I recently collected a book report assignment and a weekly free write final draft. Here are three interesting pieces of student work that I got back:

Please read the following passage from a book report on Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry:

...It is about an African American family that struggle [sic] through racism. They struggle to get money, food, and clothes to shelter their family. The reason for this is because Taylor writes not with rancor or bitterness of indignities but with pride, strength, and respect for humanity. This book is...

Can you pick out the sentence that doesn't quite fit? The author has had questionable sentences before, but this one was enough for me to actually Google the phrase. It turns out that the quote is from none other than the New York Times review of the book, which is quoted on virtually every online book vendor's site. In response, I decided to make rancor one of my vocab words for this week and used the sentence in question for the weekly context clues sheet to see if she'd notice. She didn't say anything today, so tomorrow I'm going to give her the choice of rewriting the paper or taking a zero.

The next passage comes from a book report on Love Always Bites:

...JAKIRA AND TANYA JUST STARTED TALKING ABOUT STUFF AND THEY FOUND OUT THAT BOYS ARE WACK AND THAT THEY NEVER LAST LONG UNLESS THEY ARE JUST USING YOU FOR ONE OR MAYBE TWO REASONS.ONE REASON IS FOR SOMETHING TO BRAG ABOUT DURING TALK TIME WITH YOUR FRIENDS,AND THE OTHER IS FOR YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE BOYS AND MEN LIKE...[sic]

All I could do was underline the last part and write "OK." in the margin. Amazing.

This final piece is the best of all is the following piece, written by one of my most ... interesting students. It's supposed to be the final draft for one of the daily free writes that we do each day during the week. I give them topics that I hope make them think, but they often write on other topics, the worst of which was this:

Have you seen Christopher's teeth? Every teeth is thirty miles away. His skin is so burned, that in the night you couldn't see him three feet in front of you. Christopher's teeth are so butter that they actsually blind you. Christopher is so ugly that when he looked in the mirror his reflection said "may God be with you." Christopher is so dumb that if you ask him what the square root of sixteen he will say thirty-two. Christopher's mother is so fat that she needs two toilets to do her bisness. His mother is so dumb that she flunked head start. His dad's nose is so big he can hide the whole family in it. His clothes are so ragidy and tight, you think that he a crackhead supermodel. His sister is so retarted if you asked her to blow her nose she would play with her lips. His brother is so short by the time he get thirty he will be three foot four. I think his whole family jacked up. I'm gonna stop janking this man before he's had an ugly attack. [sic]

WTF, mate?

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Yesterday I happened to stumble upon this Zogby poll. It's a poll of West Wing viewers asking whether they prefer Congressman Matt Santos (D) or Senator Arnold Vinick (R) to succeed Bartlet as president. Here are the results:

Viewers of NBC’s The West Wing would prefer that Democratic Congressman Matthew Santos were elected the next President, giving him a 16-point lead over Republican Senator Arnold Vinick, a new Zogby Interactive poll finds. The interactive poll of 5,505 West Wing viewers was conducted from February 18 to 25, 2005, and has a margin of error of +/-0.7 percentage points.

Santos, the Texas Congressman played by Jimmy Smits, is the favorite of a plurality in the poll, which was weighted to ensure it reflects the partisan breakdown of the U.S. population, and not just the demographic that views The West Wing frequently or occasionally. Arnold Vinick, the California Senator played by veteran actor Alan Alda, trails significantly. The poll also found one-in-five viewers (19%) still undecided on the race, while 9% are not willing to support either candidate.

This is interesting for a few reasons.

First, I am very interested to see whether or not the show will fold to market forces and go with Santos. This is interesting because West Wing has tanked the past two seasons after Sorkin's departure, but picked up again this season. Will they make the conservative move and stick with a Democrat in office or will they shake things up with a Republican?

Second, I'd like to know why this poll was put in the field. A poll of 22,000 people isn't cheap. Are the writers polling viewers in order to decide who should ultimately take office? It would be a strange cross between politics and entertainment -- and I like it.

Third, this could all change soon. This coming Wednesday the episode focuses primarily on Vinick. Will viewers see him in a more favorable light afterward?

I personally am one of five people on the fence about the issue, but leaning toward Santos. Even though I am as staunch a Democrat as you can find, the idea of watching a political drama that runs contrary to my beliefs intrigues me. It could be interesting to see the the other side of things and see if it can make for interesting drama. There aren't real world consequences at stake here. Well, I suppose The West Wing might turn into Republican propaganda in a world already full of it. Hmmm... maybe it should be Santos.

