wraiths82

I saw his series was going to be called “Teach” and about teaching so when I saw this book appear on the lists, immediately requested it. Here are nuggets/gems from the book!

pg. 48
“You have to be prepared to play many roles, you have to be a mother, father, sister, brother, social worker, counselor, friend and anything else they need.”

pg. 49
“We have to make up for so much that’s missing in kids’ lives today, especially in the poorer schools.”

pg. 74
“How do you get past the ‘I just can’t deal with them, and they make it impossible to teach the others, so why not just throw in the towel?’ You just keep trying. If you’re motivated, you do. The kids eventually see your passion, and that’s what makes them buy in.”

pg. 75
“You can tell the ones who’ll be great teachers. They’re the ones with the passion. The ones who try things and watch other teachers and network with teachers even outside their subject areas. You’ve got to be motivated to be a motivator. You’ve got to be able to excite the kids with a story or an action and then get them to bite on what you want them to learn. My classroom was a safe zone. Nothing but a place to learn and have fun with music, but if I saw a kid with an issue, I told him or her: see me, let’s talk. The kids are going to love that about you because they know they can talk to you.

He had other great bits of poetry from students and ideas on engaging students. Definitely worth reading.

pg. 157
That’s how life feels to me. Everyone is doing it, everyone knows how. To live and be who they are and to find a place, find a moment. I’m still waiting.

pg. 311
I don’t blame her. I haven’t told the whole truth about something important. Something I should have told her right at the beginning. But I didn’t want her to see me that way, see that part of who I am, the part that feels ugly and ruined.

Read Bob Harper’s Skinny Rules book and figure I’ll do my best to start following them. Does anyone know where ezekiel bread can be found??

In addition to following that, I went to a tasting last night for the tea, which is an alternate to a coffee that this company does that’ll help with weight loss. They’ve got a lot of stuff besides, but these are the two major sellers, and so on and so forth. Wasn’t bad, wayyyyyy better than the smart cookies. Deal is that it’ll help with weight loss without diet and exercise. That said, it’ll work even better if you do diet and exercise, or rather eat right and exercise. I’m going to do the 90 day challenge, and have ordered the tea today. There is a money back guarantee, and I also really enjoyed my time with those who were doing it, and hearing the testimonials.

I’m on my weight loss site as well and plan to post pictures and blog there about it.

Here’s to hoping it works and is awesome!

Crazy idea that could actually happen with schools as we seem to be scratching out new ways to get better results. I would have been like Mr. Reese, as I love the interaction between students and teachers, I don’t want mindless drones just less misbehavior.

pg. 172
“Maxwell is bright enough to waste hours of class time with his antics yet still complete his work and earn As. But in exercising what you consider his freedom, he impacts on the freedom of others. He wasted their class time, too, and they needed that time to understand their work. His fun caused his classmates to fail.”

I have to admit, it’s a good argument. I never thought goofing around might send someone to throwaway school. He should have told me that my first detention.

pg. 178
“Kids with behavior problems and learning disabilities used to rule the classroom. They brought our standards down so much that even the smartest students wouldn’t learn until grade twelve with what kids in other countries learn by grade eight.”

pg. 237
Mr. Reese doesn’t participate. He shows a documentary, assigns a reading, points to questions on the screen, goes about his duties like a secretary to his former self. I hate him and all that he withstands. I hate him like I hate my mother, whom I love and wish I didn’t hate but I can’t help it. I hate every adult who feels bad about what they’re doing and does it anyway, sighing with every breath, clinging to the notion that they’re good people in bad times. I hate them for not standing up for me. I hate them for not helping me stand up for myself. I hate them for not teaching me to care about all the people they mowed down before they got around to us. I hope they choke on all their coffee-talk and tissues.

pg. 262
Living with hope is like rubbing up against a cheese grater. It keeps taking slices off you until there’s so little left you just crumble.

pg. 249-250
(modified)
Today you end
and you begin. The old
is still sweeter
than the new. You
notice everything.

