schizophrenic thoughts, and share something I learned in those roles here, intending to paint or draw in an artist vein-to share that out. I wonder why lately I wanted to share this. But I originally thought it was important to witness. Until I was censored through work I used this site to meet some of those those intentions.
    Today was kind of special for us as a family because we got a better car for my middle daughter, after an old one we had for her blew its head gasket a day or so ago. It is an Accord, better car than I have ever had, and I feel a sense of full circle around that. Now when she drives to work I just will feel better because the old car clearly was a danger. She certainly deserves it-and all three of my children will, one day, I hope have the same.
    I'm making a meatless, cheeseless lasagne at the moment, for half my family and a meaty hearty one for the rest here on my mother's 85th birthday. Sophia is managing a really lush cake making, and the bread is rising. My mother's grandson (my son) made her this unbelievable card:


    It's a large card and just stupendous. He says she is a bear. And believe me it's a remarkable insight. Luca Puglisi gets credit on that image!

    My mother on her 85th birthday.
     
    One of the things I intend to do is talk about Black History Month.
    That has a strange connection to my Mom. Because, I suppose, she valued it.
    Mom was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama when Dr. King did his work, she has had lunches with Coretta Scott King, and her degrees were in Social work from a time that meant something.  But I never took in til later in my life what that meant as far as how my opinions and beliefs were shaped.
    Her gift to me.

    When we moved ten or so years ago to Temecula in CA my husband took on being a Superintendent for a small school in the mountains of San Diego.  Of all the moves I ever made this one was the most difficult, partially because I was forgoing health coverage at a time I had cancer and the HMO covering him led to disastrous care for me. I seemed to have a full premonition of this. But I took on subbing for his district because we really could not afford for me not to work, despite what he said, and no matter how hard I tried I could not find a job in another District. Interesting and very difficult long term subbing job. I certainly had esteem at minus zero after it was over. I was on leave from my job, things worked out, but my intention for awhile has been to write about that year in the mountains. 

    You might ask how does all of this have to do with Black History? 

    In San Diego certainly I learned things were different. I was invited to shooting parties for Thanksgiving by my students. That, at the time, really upset me. I picked up on "traditional values" in certain ranch families language and attitudes as they used the term as code for hot button issues, in tensions with the tribal groups, and the rancher's position of power in the area. It was important going in to keep in mind that I was viewed through the contexts and the points of view of those in the area-and that reactions to my "intentions" were often reactions to their own experiences and opinions-if you will allow me to say it, their projections. I would offer by way of context that it was a small place, intensely isolated, and somehow magnifying. So I got set on fire in my first few days in for writing a letter to parents saying hello and stating who I was, my expectations for behavior. Nothing really. It blasted into a meeting with a tribal elder-a woman furious with my kind.  To her I represented whites that had sent her to a school long ago away from family, separating children from families, and she had no intention of taking it. I represented someone trying to "train" the Native out of the children. I represented those that were there once and remained in some of the power structures still. 
    There were families that hated her and her kind. 
    The children came in on buses to sort this out with a lot of things beyond my knowing.
    My husband, very worried the day she came in, called me in to talk to her-I'm sure I insisted on dealing with that first blast by myself. And I still see his face as I sent him out the door, so she and I could talk the several hours we talked. I would wager he knew that two forces were tangling. But I learned a lot from her.
    In the end I think I earned the trust of that part of the population, at least their respect, because the children eventually felt at home with me.

    When February came I had come to terms with all the kids. More importantly they had come to terms with me. I had taken ALL my thousand of books up that hill into nowhere, so I thought very little about unloading the several boxes of Black History books I have out on the tables. I have a beautiful collection. They are old friends I can't imagine not having them at hand, especially in February. The next day the first grade teacher, a man (I should say I taught 3, 4, 5, 6 and one 7th grade) stopped me and said he heard about the books. At first I thought maybe he wanted to borrow one. I couldn't quite figure out what was up. But he was "confirming" I was "brave enough" to put them out. He "admired it." It turns out he "had never quite had the courage to do that there." So I thought-what toes am I on, what is this about? 
    One of my students was black, adopted into the reservation, but he seemed to have no idea of his heritage. No one even spoke of the fact that he was black. One day I remember asking him why that was? In talking a bit with the children I sensed they wanted to know about Civil Rights, and there were pieces in the Houghton Mifflin sets we had gotten up there to suggest teaching this-certainly Standards and state expectations -this was a place with books from 1960-but we had brought in new reading series that supported this "modern" learning. I read different things with them I really do consider very tame. Books about Rosa Parks, MLK, about the Civil War, Lincoln. I showed the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. And ignited myself for the third or fourth time, as the parents of several children came in to the white school board to make "known" their feelings about teaching "Black History."

    I didn't last there, no I didn't,  after that year and summer school an old, white board member made sure he tossed me out, but....I suspect he's gone now. And my husband, well, I required him to leave. For a year I do know Black History was taught. Especially for Willie,
    and for Willie to those that he knew as peers or friends.

    When people cannot share who they are, learn about others, be exposed to books, literature, points of view then, of course, we know the real purpose of censorship. It's always the mechanism of those that want to control thought-that have hating, or something dark and uncomfortable at the root. You hear the codes for this nonsense in those that were allowed to rear their heads over these last few years to try to remove voices, as we saw teaching Hispanic or Black History become something shadowy, and who got to implying these odd things-saying that this cultural knowledge is "divisive" when, in fact, it is actually about shifting our ways of seeing one another. As I type I'm listing to how Arizona outlawed ethnic studies on TV the strangest coincidence ever. How could ANYONE associate with this?