Here is further breakdown of the poll:

Part of Vinick’s problems can be attributed to a gender gap. While he and Santos are tied among men, each getting 35% of the vote, Santos holds a commanding lead among women, where he outpolls Vinick by 53% to 22%.

Santos even outperforms Vinick when viewers are asked to put aside their own political preferences and answer which character would make for a more interesting show. In that instance, Santos takes 44% to Vinick’s 31%.

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Since becoming a teacher in August, my classroom has gone through several transformations. One of the better transformations is that Language Arts is now almost entirely self-directed. Instead of me lecturing at kids and telling them what they need to be doing, they have a list of things they need to complete each day and they are the ones ultimately responsible for doing it. It's very hands off from a teacher's perspective, which is weird, because I feel like I'm not doing much besides periodically yelling, "The volume needs to come down!" for much of the morning.

Anyhow, since moving to this setup, some kids finish early and have nothing to do. Telling them to read doesn't really fly, though I wish it would. There is no way that I'll let them waste the time doing something uneducational, so I started looking for educational games and activities. The first thing I did was buy three Scrabble boards. By the way, I'll rock your shit at Scrabble. They enjoyed that. The next thing I did was try to get a working copy of Text Twist on the crappy old computer in my classroom that isn't connected to the internet. I had one working, but the demo expired after playing for an hour. I'm currently looking for a crack so I don't have to dish out $20. I also started looking through an educational resource catalogue for things (I somehow get like two in the mail each week). Those educational catalogues are way over-priced, by the way. No wonder education costs so much to fund. But, while browsing through one I found something awesome: pattern blocks!

When I was in fourth grade I used to love playing with pattern blocks. They are (of course) the blocks in a bucket and come in six shapes: hexagons, trapezoids, rhombbi, squares, and triangles.

Playing with pattern blocks used to be my favorite thing to do in my fourth grade class. I always finished my work early so that I could go play with them. I figured that my kids would like them too. Plus, finding and repeating patterns is supposed to be a "brain-based" way of learning, which my principal is all about. Since having the bucket in class I've found myself making patterns, too. But I've graduated to much cooler patterns than I made in fourth grade:

These blocks aren't as cool as the ones I had in fourth grade because these ones are made out of plastic (it was about $10 more for wood ones) and are only half as thick as the wood ones. But, whatever, they kick ass. I can't wait to have a kid just so I can play pattern blocks with him / her. Perhaps s/he will be the engineer that I decided not to be. I also think they'd be great for putting on a coffee table, but maybe that's just me.

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I contemplated making this post about a month ago, but a rash of news has come out in the past two days that pushed this one to the forefront.

Since early 2001 I've thought Arnold Schwarzenegger would be a worse than poor choice for California's top office. I swore I would work as hard as I could in 2006 to keep him out of office. The loathing for the idea of a body builder and poor actor becoming governor took center stage in 2003, when I worked for Californians Against the Costly Recall. Needless to say, I was pretty upset when he took over as governor. In fact, I made my first post to this blog the day after the recall.

How could the people of California decide to put him in office office? This baffled me for a long time. But, the second shoe is finally beginning to drop and the voters are waking up to the reality of the situation.

In late January, a Field Poll was released indicating a 10% drop in Ahhnuld's approval rating -- down from 65% to 55%. For anybody counting (and I am), THAT IS ONE PERCENT LOWER THAN GRAY DAVIS' APPROVAL RATING AFTER BEING IN OFFICE FOR 10 MONTHS (LA Times).

This came in response to Ahhnuld's scathing State of the State address, which proposed, among other things, privatizing state employee pensions, tying teacher salary to performance, limiting teacher tenure, and revamping the redistricting process. Now there is a recipe for success in California politics if I've ever seen one: Piss off all state labor unions, especially piss off the teacher's union, and piss off the legislature. On top of that, he's pissed off nurses and various other constituencies that had worked with him last year. Oddly enough, Californians actually support teachers, progressive labor policies, and probably have no idea what 'redistricting' even means. Bravo, Ahhnuld!