Your fingers don’t do
as they’re told.

Remember?
Remember, and
don’t forget
the moments
of your beginning.

We’ll be lucky to know you!
We’re lucky to know you now!

pg. 301-302
I can never stop thanking you.
If I never stop,
I never need to say
farewell.
A river rushes between us.
You follow it north,
I pursue it south.
When I weep
because I miss you,
my tears will seep
through your cavern.
Your face is kind
as a shawl in winter,
or a diamond for a song.
My family keeps an inn.
You have a chamber in my heart.
No rent is due.
Farewell.
Farewell.

pg. 304

People don’t look as they behave….

I had grandeur. I breathed in the cool night air. Perhaps I could learn to wear myself without apologies, with dignity. Perhaps I could become what Ijori already saw. Perhaps someday I might be able to smile at myself in a mirror.
Not yet. But maybe someday.

so many things reminded me of my own struggles with weight, that I enjoyed this. The main character deals with a lot of issues, handling them through anorexia and cutting, but at the same time tries to be the best big sister she can.

pg. 17
The buzzer sounds. Students float from room to room. The teachers tie us to our chairs and pour worlds into our ears.

pg. 19
“Dead girl walking,” the boys say in the halls.
“Tell us your secrets,” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
I am that girl.
I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.
I am the library aide who hides in Fantasy.
I am the circus freak encased in beeswax.
I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
When I get close, they step back. The cameras in their eyeholes record the zit on my chin, the rain in my eyes, the blue water under my skin. They pick up every sound on their collar microphones. They want to pull me inside of them, but they’re afraid.
I am contagious.

pg. 33
This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

pg. 78
I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how anybody does it, waking up every morning and eating and moving from the bus to the assembly line, where the teacher-bots inject us with Subject A and Subject B, and passing every test they give us. Our parents provide the list of ingredients and remind us to make healthy choices: one sport, two clubs, one artistic goal, community service, no grades below a B, because really, nobody’s average, not around here. It’s a dance with complicated footwork and a changing tempo.

I’m the girl who trips on the dance floor and can’t find her way to the exit. All eyes on me.

pg. 161 (in response to the old friend’s mother wanting to know why her daughter threw her life away)
Why? You want to know why?
Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes yoru regular clothes as long as they are tight.

Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all “a disappointment.” Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don’t want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and cut and drink because you need an anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it’s too late because you are main-lining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can’t stop.

Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heart-beat scream that everysinglething is wrong with you.

“Why?” is the wrong question.

Ask “Why not?”

pg. 221
I am locked into the mirror and there is no door out.

pg. 277-278
I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. The tiny elf dancer became a wooden doll whose strings were jerked by people not paying attention. I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.

I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness.

Cassie did, too. We leaned on each other, lost in the dark and wandering in endless circles. She got too tired and went to sleep. Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.

I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.

There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn’t matter anymore.

I am thawing.

I wouldn’t mind going to Elsewhere after I die and I loved the story of Liz’s life(and death?).

pg. 239-240

There will be other lives.

There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters’ unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands.

And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and for Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecisions and revisions.

And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles.

And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk.

And there will be other lives for a man you don’t recognize, for a face in the mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything.

Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.

pg. 266

“A life isn’t measured in hours and minutes. It’s the quality, not the length. All things considered, I’ve been luckier than most.”

Delirium by Lauren Oliver. Provocative, thought-provoking and an interesting futuristic kind of book. I liked it, going to check out her other stuff too.

pg. 50
Sometimes I feel as though there are two me’s, one coasting directly on top of the other; the superficial me, who nods when she’s supposed to nod adn says what she’s supposed to say, and some other, deeper part, the part that worries and dreams says “Gray.” Most of the time they move along in sync and I hardly notice the split, but sometimes it feels as though I’m two whole different people and I could rip apart at any second. Once I confessed this to Rachel. She just smiled and told me it would all be better after the procedure. After the procedure, she said, it would be all coasting, all glide, every day as easy as one, two, three.

pg. 106-107
Hana has been morphing into a stranger.

