50 Random Facts

I really think this is a cool idea. A little fun self-indulgence, but I'd like to see what other people would write, so...
Piggybacking off of JL's cool random facts (allergic to Nickel? How do you make change? ;-) And fully recognizing that blogging is often little more than a socially acceptable excuse for pure narcissism, I present my personal

50 Random Facts About ME

1. Until at least 10th grade, any actual music facts I learned (lines & spaces, note values), I learned from my tyrannical but gifted children's church choir director.
   
2. I swear to God my dog drives me nuts on purpose.
   
3. My town doesn't put fluoride in its water.
   
4. I have over a dozen news feeds that I never read.
   
5. A month ago I got talked into subscribing to the Philly Inquirer because they would donate $5 of the $22 to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and throw in a $5 Wal-Mart card for me. I have yet to read anything but the circulars and coupons sections.
6. I had a major crush on my 6th grade Math teacher. Who I'm pretty sure is actually gay.
   
7. I started talking to my husband when I overheard that he had to work the night we band freshmen were to go pick up our new band gloves. I walked up to him and offered to pick them up and bring them to his room. Yes, tramp.
   
8. My daughter can recognize and say the following letters of the alphabet by sight: A, B, C, D, E, F, H, I, J, M, N, O, P, T, U, X, Y, Z . 17 months old, ladies and gentlemen!
9. My first job was working for a partially brain-damaged European gift shop owner who had been my neighbor before we moved when I was 8.
10. All my grandparents are still living, and some are still kicking.
    
11. My favorite color is blue.
    
12. My favorite food type is Tex-Mex, nachos especially.
    
13. I cannot parallel park to save my life.
    
14. My childhood pet was a cat named Smedly, who lived to be 17 (older than I was at the time). My parents named him after a club in some movie they liked.
    
15. My sister has been included in case studies at Johns Hopkins for her Neurally Mediated Hypo-tension.
    
16. My middle name is Rae, my Dad liked that Sally Fields union movie called "Norma Rae".
    
17. My first car was a '97 blue-green Subara Legacy. It was my sister's first car too.
    
18. My dad has had: a heart attack, skin cancer, testicular cancer, and a blood clot on the brain.
19. I'm deathly afraid of spiders. My husband is deathly afraid of spider webs. We're hoping our kids will do the bug-killing.
    
20. I lived down the street and around the block from Gettysburg College as a young child.
    
21. I have naturally red, curly hair, which requires 4+ products every morning to not look like an afro.
    
22. I was born on my paternal grandmother's 50th birthday.
    
23. Said grandmother refuses to this day to let me call her anything but "Mamu", since this is what I called her as a 1 year-old.
    
24. I hate how black eye-liner looks on most people, especially myself.
    
25. I was going to list all the guys I'd had crushes on before my husband, but I'm pretty sure blogger.com has a maximum character limit on posts. Yes, tramp.
    
26. My family's dog's name was Hamlet, after the play my sister was in at the time. (I wanted to name him Frasier.)
    
27. 4th grade was my worst year in school; My teacher was anything but understanding, and I was beaten with an awkward stick that year.
28. I hate clothes shopping, because if there's such an obesity epidemic, especially in our generation and younger, why is that all the women's clothing stores think all plus-sized women are over the age of 60? Giant flower prints! Gaaa!
29. I hate raw onions because you taste them all day.
    
30. I also hate coconut. Coconut flavoring is ok, though, just hate the texture.
    
31. I lied to my mom when I signed up for girl scout camp in 5th grade; I told her I didn't want to take the horseback riding camp because I was afraid of horses, and really it was because I was afraid of the older girls in that camp.
    
32. I swam on the YWCA's swim team for about 5 years. Backstroke was my best stroke. I actually moved backwards when I attempted breaststroke.
    
33. I love really watered-down lemonade.
    
34. I visited Germany in 1997 and my favorite part was spitting off the bridge in Heidelburg.
    
35. Even though I hate bathing suits, sandy stuff, sunburns, and any of the disgusting wildlife that lives in the ocean, I for some reason love the beach.
    
36. I've played French Horn since 4th grade, teach it, wish I played it more now.
    
37. Drinking makes me hot and more red-faced than usual, and I actually don't like the out-of-control feeling at all.
    
38. I strongly considered majoring in English/Secondary Ed. and becoming an English Lit. teacher.
    
39. I asked my husband out when I delivered his band gloves to him. He had plans with his roomie to go to a VIDEO GAME THING and declined...he luckily asked me again later.
    
40. I wore braces for 3 years on my upper teeth only. They didn't fully work.
    
41. I hate going to bed by myself.
    
42. I developed gestational diabetes when I was pregnant with my daughter, and my major food craving was, of course, pancakes. Life ain't fair.
    
43. I have a pair of chunky-heeled, black thong sandals from 8th grade in my closet that I still wear regularly.
    
44. My daughter can recognize and say the following numbers on sight: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9
    
45. Elmo and my mother in-law can probably take more credit for #8 and and #44 than I can, but I love them both anyway.
    
46. I have a major problem with parents who "try for a boy/girl", due mainly to a video from social studies class I saw in Jr. High about the orphan baby girl crisis in China that made me cry in class.
    
47. I lived in Gettysburg, PA, until I was about 21, and for the life of me can't understand why anyone would want to vacation there, ever.
    
48. My preschool teacher, Ms. Jane, nick-named me "Megalla-Megalla", and still asks my mom how I'm doing.
    
49. I suck at piano and wish I had the time and drive to actually learn to play well. Guitar too.
    
50. I freakin' love board games .
    

Except I hate Starbucks Coffee.

