Mental health with feathers

Woodpecker

Hope is the thing with feathers, according to Emily Dickinson.  A good walk with birds is the thing for my mental outlook. So much to do at home, but the dark rainy morning had changed to a gorgeous sunny afternoon. The sunshine grasped me in her talons and dragged me through the bright blue sky to the trailhead at Renner Road and US 75.

Mockingbird, juvenile.

Greeted by a woodpecker. Under the watch of a kestrel. A red tail hawk circled overhead. A mockingbird posed. Mallards bickered and bullied in Spring Creek under the highway.

Bad boy mallards

Kestrel photo good enough for an ID.

Odd, loud, buzzy, rattled bird calls tantalized me as I got closer to the US 75/190 George Bush tollway interchange.

Kingfishers avoid paparazzi

The buzzy calls led to a pair of kingfishers on a telephone wire above the creek, but under the highways. No mistaking the shape of the kingfishers, or the glorious blue when they swooped along the creek declining to be photographed by the paparazzi.

Teeny brown birds in a budding tree consented to photos but declined to be identified. On the way back I spotted a heron looking scruffy near a heap of trashed grocery carts.




Something was bothering me earlier.  I wonder what it was... besides the ugly grocery carts.




© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

Survivor--100 Days of School

Happy, happy one hundredth day of school!  We made it! May I not see ten groups of ten Cocoa Puffs for another year.  I am so very counted out. When I ground the coffee beans this morning I forgot to stop at my usual 28, and was still grinding at sixty!  Oops.

This week the students brought in "collections" of one hundred items to practice counting and grouping.

Packing peanuts wiggle when lined up.

We have counted:

• Legos
• Hot Wheels
• Pennies
• Popcorn kernels
• Beads
• Jigsaw puzzle pieces
• Drinking straws
• Crayons
• Jelly beans
• Popcorn
• Angry Bird cookies
• Animal crackers
• Cocoa Puffs
• Cheetos, for crying out loud
• Mixed crackers
• Feathers
• Pompoms

Marthe Jocelyn's book, Hannah's Collections, helps kids consider the idea of saving items. Other books focus on the counting and the excitement of bringing a group of objects to preschool. Hannah in the book is not a hoarder, although I question the accumulation of sticky popsicle sticks. Wish I could remember what book featured a boy saving chicken drumsticks in his sock drawer!

I'm not a hoarder, I'm just disorganized and hesitant to throw things away! Maybe I've spent my whole life accumulating items to take to school on the hundredth day. My dad wasn't a large scale tv-worthy hoarder.  He was more of a mini fast food condiment collector. My frail 89-year-old neighbor isn't so much a hoarder as too unsteady to go to the dumpster and too proud to ask for help.

Parents don't seem to send their kids out in the yard or park to collect acorns, juniper berries, clover flowers, or maple seed helicopters. In my childhood I could have taken a hundred foil potpie pans to school.

The hundredth day of school for grown-ups:

Four rows of ten hangers plus six rows of ten pickles equal one hundred.

Four rows of ten red wiggler worms do not cooperate.






Ten rows of ten wine corks can't go to school!

© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

Obituary for the iron

Fans of the Monopoly iron wept in their beers tonight after Hasbro announced that game piece was voted off the board. There were no reports of protests or rioting, but my choreographer sister expressed fans' indignation in a text message:

This is an outrage. The iron slid across the board with grace.


So well said.  It's unlikely my epitaph will be so uplifting.  It will probably be more like:

She languished half-charred in the greasy hell at the bottom of the stove burner drip pan.

My little students are unlikely to be able to identify an iron, steam or flat.  They don't even know the word "stove".

The Monopoly iron slid along the board, as did the cannon.  The other pieces had to be tapped along to count out one's roll of the dice. I flopped down on the floor and peered under the bed, but my Sixties era Monopoly game was not there.  Seems like after Norton the rabbit hopped under the bed to nibble the box and eat the $500 bills I moved the game somewhere "safer".  But where?  Probably under the stairs and beneath the boxed up fake Christmas tree.  I blog for truth, freedom, and vintage game board pieces, but I'm not moving the sofa to haul out the Christmas tree to find Monopoly.