A sharp blade of sadness goes through me, deep and quick. I guess it was bound to happen eventually. I’ve always known it would. Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear, some behind a different face or personality, some behind a dense early morning fog, beyond a cliff. That’s why the cure is so important. That’s why we need it.

pg. 153
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you—sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.

pg. 383
I know that life isn’t life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point-the only point-is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

pg. 395
Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.
But that isn’t it, exactly.
The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you, God.
Love: It will kill you and save you, both.

pg. 440
You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way.
But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.

I look at this goal sometimes after my brief stint in Seattle of just trying to live somewhere else briefly, that failed. I wonder sometimes if I will leave my area, as I am working hard to maintain my job. Never would have thought I’d be teaching in a different county than I live in, but it works. I love the subjects I’m teaching, one is Teen Leadership, check out Flip Flippen if you want more info(but it is very rewarding for the most part to teach this) and then English, this year I’ll be doing ESOL English none of just plain English. This means speakers of other languages who don’t have the same looks/backgrounds/knowledge that most English speakers have. Huge hurtle when it comes to testings. This will be my third year at my school. I loved this past year, the students, the experiences were all very rewarding. I saw a lot of gains, and not as many failures. I’m blessed and working on continuing that.

If things should get bad, I would probably look elsewhere. This goal is still on my list as I’d still like to try it, maybe in a smaller amount to see how I do and if I can handle that far from home anyhow.

I’ll always remember my English teacher that opened my eyes to doing this and hopefully one day soon I’ll get to experience this too.

this author did another amazing book called the Daughter of Smoke & Bone, definitely one to read if you haven’t heard of her.

pg. 40-41

With a deep visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy’s blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn’t possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer’s small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.

Kizzy wanted.

I just paid all my bills and still have money left. It is a thrilling time.

Anyhow, major cause for celebration is my student loan debt is down to $1576.65!! That includes my newest loan I took out when I was unemployed and all my college loans from 2002-2004. I should definitely have my smaller loan paid off by the end of this year and then I could probably have the other loan paid off next year if I can commit.

I’ve been running numbers too as far as if I had no entertainment/fun budget and just committed to paying down my debt for a year of how quickly my excess debt would go down. That’s a major commitment and not sure if I can do that yet.

Anyone out there see that show on tv about the community that paid down their debt? I’m going to try to check it out. Always looking for more ideas and help, so feel free to share! I continue to marvel at the Extreme Couponing people, but if I had as much stuff as they do, I’d definitely give the excess to charities.

I did give him a chance Todd!-I realize the last entry might’ve been a bit harsh-but I’m trying not to sweep stuff aside like I’ve done before.

It’s refreshing to live apart, and date a bit long distance. He’s in Orlando and I’m down south of Vero. It’s an hour and a half away and he’s even tried making the trip by bike as he doesn’t have car. He’s open to mouthwash and is sweet about it. Z’s made plans with his dad and seems to be moving in the right direction-which is away from a bad situation.

He still makes me laugh, smile and I enjoy having him around. Z’s met my parents, loves them and they like him too. I’m a wee bit nervous about meeting his, but will cross that bridge when it happens.

This is definitely a worthwhile goal as I’m much happier this time around and it’s worth the wait.

Why? They survived the Hunger Games and are just amazing continually. They brought their A game and took all. Enough said.

We just had FCAT this week at school and food was definitely of the fast food variety and in mass quantity.

I also ended up drinking quite a lot as well. Stressed about school and the new speeding ticket I got which thankfully was not as high as it could have been! Thank you Mr. FL Highway Patrolman! Haven’t been treating those stressed moods so well. The bowling league’s party will be on Wednesday and we have a drinking extravaganza if there will be a designated driver. Otherwise I’ll have one drink and go home.

A step in the right direction today, got up and worked out with my walking buddy at the gym. Felt good and set me off in a productive weekend day.

So this is still a struggle, but working at it again.

