Yelp!

I verbally yelped when I heard about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win on Friday. It was surprising. But I think it speaks to the change that's possible with him in office and the hope he brings the people of this country and perhaps even more importantly, the world.

I also yelped earlier in the week about this:


I looked back at my blog and the date corresponds to almost when I posted buds on the Christmas cactus last year. Funny.

Also, I was delighted to see:
on the curtain in my living room today. Can you tell it's a little lady bug.

Otherwise, things are going well.

Still Smiling

So I gave the guy (not my student, but the guy I'd been on a date with) from my "What they do, not what they say..." post a few weeks ago a second chance. We had a movie and dinner date last weekend. And yesterday, we spent the good part of the rainy day together. We had wanted to go hiking but decided on indoor activities instead. So, we went bowling. This was New England style bowling. I had never been candlepin bowling before - apparently this has been around since the 1880. It's like normal bowling, but with thinner pins and smaller balls without holes. In each frame you bowl three balls. It was hard to get the hang of and I was beat the first two games (in fact the first game I only got 22 points). My date made the observation that I seemed to do better when I was really following through with my throw; this proved to be completely correct once I started paying attention to it. By the last frame, I got a strike and then knocked all 10 pins down on the second ball of the extra frame. At the beginning, I was worried how it would all work out, but I would totally go again. We also had pizza at my favorite place and baked some awesome cookies (oatmeal with chocolate chips instead of raisins) at my place. It's going surprisingly well. And my prior comments about him can now be considered false. I think this will likely be the last time I blog about him. I just want to enjoy the moments.

Extensions...

I have two comments about extensions. First off, I do not grant them unless it's an emergency. If my students can't get things in on time, I don't think they will be able to meet deadlines in the real world. There should be some sort of penalty. But I do understand that they have a lot of demands on their time. These could be things that I also think are important or things that I don't think they should be spending time on in a million years. So I just make it a policy that I don't care why a paper is late, I just give it the late penalty.

The other extension connection is something I recently observed. It's the cell phone is an extension of the hand/ear of the current student. I have a classroom near my office and I happened to be walking back to my office as a class was letting out recently. At least 90% of the students pulled their cell phones out immediately after walking out of the classroom. They were texting, getting messages and making calls. It makes it really hard to navigate a hallway when it is full of students who are not paying attention to walking or where they are going. And it is very annoying.