green hair and the limerick that will never be

well, today was the final showdown for science! woohoo! i am WORN OUT! sitting there trying to be observant is very tiring...i'd rather be teaching (that should be a bumper sticker).  now i'm in after school working with my creative writers! and i only mention that because one of them just said, "ms. robinson, right that there is such a thing as a bird called a booby?" and so i got to explain that and why it is called that, while they giggled i think they thought it was funnier that i said the bird was thought to be stupid (bobo) they think stupid is a bad word-funny how coincidental things are since i've been writing my blog! (after i mentioned mary poppins the other day i actually had a song on my random play that sang about her-and i'd never even noticed!)

the sub today was so sweet-she's an older lady and she said, "i just think you are just so cute! i see lots of beautiful ladies, but every time i see you, i just think 'she is so cute!' there is just something different about you! maybe it's your blonde hair." i thought maybe i should let her know she needs her glasses adjusted.

my students were working on poetry without me today. i've taught them a few different types of poetry. i thought about limericks, but there isn't enough time (we're putting a classbook together tomorrow). this is the beginning of one limerick i had thought about teaching they had as a sample:
There was an old man from Peru
Who dreamt he was eating his shoe
He awoke in the night
In a terrible fright
And found it was perfectly true...

i thought about starting one like this for them to finish:
there was a tall man from venus, if he'd have opened his eyes he'd've seen us.
the problems with this are numerous. the most evident is the use of the double apostrophe...(why can't that work? i feel like that's the way we speak....) the second problem is that there aren't many viable options for rhyming with venus that are elementary school acceptable-and the fact that 3/4 of my class are boys, they would have likely made a limerick that is unacceptable. 
hmm.

well, on the UP side, MY WASHER'S FIXED! I DON'T HAVE TO LEAVE THE COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE OF 'HOME'! 
and on the DOWN side, MY WASHER'S FIXED! I HAVE TO DO MY LAUNDRY.

and chaco has decided that not only is he embarrassed to be seen with me and my old bag(you know, the one he chewed the zipper off), now he doesn't want to be seen with me at certain restaurants 

because he said it would hurt his marketability... what? what is he even talking about?? just like the rest of the youth in america, fame and fortune is his tunnel vision. i'll wait to burst his bubble..you're only little once! (ok, he'll be little forever)

there is now a random swing. today as i was testing, i began thinking a random chain of thoughts. i thought back to when i was young, hanging out with my cousins in michigan. i loved being young! i have so many stories with them, but the one that came to mind this morning was when my cousin dick offered to help dana come her hair in the car, and he just started curling her beautiful long hair in circles with a round clairol type brush-it was a mess!! and it wasn't like it was an accident, then there was the time we were driving and i fell asleep and got gum stuck in my hair and my cousin said, "don't worry! we can get it out with a little peanut butter!" great idea. 

then there was a 4th of july when we went to a friend's pool and they had lots of chlorine and my hair was even blonder than it is now...and the words, "julie, you're hair looks green," were the cruelest words i had heard all summer. it's true, the bottom turned slightly green (this of course was before it was popular to dye your hair ridiculous colors). i wore my jacket all evening long at the fireworks (the 4th of july!) and tucked my hair under the collar; even after the sun went down! we laid out the next couple of days with lemon juice in the hair. you can see the chain of thought-hair.


jeans day tomorrow!
jules