Downsides, Z has horribly bad breath and no car. I haven’t broached the breath deal with him as he had warned me about it. Taking things slower due to distance and not rushing into anything. He’s really affectionate and nice, but finances could be an issue as he is very much living paycheck to paycheck.

Z’s got a job and isn’t homeless-step up in smarter category. He makes me laugh and smile even if he goes a bit over board. Don’t know if its a forever kind of guy, but he’s a good for right now one.

on annuals for 89 cents and some other great stuff. I just got it cleared out of those spiny cactus like things, I’m not saving them, as roommate managed to fall and get on of the spines under his fingernail. I bought a ton of marigolds and some herbs, going back now as I didn’t estimate the correct number for the planter. I’ll post a pic when done!

Researching how to put the cover thing down to stop weeds too. It’s a learning experience.

1. Get to the library to print recipes and do my homestead exemption. It’ll save me money on taxes and the recipes will be fun to try.

2. Clean the house, as far as dusting and mopping.Bought the 360 Swiffer thing and dusted, it is amazing. Worth the money!

3. Organize games to one easy location, be it the living room or the dining room.

4. Clear the foyer area of the tv and my stuff; as well as roommates stuff.

5. Take back dining room table.

6. Sort/organize/go through the boxes in the workroom.

7. Finish up in my room; sort/organize eastern section of room. Hope to have new custom bookcase to finish up library area soon.

8. Get screens back fixed from Restore place; wash windows if possible. Get $1 broom from dollar store and do the outside of house.

9. Think up awesome Romeo and Juliet project for school.

10. Read and enjoy free time; see friends in Orlando if possible.

Additions: Go to Sam’s and get essentials-like tall kitchen bags, salt, paper towels, handsoap(?), and more.
Steam clean dining and living room; noted after dusting how tracked the dirt was, really need to do it asap.

1. Get to the library to print recipes and do my homestead exemption. It’ll save me money on taxes and the recipes will be fun to try.

2. Clean the house, as far as dusting and mopping.Bought the 360 Swiffer thing and dusted, it is amazing. Worth the money!

3. Organize games to one easy location, be it the living room or the dining room.

4. Clear the foyer area of the tv and my stuff; as well as roommates stuff.

5. Take back dining room table.

6. Sort/organize/go through the boxes in the workroom.

7. Finish up in my room; sort/organize eastern section of room. Hope to have new custom bookcase to finish up library area soon.

8. Get screens back fixed from Restore place; wash windows if possible. Get $1 broom from dollar store and do the outside of house.

9. Think up awesome Romeo and Juliet project for school.

10. Read and enjoy free time; see friends in Orlando if possible.

Additions: Go to Sam’s and get essentials-like tall kitchen bags, salt, paper towels, handsoap(?), and more.
Steam clean dining and living room; noted after dusting how tracked the dirt was, really need to do it asap.

1. Get to the library to print recipes and do my homestead exemption. It’ll save me money on taxes and the recipes will be fun to try.

2. Clean the house, as far as dusting and mopping.

3. Organize games to one easy location, be it the living room or the dining room.

4. Clear the foyer area of the tv and my stuff; as well as roommates stuff.

5. Take back dining room table.

6. Sort/organize/go through the boxes in the workroom.

7. Finish up in my room; sort/organize eastern section of room. Hope to have new custom bookcase to finish up library area soon.

8. Get screens back fixed from Restore place; wash windows if possible. Get $1 broom from dollar store and do the outside of house.

9. Think up awesome Romeo and Juliet project for school.

10. Read and enjoy free time; see friends in Orlando if possible.

Ultimately, I’ll be happy if I can get even half the list done. If I manage to do the whole list; I’d be amazed by my awesomeness.

I’ve got more of the huge tree we cut back last year gone, and part of what is by the shed also gone.

Still have around the shed, the pool, and the two big trees out front to do. Progress seen though as it is a huge job and it’s just myself and my parents now with getting it done.

Arms are really sore today from swinging the sledgehammer which was a lot of fun.