Clue was under the bed instead. Will we be voting to change the deadly weapons next? Or will we send Colonel Mustard into exile?

On a different tack, my tie dye experiment results were underwhelming.

© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

So far behind I cain't get caught up

Shuffle/ Don't even know where to start, so I'll just swagger into this saloon and sit myself in the corner with my back up to the wall.  You know how to deal?  Cut the deck.

I do not have enough patience stored up in my lifetime account to teach any more children to play card games unless those kids are brilliant, well-mannered, good sports, and therefore direct descendants.  Deal clockwise.

Wild Bill, my ancient next door neighbor, is in the hospital. I don't know if he will ever return to his condo. Wild Bill is like a shadow of my dad, Howie.  If this is Bill's exit event, I pray he can leave with most of his wits and much of his dignity. Go fish.

© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

Playing spoons

For information on the card game Spoons click here.

If you want to play spoons as a musical instrument, then you want to click here.

But if you are ready for another adventure in aggravating three-year-old inventiveness, here is the lunch special recipe of the week.

Take one three-year-old.  Add a thermos full of rice and beans, one very ripe banana, and a plastic spoon. Spill a lot of the rice on the floor. When the teacher says, "Oh, my, you are making quite a mess," drop a few banana chunks down there too. Stomp and slide this around, and get a good mash on the bottom of your shoe.  Scrape the bottom of your shoe with the plastic spoon to see what interesting sounds that will make until you get a grown-up's attention.

This is a lot more annoying when repeated on the next day!

Come on and hear, come on and hear,
Alexander's Ragtime Band.
Come on and hear, come on and hear,
It's the best band in the land!

© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder

Look, it's going to bubbles!

The ancient history of audio-visual instruction 

Once upon a time, boys and girls, just after God said "Let there be light" and there was light, the filmstrip projector came to school. It sat on top of two fat dictionaries on a desk pulled into the middle of an aisle.  Beside it on the desk sat a can holding a roll of film and knowledge, and a little easy-reader booklet.

What is film, Ms Nancy?...Never mind. We'll just skip over this part.*

In the Late Cretaceous, the filmstrip was accompanied by a 45 rpm recording with beeps in the narration indicating when the filmstrip should be advanced to the next black and white image. The beeps caused the student deputized to operate the projector to instantly forget which direction was forward and which was back. [This is similar to the nursing home phenomenon of elderly patients with tv remote controls.]

Why were film strips important?  Because film strips promoted napping at school. Napping is good.(1)

Nebraska was one of the first states to begin educational broadcasting. All the students would walk in two straight lines with their hands clasped behind their backs down the hall to the Eastridge Elementary School library, then sit on the cork-tile floor to watch Dolores Dudley read classic picture books like Rex Parkin's The Red Carpet, and Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats on the school's lone black and white television.  Mrs. Dudley was at the peak of her powers with Marcia Brown's Stone Soup. (2)

That's when I first wanted to be a storytime lady when I grew up. 

Creating bulletin boards was a competitive sport for elementary school teachers. An opaque projector enabled teachers to enlarge a student drawing on a big swath of butcher paper.  Then kiddies could paint the big image with runny powdered tempera paint mixed up in metal orange juice cans. (3)

Every December all the Eastridge students would file into the auditorium to watch a film about the composing of "Silent Night".  The film was quite blue, with people crunching around in the snow.  The highlight of this annual event was the inevitable breaking, splicing, and rethreading of the film into the projector.  We kids would be all hyped up on holiday anticipation, and be anything but silent.

At Millard Lefler Junior High teachers began using overhead projectors.  Students missed the chances to make dusty messes with the chalk erasers.  At least we still got to sniff ditto papers. And wouldn't The Sniffing Dittos be a good name for an oldies cover band?

In Speech class we were allowed to use a tape recorder for the group project "radio broadcast". The technological biggie was the foreign language lab. Each student sat in a carrell that looked like a prison visitation booth and put on headphones. While Srta. Diaz allegedly eavesdropped on our performances, we repeated phrases like

 I would like the chocolate cake.  Yo quisiera el pastel de chocolate.

