I'm having a conundrum. I'm slated to teach my own freshman English class next year, and to be partially responsible for teaching it next semester. This semester, I'm tutoring in the campus writing center and I'm also taking a "How to Teach Freshman English!" class.

The problem is that I don't believe in freshman English. I'm sorry, but you can't transform a grammatically challenged person with minimal research skills into a functional writer in fifteen weeks. You just can't. Either you've been on the ball since elementary school, doing your Daily Oral Language and writing your book reports, or you haven't. Structuring a paper, putting the commas in the right place, reading comprehension...these are skills that one acquires over the course of years, not weeks.

Not to mention that the English-challenged kids don't want to learn how to write a paper anyway. They just don't. The do their 10-pagers the night before they're due, without a thought to all of the punctuation and organization lessons they've slept through all semester.

I've got a small amount of experience in this field. I was a "student mentor" for my Jew's freshman English class once upon a time. She was pretty hopeless about the whole affair...she knew that the improvement from the beginning of the semester to the end was minimal, that she hadn't made a writer out of anyone in her class. My Jew had no delusions.

So what can I do? I get a tuition waiver and a stipend. I would, eventually, like a job -- and this experience will help. I just have to suck it up, smile and nod, and pretend that I'm doing something worthwhile. And that blows.

The Onion changed their site yet again, and this time, its even harder to ignore the obnoxious ads. I don't know why I still check the publication every week, I rarely find things on the website very amusing anymore. I think The Onion has really gone downhill since their move to NYC back in 2002. Savage Love is still good, but thats because Dan Savage is still the same, if not even more awesome with age. What are your thoughts on the way things have changed over at The Onion?

Hurricane update:

Tim and Sara are fine. They are staying with some friends in West Lafayette, LA, about half way to Texas. They can't return to their apartment for a week, though, and they won't have power for a month.

How are all you girls doing? Thought I'd post something since the site is looking all new and snazzy and there's not been many new posts lately. The whole being pregnant thing is definitely hitting me lately. My belly button is half popped out (just the lower half)and I have outgrown all but 2 of my maternity shirts. This week I'm hitting up Motherhood Maternity and hoping to get lots of good sales. Ella is growing so much that my skin is burning (even with LOTS of lotion) from all of the extra stretching. I am going to have Jacob take some good pictures of me and the belly in a few weeks (when I'm 30 weeks along) and he will definitely edit out the nasty stretch marks! I'll post a link to those when they are all ready.
(Lauren - remember Kim Barber at Rainbow Falls and all those stretch marks that came out the sides of her swimming suit? I tried my suit on and was totally happy when I didn't see any of mine sneaking out of the suit, yet!)

Jacob and I are packing our apartment up and house searching around the Oshkosh/Appleton area. He's had some great interviews and some promising leads so within the next week or so I'm sure he'll have a job all lined up. I'm anxiously awaiting my first subbing call of the year - I wonder how early I'll get called?!
Guess who is turning an even number in 12 days?! I love being an even number, I don't have any idea why, but I just do! I'll be back in Crapids for my birthday for the first time since I turned 18 - the shower Amy is throwing us is on the 10th.

How's school going for everyone? Lauren did you start yet? Erica what kind of fun bug stuff are you doing? Did you guys get anything from the hurricane? Have you heard if Tim & Sara are okay? Sig what's going on with you - how's the writing going? Urs - thanks for working on the blog - looks great :)

Signe let me be an administrator (thank you :] ). I made a few changes, the first was my idea to have a list of our current residences on the side panel. I just put down the locations I knew, so let me know the actual locations. The other changes I made were widening the side panel by 50 pixels and changing the archive display format so it isn't as confusing.

I'm thinking about doing some other, mostly CSS related, things. One of those concerns the three links on the side panel. How do people feel about those? I don't frequent Fark, but have Homestar and The Onion on my own blog. I also wonder how useful they really are. If anybody has any other ideas for what they want to see here, let me know.

Note: I have re-entered this entry and deleted the old one so as to edit the comments from the old one. I just entered all of those en masse. Lauren, let me know if you are comfortable with a link to your journal. Finally, do people have any other ideas? Special additions or ideas for different colors? I think I'm going to play with the way links display, let me know if you like it or not. I can do a lot of things with fonts, sizes and borders and possibly more so just suggest anything you think of.

Anyone interested in playing some online fantasy football? If you are interested I’ve set up a league using Yahoo and you are welcome to join in on all the fun! It’s free and if you’ve never played before it’s pretty easy and Yahoo guides you step by step through the whole process. We will be having a live draft on August 31st at night sometime. You just need to login 10 minutes ahead of time and have Java - if you can’t make the draft you can pre-rank your players and the computer will do the drafting for you.
Please comment on this post or email me at LaGraf@Charter.net and I will email you back with the league ID and password - also feel free to invite other friends and family members - the more people the better!

"Lesbian [swans], next on Geraldo."
"Ooooh...yummy."

Come on, kids. What movie is that from?

This, by the way, is one of my boss's favorite games. He picks really obscure movie quotes that drive us all nuts. Yesterday's was, "Why is the carpet wet, Todd?" Turns out it's from Christmas Vacation. I had forgotten that there were neighbors in that movie.

Working in the remote shelving facility is fun - I never deal with patrons or answer the phone, I just enter data about old books into the computer and gab with the co-workers. Sometimes, I see an amusing title - usually, like Ukranians in America or Alas Poor Yorick, they remind me of mst3k lines.

Today, I came across a very interesting book called Books that were Fatal to their Authors, the call number in Dewey is 809 D61. It was written in 1895 and has information about a bunch of authors grouped into the subject of their fatal book. If google wasn't monitoring me for speed, I might have read a little story or two.