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Now Playing -  Crazy In Love by The Puppini Sisters Life - One thing Linz and I have always enjoyed is doing the local tourist things. We find that a lot of people never take the time to explore the area they live in and we've been guilty of that lately too. SO this weekend, we bit the bullet. The last weekend in March every year, the state of Maine's Maple Syrup makers or Sugarhouses have

A weekend or two ago, I visited my first Sugar Shack (or cabane a sucre). I always heard about this Quebecois tradition, but never quite managed to make the time to experience it for myself. So I and a few friends (and half of Montreal, it seemed! It was crowded.) went to Sucrerie de la Montagne in Regaud, Quebec on a bright, coolish, spring Sunday afternoon. What was the experience like? Photos and brief commentary below.

Below: Outside the main building where the banquet halls are to eat are located.

Below: Buckets on trees. Note. Snow on ground and noooo leaves. Arg!

Below: Things you do while waiting to eat…

Below: Inside the main banquet hall you….

Below: The main course…

Below: After all the maple sugar-laden food, wine & song, life looked like this…

Just kidding. : ) A fun time was had by all. I cut loose and played the wooden spoons. A lot. Must have been the maple wine (was it maple…? Everything was MAPLE!).

Teaching With Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach
by Sam M. Intrator

If you read my last couple of posts (minus the Daemon), you might wonder if I'm counting the days to retirement. Not even close to that! But some days I do need something to sustain the courage to teach my way until the moment when, just to use a recent example, a student compares me to Mo in INKHEART. Or some such. This little book of poems and essays has kept me going more than once.

"Teaching with Fire is a glorious collection of the poetry that has restored the faith of teachers in the highest, most transcendent values of their work with children....Those who want us to believe that teaching is a technocratic and robotic skill devoid of art or joy or beauty need to read this powerful collection. So, for that matter, do we all."
Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace and Savage Inequalities

"When reasoned argument fails, poetry helps us make sense of life. A few well-chosen images, the spinning together of words creates a way of seeing where we came from and lights up possibilities for where we might be going....Dip in, read, and ponder; share with others. It's inspiration in the very best sense."
Deborah Meier, co-principal of The Mission Hill School, Boston and founder of a network of schools in East Harlem, New York

Check out the great review and synopsis here. (I'm not being lazy; my copy lives at school on the shelves beside my desk!)

Today was Let Your Child Skip School Day Take Your Child to Work Day. Instead of 25 students, I had 12. It was the perfect day to share the book Once Upon a Banana, by Jennifer Armstrong (illustrations by David Small).

In this wordless (except for street signs) picture book, a monkey escapes from a street performer, steals a banana from a grocer's outdoor display, drops the peel on the sidewalk, and, well, you probably know the rest. One thing leads to another and then another.

We had great discussions from the very beginning. The monkey escapes in the end papers, the banana is stolen on the title page spread, and the monkey scampers away from the street performer while he is detained by the angry grocer on the copyright page spread. "It's like an...introduction," I said. "No, a PROLOGUE," corrected one of the students.

As we read on, they made inferences based on facial expressions and body language, made predictions, and used the terms "cause and effect" and "point of view." Then, right when the judge who accidentally stepped on the skateboard runs into the lady with the baby carriage, my Firecracker who was tipping in his chair fell, knocking his desk over, and dumping its contents on his head.

They thought it was hilarious (and no one more than Firecracker himself, who was not injured in the least) that this had all happened at the moment in the book when there's the most chaos.

And then someone brought up the time when I was reading BLOOD ON THE RIVER and the character Samuel punched the character Richard in the mouth and Richard lost a tooth. At that very moment, one of my students lost a tooth. At the time, we went, "Ooooh, ahhhh," because it was like I made my student's tooth fall out. But now it happened again.

"It's just like in INKHEART!" one of my super girl readers said.

"Yeah!" said another. "You're like Mo!" (That might be enough to help me make it to the end of the year!!)

After we explained to the rest of the class about Mo being able to read book characters to life, one of the boys commented that I better not read aloud any books with guns and killing.

"But I already have," I replied. (BLOOD ON THE RIVER currently and DANGER ALONG THE OHIO last year) "I must only be able to read into life things that could happen in a classroom."

"Read a story about cookies!" tooth-loss boy cried out.

"Read a book about Christmas!" begged another.

About a month ago, I shared an email that circulates periodically among teachers. It speculates about how a dentist would react if subjected to the professional degradation that is routine for teachers under NCLB. Here's another one that makes the rounds occasionally:

SICK OF THOSE HIGH PAID TEACHERS

I, for one, am sick and tired of those high paid teachers. Their hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work nine or ten months a year! It's time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do...baby-sit! We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That's right...I would give them $3.00 an hour and only for the hours they worked, not any of that silly planning time. That would be $15 a day. Each parent should pay $15 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now, how many do they teach in a day.... maybe 25? Then that's $15 X 25=$375 a day. But remember they only work 180 days a year! I'm not going
to pay them for any vacations.

Let's see... that's 375 X 180 = $67,500.00

(Hold on, my calculator must need batteries! The average teacher salary is $40,000.)

What about those special teachers or the ones with master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage just to be fair. Let's round it off to $6.00 an hour. That would be $6 X 5 hours X 25 children X 180 days = $135,000.00 per year.

Wait a minute, there is something wrong here!!! Teachers would earn more if we just paid them to baby sit!!