What In Tarnation?!?!?

…are greatly exaggerated.

To bad the rumors are being spread in a local (local in this case being Sullivan, not Rolla) paper, the Sullivan Independent News. Here is the scan of the article:

No, I’m not in jail. No, I did not sell meth. I better hurry up and finish this entry. Bubba wants to use the Internet, glad he’s not my cell room mate.
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Holes
PG

I dragged some folks to see Holes. I was very excited to see another of my favorite children’s books make its way to the big screen and I was especially excited because I recently finished reading the book to my class and they were excited about it. To top it all off, I learned that the author of the book, Louis Sachar wrote the screenplay, adapting his own book. The result? Absolutely fabulous! I loved it. The film makers realized that people going to see this movie were going to want to see the book, not something loosely based on the book. The adaptation is spot on, only a few changes were made to the story, and those changes were minor changes that would only be seen by someone who has read the book two or three times.

The directing complemented the source material. Acting was strong from all actors, you could definately tell that Jon Voight was having fun with the part of Mr. Sir. (”We ain’t kindergarteners in a sandbox!”)

Now my review of this movie is, admittedly biased. I love the book. Increasing my enjoyment of the movie were the memories of reading and sharing the book with my students. I was reminded of an interesting discussion that I had with my students about racism that sprang from the events of the book. Ah, good times. I give it an A! Go read the book and watch the movie.

Class dismissed!

To complement my Top 20 favorite movies of all time, I give you the beginnings of my Worst Movies of all time.
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Question of the Week:

Conversations with one of my students after he read “What the hell?” in one of his independent reading books:

Student: There is a bad word in my book.

Me: Have you talked to your Mom and Dad about reading books with bad language in it?

S: Yes. They told me to ignore it.

M: Can you do that?

S: Yup.

M: Good.

S: One question, why do they put words like that in books? They don’t need them.

M: Good question! If you figure it out, come back and tell me.

Class dismissed.

Testing begins today and I am a nervous wreck.

Last weekend was quite interesting.

I promised that I would be a problem captian for the state Odssey of the Mind. Basically it is a problem solving tournement for students from elementary school to high school. As problem captain, I was in charge of one of the problems. I was responsible for knowing all the rules for the problem backwards and forwards, training a team of judges to evaluate teams, make decisions durning the tournement, and deal with angry coaches and parents.

My specific problem was Fooled Ya!: (from the OM website)

The team is to create and present a performance that includes two characters who perform at least five “illusions” that entertain other characters in the performance. One of the illusions will turn out to be not an illusion at all — it will actually happen! The team will also include a special effect in its performance.

Teams must do this without outside assistance. No help from anyone outside the team. We saw some really nice solutions to the problem, one that really impressed me was from a high school team that performed without speaking, the story was told through original music, and movement, with all the illusions and special effects required, it was quite impressive.
The job of PC wouldn’t have been that bad except I was also assigned to be the head judge. The head judge, basically runs the event, making sure everything is on time, making sure the judges are well taken care of, giving scores to coaches and going over the results with them. Actually, doing those two jobs would have been fine but I was also assigned to be scorekeeper who basically crunches numbers from the judges. I was basically running around like a chicken with his head cut off. It was a bit too much. After the over twelve hour day I was ready to fall asleep Saturday night. And I did, till my alarm went off at 7:30 am so I could get to church on time. My presence at church was required on Sunday because ALL the sound guys were gone, I was the only one left. When I finally got up, I took a shower and then got dressed. I headed into the living room and I noticed the time on the digital cable box, 9:45!!!!! What!!!! Sunday School started at 9:30 and I had a 45 minute drive, I realized that I wasn’t going to make it to Sunday School. Then I started thinking… I didn’t really spend an hour and a half in the shower (though I would if I could). I went back into the bedroom to check out the time, 8:46… wait a second! What in tarnation!!!!! We jumped forward an hour! No one told me! I got finished dressing and jumped in my car and raced like a mad man to church. The cell phone call from the pastor was classic. Long story short, I got there in time barely.

I ate lunch with my parents (chicken and dumplings at Du Kum Inn, yum) and went back to their house to relax, I was still pretty tired. Until, my father said, “Chris, it’s 6:00 aren’t you supposed to be a church to run sound.”

“WHAT! NO!” I run out of the house and recieve another, classic phone call from my pastor. Long story, short, I was a couple of minutes late but they waited.

Not sure why this time change effected me so much but it really messed me up, I’m not quite back to normal.
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Good news! The Palms for my classroom came in today! I got the teacher model, but technology still needs to inventory the student Palms.

Wow it is after 7:00 pm and it is still light outside, not sure how I like this. Told you that the time change really messed me up.

Class dismissed!