    In that small scale microcosm I noted that the way I was addressed about the books was not directly. Power behind the scenes came into play. My husband was pressured,  strange racial  "suggestions" were made, and underlying it all was the fact that several families up on that hill were racists-they said things about those with African American heritage that were appalling behind closed doors and I observed that in my interactions. Somehow they felt their children should not go to a public school and be exposed to another frame other than their own.

    I stood in the way.

    I had no idea when I took out my book boxes that I was doing anything like this at all. Just getting set up for February. Just like when I got parent permissions to put artwork here on my blog and for years put up exemplary work- I had no idea a District or a peer would do anything but find that exemplary work and of great enriching benefit. But, I found out on that mountain-things are complex, and, in a way, not so complex.

    Eventually I've come to know something I first thought about- it was really because my mother taught it. I was encouraged to read-in all cultures and all points of view. Encouraged into cultural valuing.  Mom liked people. We project upon individuals-our scapegoats. She understood this was in herself and in others. Something to keep in awareness and check. That's what she took away from being raised in the south. This is a true thing we can work on. When environments are encouraged to do so things feel differently than when fear and hate rule, when we develop rationals and then "use" a system, then we are corrupted. Diseased I think. And that ill system operates in a kind of creeping nightmare, afraid of exposure, critical, secretive, judging, hurtful, lying, distorting.
    I saw it in that tiny setting. Oh yeah.

    But I saw something else. Exposed to those books, films, researching, the students valued everything we did. They learned. They were open. Questions were ok. Hurting another-not ok. That was something as a bottom line I never wavered on. Their minds had the capacity to weigh these things. I hope that lasts there, and that today they have stepped forward over fallen back.

    For what it is worth this is one reason WHY I value fiction so highly. And reading. I think reading Steinbeck helped my students, I think that they gained through exposure to my black history box.
    Perhaps leading them all to a discovery of their own family. 
    Who they once were and where they have come to now and how it might well be.


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  4. http://www.decodeunicode.org/en/data/glyph/196x196/25AA.gif
    My husband made a couple of sets of children's songs that I often use teaching.
    I just found that he put them free online. Please go here.
    They are wonderful for ELD.


    I realize it's hard to get people to go to a link. But....try them, if you teach I think you'll enjoy them. I hope they open for you as itunes choices, I had to download them. Keep trying, you'll get there.
    Good work Jack!
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  5. http://www.decodeunicode.org/en/data/glyph/196x196/25AA.gif



     "Rainy Days And Mondays"

    Talkin' to myself and feelin' old
    Sometimes I'd like to quit
    Nothing ever seems to fit
    Hangin' around
    Nothing to do but frown
    Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

    What I've got they used to call the blues
    Nothin' is really wrong
    Feelin' like I don't belong
    Walkin' around
    Some kind of lonely clown
    Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

    Funny but it seems I always wind up here
    with you
    Nice to know somebody loves me

    Funny but it seems that it's the only thing to do
    Run and find the one who loves me.

    What I feel has come and gone before
    No need to talk it out
    We know what it's all about
    Hangin' around
    Nothing to do but frown
    Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

    I'm going to teach an art workshop to adult teachers-an inservice.
    I've got the art project, it's based in symmetry because that is the theme of this workshop-basically I'm going to stick to designs in octagons, I think octagons, these triangles to lock together. Designed in markers.
    Off the top of my head I just said the name would be Rainy Days and Mondays and the project appeared in my head. That's how it is for me. It just came.
    I decided that white umbrellas would be a lot more fun than just paper, so....we'll see if my umbrellas get funded. Decorate them with permanent markers.... can they get here? I hope so.
    By the 26th.
    If not we'll do the designs. On paper.

    Now off to do a few and check back for updates.
    Now I need Rainy Day music.

    I bet my class would love to make umbrellas. Design them. For 5 dollars a child I see white umbrellas here.  

     

     An image I found here that seems perfect for this.
    Or this, perfect:
     

    What I'm doing is a first step into making mandalas .

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  6. It's nice to see my blog gets around. I suppose I'll leave an explanation of my image to imagination. This one someone posted and I saw it but I do not know who to credit.

    We are watching the Super Bowl, but it went black so I thought of "blackout." I've had a few.
    When my iron was 4.

    Went to the beach today to scoop up small flat rocks so that my students can make tiny glitter hearts on them-a project I caught on-line. I'm also thinking that they'd like glittering planets.
    We'll see.

    It was dry, windy, with high waves today.

    Quite amazing as I saw a great many birds. My pictures stink in part because the camera lens was covered in salt every time I took a pic, my glasses the same, these are the days when I can't get the day on camera.

     

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I'm a public school elementary teacher from W.V. beginning my career in poverty schools in the 1980's. (I have GIST cancer-small intestinal and syringomyelia which isn't what I want to define me but does help define how I view the meaning of my life.) I am a mom of 3 great children-now grown. I teach 3rd grade in an Underperforming school, teaching mostly immigrant 2nd Lang. children. I majored in art, as well as teaching. Art informs all I do. Teaching is a driving part of my life energy. But I am turning to art soon. I'm married to an artist I coaxed into teaching- now a Superintendent of one of the bigger Districts in the area. Similar population. We both have dedicated inordinate amounts of our life to the field of teaching in areas of poverty hoping to give students opportunities to make better lives. I'm trying to write as I can to the issues of PUBLIC education , trying to gain the sophistication to address the issues in written forms so they can be understood from my teaching contexts.I like to blog from daily experiences. My work is my own, not reflective of any school district.
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