High school brought new AV technology. Learning to drive meant sitting in a simulator watching films of roads and turning the steering wheel.  Each simulator looked like a cross between an opaque projector and an immovable carnival bumper car.  Crazy that twenty years later my young sons were"flying" simulated dogfights on our computer games with realistic graphics.

Ah, college! Dark lecture halls. Watching art history slide shows. Remember, napping is good. To this day I don't use the exhibit audio tours at art museums. It would be so embarrassing to fall asleep and start snoring and drooling...



Fast forward FF. I still can't cope with the tv remote, but I'm making computer slideshows for my young art students. Trying to connect with kids who can scroll on an iPhone before they can wipe and flush. Trying to connect the raccoon's tail without too many technical diffooooculties.

What do my students like best? Look, Ms. Nancy.  It's going to bubbles!

Footnotes

(1)  Concurrent technology available in homes included single view handheld slide projectors, and tray or carousel slide projectors for subjecting the neighbors to long evenings reviewing your tent-camping trip to Yellowstone. Comic relief came in the form of slides loaded upside down or backwards.

(2) We also watched Mercury and Gemini blast-offs in the library.

(3) The View-Master was a concurrent "educational slideshow".  Children could click through images of Our Nation's Capitol including Jackie Kennedy's White House renovations, Disney's Peter Pan, and Yellowstone geysers.

*Judge Maxwell: I think I want to skip over this part, too. 
Howard: That night, I went back to my room and she was in the bath. 
Judge Maxwell: Who was there? No, don't tell me, just go on. 
Howard: When Eunice walked in and the drapes caught fire, everything burned. They asked me to leave. I really don't blame them. 
Judge Maxwell: Good boy. Is there more? 
Howard: Sure. 
Judge Maxwell: There's more. 



© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Na na na na Hey hey hey Goodbye

Neither gnomes, nor gnats, nor naugahyde will adorn the preschoolers' gift to their lead teacher, so you mightn't have expected the knife, knots, and knitting. Preschoolers can't give a gift of nothing to their teacher, so in the handmade spirit we have made a box of Nn. Naturally, the motives are twofold.

1. The students might learn something about the "Nn" sound.
2. This project will cost nada, nil, nothing, zip.  (Preschoolers often confuse N and Z)

The inspiration was part nasal exasperation. Our class is a championship caliber nose-picking team, no matter what measures we've take.

Our class rabbit is named Norton, so he's the star of the Nn box.

Having taught some of the kids to "turn sevens into stars", a few turned that back on me by refusing to practice writing numbers or letters. It's stars and only stars from morning until night.

Our box of Nn is almost done. And it's a good thing the semester is almost done, too. Enjoy some noodles, but use your napkin!

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Silent E, Holy E

My calm and bright student is working through the silent e words for the fifth, and lowliest, of the vowels. The words with their illustrations make a peculiar group:

mute  butte  cure  pure  rude 
fume  prune  tune  flute  cute 

What image can illustrate "pure" for a five-year-old? The picture that goes with the word is a child in a winter coat and hat starring up at the stars.

The image for "cure" shows EMTs unloading a patient on a stretcher from an ambulance.

"Mute" and "butte" present problems stretching from here to Montana.

"Tune" shows a kid whistling, and "cute" is a baby, although not the cutest grandbaby on Earth, with whom I'm acquainted.

Gave myself a stern talking-to about finishing the pile of ironing before putting up the Christmas tree.  The pile is still there, should you need a silent e illustration for the third vowel.  The lights are untangled, and most of the strings still work. Maybe I should pop "Hunt for Red October" in the old VCR in honor of the USS Enterprise, and fire up the steam iron.  I'll just let the lights blink on the living room floor.





Employee overheard at the copy center in a national chain office supply store patiently explaining to a customer who might have been off his meds:

You need Dobe to print those puddiffs.

[In this case Dobe does not rhyme with Kobe Bryant.]

