Proud Pet-Owner

Well, I've finished all three sessions of the CTEL review (for the tests I take on Saturday). It was a lot of information--fortunately, it was all familiar and common sense to me. I actually enjoyed the sessions; I find myself fascinated by language acquisition and development, as well as cultural issues (I guess that makes sense since I grew up in another culture and I teach language to deaf kids). One student in the class, a science teacher, referred to the review sessions as "bulimic learning"--get it? He's learning all of this information just to regurgitate it on the test and forget about it forever. I thought that was an interesting analogy...

In other news, I went to an all-day conference about how to teach the life cycles of a butterfly to second graders. It was a very good conference, and I came away with lots I can use in my classroom.... as well as three sample caterpillars in jars. Instead of bringing them to my classroom (I'll wait until spring to do that unit because that's when I get the kit from the district), I brought them home to be the pets that I've always wanted. Pets that will only live for a couple of weeks, but pets nonetheless. They're in three separate containers, and I've named them Alvin, Simon and Theodore after my favorite cartoon chipmunks. They'll probably be butterflies by the time everyone gets here (I think). So exciting.

I need a puppy.