Otherwise, right on.


Created by OnePlusYou

A little help?

I have a student, let's call him, um, John. He's in 3rd grade. He has fine motor skill issues, barely writes legibly unless he tries, and is hyperactive and pretty darn lazy. And that was before.

Friday, January 18th, John lost both his parents. He was at home, before school, playing on the computer in his room. Sponge Bob. His father and mother were in their bedroom. His father's mortgage company was on its way to bankruptcy, and rumor had it, his mother was having an affair. Just lovely, huh. According to good a friend and neighbor who knew them well pieced it together from regular contact w/ their family, it went like this: Dad found out one way or another about mom's affair. Dad flew off the handle, and beat Mom over th e head with a heavy ceramic coffee carraffe. Blunt trauma to the head. Mom's dead. Dad "calmly" tells John that it's time to leave, and instead of school, he takes his son to grandma's house, and calls him out of school that day. Makes arrangements for the older son not to go home on the bus later, but get sent to Grandma's too. After dropping John off at his mother's house, Dad drives south to the Delaware-Memorial bridge, stops the car, gets out, and jumps. They found his body about 3 weeks later.

Yes, this is the stuff of a horrible TV movie. Doesn't end there.

John and big brother (half-brother, not belonging to Dad) are kept out of town for a week. When they come back to school, after much school counselor sessions here and many fearful tears from the younger kids who think their parents are going to die too, all is WEIRD. John was told his parents "died in a tragic car accident". H e knows nothing of how his parents died. His mother's family, who is closer to the school and I believe have custody, want him told. His grandmother doesn't want him to know (I guess until he's older?) and because the father left him in her care, she has a partial custody claim as well. They fight, in and out of the school counselor's office. Vicious. They get the courts involved, and until it's settled, there's a gag order - nobody can say anything to him about how his parents died (keep every kid at school from telling him on the playground, though, I dare you to try!) But so far, supposedly, he knows nothing.

Meanwhile, John is a mess. He's gone from pretty darn bad before this whole event, to very near uncontrollable. On recorders, he blasts air through it, throws it in the air, smacks it on desks, jumps, dances, throws pencils, and screams in class. He has moments of calm, but you look at him and see it all bubbling in him, just under the surface. He's a pressure cooker. He knows his parents are dead, he knows something worse happened, and he knows everybody else knows but him. He also knows that we all can't touch him.
What are we going to do? The kid lost his parents, his world, everything! What do you do, threaten to call home? Take away recess? For weeks, the rest of his class would gasp and give you dirty looks if you so much as suggested that John follow directions. Meanwhile his disruptions don't stop, and they're always JUST this side of violent. He knows where the line is, and he spits on it, but that's it. His class is way behind, and now they're starting to mind his behavior. Their concert is in a month, and they all know who it is that's squeaking, wailing, and otherwise sucking it up big-time.

I meet with his teacher - poor Kate, how she comes to school every day is beyond me. The guidance counselor just says to treat him "carefully" but that he's still supposed to function as a 3rd grader. Ok....how, exactly? Seriously, what do I do with this kid? If a 'normal' kid acted like this, he'd be in the principal's office, kicked out of class, and kicked out of the concert. I don't have that option.

My only consolation is that he already told me that he's not coming to the evening concert for the families because he "doesn't feel like it". PLEASE let him keep that promise, the one day he was absent that class sounded absolutely fabulous. What's worse, we're all sure that some day soon, John is going to blow. He's seething. He's also calculating. Some outbursts he looks like he planned carefully, some it looks like the pod people took over his body. His eyes are blank, he can't speak, he flails and falls off his seat. Then he looks around to see who saw him. Then he throws a pencil to punctuate it all. Your teacher instincts kick in and you go to rain down fire and brimstone on the misbehaver, and then you remember, it's John. Right now, he hasn't hurt himself or anybody. But we're all scared that he'll do worse.

But what can we do? You can't suspend a kid whose parents were the murder/suicide story on the front page of the paper for over a week. What do you do to discipline a child who 1) doesn't care, because why care about anything anymore, and 2) knows full well that you can't do a thing to him anyway, and that you don't really want to. You send him to the guidance counselor for the umpteenth time, taking him out of instruction he sorely needs, but he sits there, refuses to talk about anything, refuses to admit that his behavior was even the least bit questionable, and gets sent back, untouched. Why should it help? Nobody can give him his mom and dad back, nobody matters anymore.

A lovely parent from PTA who was good friends with the mom told his teacher this, and she passed it on to his other teachers: "I knew her, and how much she loved her boys, and she would be horrified if she knew he was like this now. For her sake, please don't let him act this way. She wanted better for him." Yeah. *sniff* I've toughened up on him lately, but even that doesn't have much effect. It's just me yelling at him more, rather than letting behaviors go. He's still exactly the same.

The little girl he sits next to is terrified of him. I can't keep moving him around, either. Too obvious. Oh, and I swear to God his best friend, who previously wasn't much of a problem, has decided to start acting out as a distraction from John's behavior. They almost compete. Now what?

So what do I do? Anybody? Got anything?

80's and 90's music lyric quiz. Obviously 90's music sucked.

Got a 65.5 Apparently I was too busy watching my little pony or being born or something like that. Good 80's quiz though.



You would think that the decade that you spent in jr. high and high school would have music that would stick with you. Nope. I was too busy with showtunes and practicing for district 7 band. :-) Time not wasted, but I had no clue - NONE - on most of these. And several I got right only because I remembered hearing them in Weird Al polka versions. A trophy to my Nerdiness:

What I do when I'm bored.