Long ago I taught a girl who sang "Dudolf da Ded-Dosed Deindeer".  Dudolf could never get his pdfs to print with or without the latest version of Adobe, and my Christmases have never been the same since.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Wasted Miata and the Olympic tomato bobsled team

Close your eyes. Take a deep, cleansing breath and let it out slowly like a roll of toilet paper smoothly  and gently unrolling out to infinity.

You are feeling relaxed and refreshed, and ready for your preschool Spanish lesson.

--"Ms. Nancy, I wasted the toilet paper."

Thank you, my child for being honest. Just don't use so much next time or you will clog the potty.

In the background I hear the beginning wail of a kiddie stuck on the toilet seat with no t.p. This is not the best moment for a vocabulary correction. That moment would be after the poop Sherpa replaces the t.p. and guides the stranded mountain-climber off the porcelain peak.   

"Wasted" is not quite the same as "used the last of the roll".

--"Wasted" has a big load of guilt attached. You/I have wasted talents, time, effort, resources and abilities. You/I are not "wasted" in the sense of intoxicated.  Well, maybe you.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Just don't kick the gravel on the playground...

--Getting out to the playground is like moving a caravan of cats.  The children must locate their partners and hold hands.  Then they must walk in a line out of the classroom, down the hall, and into the school lobby.  The first pair of students, unless they have gotten a whole lotta nose goobies on their fingers during this trek, get to hold the door open.  The children thank them for holding the door open.  They respond with, "You're welcome," unless someone decides to go rogue espanol.  

--Thank you is "gracias".  You're welcome is "de nada".  The preschoolers are vague on which is which and the pronunciation of both.  That leads to long lines of polite kiddies saying:

Granada

Miata

Granada

Miata

Granada

Miata

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines
In two straight lines they broke their bread
And brushed their teeth and went to bed.
They left the house at half past nine
In two straight lines in rain or shine-
The smallest one was Madeline.

--Which leads to the mystery of the tomato bobsled team. These perfectly spaced and sized cherry tomatoes were somehow grown in one long vine that folded over to make a double layer. 

It's like the dwarfs are in the glass coffin instead of Snow White. She's on the outside singing "Someday my Miata will come".

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Halloween census

My tallies have not added up correctly.  I'm afraid there might be hanging chads in my count of the preschool costumes, or maybe my memory is failing.  I'm sad to report that Norton the elderly class rabbit did not get out of his cage to be in the class Halloween photo this year.

1 Bat Girl
1 Bat Man
1 blueberry fairy
1 doctor

5 fairy/butterfly/tutu girls (1 with fever and diarrhea)
1 great pumpkin t shirt
1 Incredible Hulk
1 Jedi knight

1 Minnie Mouse
1 nonparticipant
1 peacock
1 pirate

1 princess

1 royal princess

1 Superman
1 Spiderman
1 tiger in Pull-Ups
1 vaguely pink sparkle cowgirl fairy with wand
_____________________________________
This does not equal 24 children

The elementary class only has nine students at the moment.  Those kids are always asked to be something or someone "real".  Andy and the Statue deserved applause.

Dr. Who
Maria Tallchief
1 ballet teacher
Andy Warhol
The Statue of Liberty
Amelia Earhart
Tim Burton
Queen Elizabeth
Julia Child

*

Most things change, but the popularity of Amelia Earhart for kids needing to read a biography or dress up as somebody famous has stayed the same.  The popularity of ironing has continued to plummet.

**

*Ninja turtle + 20 years or so at the Statue of Liberty.

**The bat is still without power in New Jersey.  Junior Birdman is now a daddy.  I wonder what ever became of the pilot's white scarf!

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Saggyboobosity lonesome Playtex blues

Over in Illinois there are some very tired 18-hour bras working a double shift.  In the preschool room my tiny French student notices the Bandaid over my hot glue burn and says, "Boo boo."  From this small step she suddenly expresses the big idea, "I like your shirt. Do you like my shirt?"

 I do.  I like that party shirt! Go, Dog, Go!  We are cooking.