These new initiatives have caused Democrats to finally come out from their covers and fight Ahhnuld. California For Democracy, one of Howard Dean's money-generating arms of his failed presidential campaign, has come out of the woodwork to oppose the ballot initiatives that Ahhnuld is pushing. Not only are they raising money to fight Gropenführer, they are using the same technique that the early anti-recall campaign used: blocking signature gathering efforts. This time, the internet is being used to harness firemen, nurses, teachers, union guys, and other activists to go to signature gathering sites to distract and dissuade would-be petition signers (SF Gate). Maybe we'll block them this time.

If that weren't bad enough, Ahhnuld is beginning to gather a following that he's not accustomed to. See, in the past Ahhnuld has had thousands of lemmings follow him in support, but that hasn't been the case lately. On a recent trip cross-country, protesters dogged the beloved Ahhnuld at his stops in Columbus and New York. He had to sneak into restaurants instead of making his grand entrances and alter his stump speeches to acknowledge the shouts of nurses from outside. New York Governor George Pataki didn't have to go in the back door, by the way.

The best part of the story is that Ahhnuld was confronted by a Santa Clara firefighter while at a fundraising reception with George Pataki at a fancy New York club. The firefighter payed for a trip to New York, put on a suit, and made a reservation at the upscale establishment. Once Ahhnuld was there, the firefighter went up to him to confront him about his plan to privatize state pensions. Ahhnuld's response was, "I'm a friend of the firefighters and I would never take anything away from them." The firefighter's response was a cold, "No, you're not a friend to us, sir. And what you're doing is wrong." They discussed the issue for a few minutes and Ahhnuld turned to walk away (LA Times).

Perhaps I have a renewed faith in a Democrat being elected in 2006. California State Treasurer Phil Angelides sees the turn of events too, which is probably why he is announcing his candidacy tomorrow (LA Times). Not that Angelides is very electable, but hey, more bad news for the once infallible Gropenführer.

Posted by at 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

It's not often that I gloat, but I think that yesterday calls for one of those rare occasions.

Yesterday was the UVA Student Council elections. Everybody knows I couldn't care less about Student Council because it does hardly anything besides build one's résumé. Despite this fact, I did enjoy the StudCo elections as an undergraduate. It gave me (and UDems) the chance to back candidates and put them in office like we would do in real life. It's like a Nerf election. It's great.

Anyhow, two years ago UDems and the Minority Rights Coalition stumbled upon a recipe for what now appears like guaranteed victory in StudCo elections. It's pretty simple:

      UDems + Minority Rights Coalition + Targeted GOTV = Victory

As it turns out, the UDems and MRC have somehow managed to back the same presidential candidate for three years in a row, creating a sizable voting bloc for the endorsees. Once a candidate has that, we utilize a program I wrote two years ago that sends targeted, personalized messages to voters.

Last night was a testament to how well the strategy works. UDems newest candidate for President, Jaquetta Upton, didn't have the intense campaign that UDems candidates have had in the past. In fact, some people estimate that Tom Gibson, another presidential candidate, spent over $1,000 and had a ton of people working for him. The anti-candidate Curran Jhanjee had all of the hype on the internet and the press. Both of these candidates had all of the things one might attribute with winning, but look what happened:

Saying that this race alone crown's the UDems' endorsement wouldn't be quite accurate, as Upton did have greek support. BUT- looking at the results for the Vice President for Administration does crown us. Okey Udumaga ran against Monti Lawson, garnering only the UDems and MRC endorsement and won with 201 votes. On top of that, UDems swept in all of the other offices, as usual. That's 3 years in a row. Threepeat. Dynasty.

Frats, Cav Daily, Apathetic Campaigns, and College Republicans: Why even bother? Get out of the way or get run over.

Here are returns from the past three years when we used my email program:

Spring 2004

StudCo President
Noah Sullivan: 2877, 50.52% (UDems Endorsee)
Greg Scanlon: 1279, 22.46%
Curtis Ofori: 998, 17.52%
Elliott Haspel: 540, 9.4%

Fall 2003

CLAS Representatives
Joshua Eubank: 1512 (UDems Endorsee)
Katie Willis: 1395 (UDems Endorsee)
Thomas Gibson: 1160
Shannon Hogan: 1020 (UDems Endorsee)
Darius Nabors: 927 (UDems Endorsee)
841: David Hondula
412: John Harkess


SEAS Representatives
John Yandziak: 413 (UDems Endorsee)
Amin Mehr: 141

Spring 2003

StudCo President
Daisy Lundy: 2006 (2% Penalty, 41 Votes)
Ed Hallen: 1830
Brad Harrison: 718
Write In Candidates: 93

Posted by at 7:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)