Here in Texas I put a Chicken Davenport ala Doris casserole into my preheated newlio trulio functioning oven. Doris was my sister-in-law way back in the before time.  She made a gourmet dish of chicken, frozen broccoli, frozen hashbrowns, cheese, and cream of chicken soup for a bridal shower a quarter century or so ago. I can't remember "divan", and I can't exactly google "Doris", although I miss her and wish her well after all these years, and her husband, too. Another former sister-in-law lived in Davenport, Iowa, a swing state. Somehow Chicken Divan got mixed up with davenports, couches, sofas,sleepers, settees, divans, loveseats, futons, and sectionals. The secret is having plenty of buttered bread crumbs baked on top of the casserole.  Enough might even prevent divorce.

I am so far behind.  I zip and dart from Halloween tie-dye experiments to Hurricane Sandy fretting. Sitting in the waiting room for my blood pressure checkup, I pass the time writing fall student progress reports. This creative endeavor seems to calm the blood pressure.  My doctor pronounces my blood pressure "beautiful".  Not bad for a divorced couch casserole boo-boo art teacher.

It had been a bad day.  I couldn't even wear my own shirt.  There was so much poop in the preschool that I had to scrounge up a new outfit to wear to the doctor appointment.  My little French student would have looked at my shirt and said something other than "Boo boo"!




© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Curse of the Spider Woman*

Don't look at me even through squinted eyes. I am toxic. I am Typhoid Mama. No inanimate object is safe. Some animate ones behave too inanimately. It's been bad voodoo all over the place.

So far just since the rodents and the rat snake on the patio:

• Stove control panel died.
• Oven died.
• Microsoft support for Windows Home Premium operating system evaporated.
• Preschoolers took poopy pants to a whole new level.
• Brakes on Buick started grabbing and squawking.
• New electric range is delivered, but the old one is wired directly into the condo electrical system and giant delivery dudes are not authorized to remove old or install new range.
• Canon printer pooped out.
• Preschool pet rabbit plays possum while lead teacher is away on jury duty.
• Giant spider attacked library.

On the upside:

•  I finally got a photo of a funnel web spider.
• The eleven-year-old preschool rabbit revived.
• The lead teacher was not picked for a jury even though she was looking forward to being sequestered.
• The brake work was minor.
• I like Windows 7 and the new Canon printer.
• It's finally autumn.
• The condo mailboxes in the kiosk have been replaced after a year of broken locks and doors.

*Kiss of the Spider Woman was a haunting movie with William Hurt, Raul Julia, and Sonia Braga. Hurt won the 1985 Best Actor Oscar for his performance which did not involve mailboxes or rabbits as far as I can recall.

Once I had an evil eye charm given to me by an elderly traveling coworker.  Alas, I added the charm to a wire sculpture. The old blue eyes mystery of the Florida swordfish reminded me. I never had one of those creepy rabbit's foot key chains, thank heaven. I'm horrified to find they are still "harvested" and sold, even on Amazon.  

And so I close another crazed rant to go reweave my web.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Maybe I'm still a larva

There's just so much I didn't even imagine I didn't know! Here I am, almost all grown up, and I'm just learning the life cycle of ladybugs.

We've discovered a ladybug tree at school.  All the stages are busy on this one crepe myrtle tree just outside the school office. Here's an adult emerging from its pupa. My larva photos did not turn out. For extra fun, there are black ladybugs with two red spots. Holy metamorphosis, Batman!

Crepe myrtle trees provide reliable landscape color through the hot season  in north Texas. You can spell it "crape", too, but it never looks as classy in my humble O. Crepe myrtles have interesting bark.

This morning I woke to news of a fast-flowing hip-deep Martian stream. Billions of years ago it deposited rounded gravel that became cemented together to form a sedimentary conglomerate rock. Not that my little students ever sit there like clueless lumps staring up at me with all the spark of soggy pasta...

I had to look it up, but gneiss is not a sedimentary conglomerate. Gneiss is a nice way to describe a metamorphic rock. It's gneiss to have nieces. Both my nieces are gneiss.

gneiss

   [nahys] 

noun

a metamorphic rock, generally made up of bands that differ in color and composition, some bands being rich in feldspar and quartz, others rich in hornblende or mica.

I love that the Mars rover is named Curiosity, and I hope curiosity is contagious! Every teacher would love to ignite more sparks of curiosity.

Gneiss probably comes from German and Old Norse for spark. It's an igneous rock transformed by heat and pressure. And, of course, igneous derives from ancient word roots for fire with a sacrificial connotation.

It's hard to explain "knife" to young readers, you know? And now it seems that "gnocchi" is more closely related to knuckles than ignition. The pasta is pronounced either nockey rhyming with hockey, or nyuckey, which doesn't sound all that appetizing.

gnocchi 

1891, from It. gnocchi, pl. of gnocco, from nocchio "a knot in wood," perhaps from a Germanic source akin to knuckle. So called for their shape.

Gnow don't get me started on rhymes, as I've got to go talk to Gepetto.

head and shoulders gknees and toes
head and shoulders gknees and toes
eyes and ears and mouth and gnose
head and shoulders gknees and toes
gknees and toes

And to complete this ramble, here is Andy Williams singing Cole Porter's "You'd Be So Gneiss To Come Home To"... you'd be so nice by the fire...

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Compound eyes and overstuffed sinusii

I'm so very thankful to have a teaching job that does not depend on outcomes of standardized tests. The teachers who inspired me as a child, and those who jump-started my sons were not constricted by requirements to teach to the test. Their motivation came from their gut to make a profound impact in children's lives.

Current expectations for teaching take all the joy out of a profession that used to thrive on creativity and deep connections with individual children. It's a testament to the heart of so many educators that they are still working in schools without support from their administrators and districts, and without essential involvement from parents.

Our teachers have become the 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. primary caregivers for this generation of children.  Teachers are so bogged down dealing with basic nutrition, hygiene, health and behavior problems it is a miracle that kids are still learning to count and to read. Teachers are providing emotional support and parenting guidance to a needy generation of parents lacking basic understanding of child development stages and the consistent sleep and meal routines so essential for healthy families.

Still have a stuffed up snout, but I must get on with planning the art classes for the semester. My goal is to link observations in the school garden to art projects and concepts across the age groups. Working with kaleidoscopes, wire kitchen strainers, spyglasses, colanders to prepare "visual aids" about the compound eyes of blue dragonflies.

Attended an all-day workshop Saturday for  required clock hours. The morning session bogged down with roll calls and registration snafus.Glad I'm not on the student side of the chart five days every week.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Little black spots before my eyes

The headcold came on slowly, just raw throats in the nighttime for a week.  Easy to blame on ragweed pollen.  Mild earache and slight stuffy nose, just job-related germ-sharing in the preschool room.  Dragged myself through a day at the library Saturday, cursing students and hanging on for a round-the-clock snooze.

Sunday the spots started.  Fell asleep while doing the crossword puzzle to wake up with newsprint on my cheek.  Fell asleep on the couch until a text message from my boss woke me:

We found this snake on our walk, 
caught in the erosion control netting. 
We set him free. Can you ID?



Just a bit of groggy field guiding and googling to identify the speckled king snake. It's a mighty handsome snake I don't really want to meet. Or maybe I do, ah-choo! King snakes are constrictors that eat other snakes, lizards, rodents, and birds.

Things deteriorated from there despite a Skype session with my intergalactic stellar grandbaby. My youngest texted asking what movie he had watched as a child with a silver spaceship and time travel. 
That would be "Flight of the Navigator".

I wondered why I was seeing zipping black dots while I stared out the patio window for a couple zombie days. Was this headache a migraine? Brain cancer? Decongestant side effect? Orange juice overdose? The slow-moving green specks that occasionally jumped from fence to plant were anole lizards, not side effects.

First sick leave day with zinc therapy, vitamins, cough Rx, inhaler, saline solution, ibuprofen and decongestants I was only able to nap and play online Legos at Build With Chrome. Second sick day, I'm lots more perky, still snozzy, but able to see that those rushing black dots are tiny scurrying mice on the patio. No OTC meds will get rid of the mice. Maybe I can borrow the speckled king snake!


© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder