friday cat in box blogging

My mom brought me a few things in this box and the cat has become absolutely entranced with it.

recycling shame

D. and I believe in recycling. Not as the all encompassing solution to this country's resource and energy problems, but as Something Good People Should Do Instead Of Throwing All That Stuff In The Trash. We get a lot of junk mail and grocery store flyers, and then there are all the empty wine bottles and assorted plastic containers that food comes in. I make a special effort to wash these containers and put them in the box in the kitchen from which they are transferred to the official box on the porch once the kitchen box gets full. Problem: We don't know when recycling pickup day is. As a direct result of this problem, the official porch box is full, the kitchen box is full, and I have stuffed something like three bags of paper and one bag of containers in the sun porch because I didn't want my mother to see our recycling shame when she was here last weekend. I used to think recycling pickup day was Thursday, same as trash day. I was relieved of this notion several months ago when lo and behold, the recycling didn't vanish on Thursday. It did, however, vanish on Friday. But I never hear or see a recycling truck on Fridays, and sometimes (not yet with any discernable pattern) I see my neighbors' empty recycling boxes on hm, Thursday afternoon. I'm starting to suspect it's something like the third Thursday and first Friday of the month. All in all, we've only managed to get the recycling picked up about twice since we've been here. The current recycling shame is not, however, as bad as the pre-Christmas recycling shame. Before Christmas, I don't think we achieved ANY recycling pickups, and as a result we had something like 11 bags of papers, 7 bags of containers, and 6 giant kitty litter boxes stuffed in the corner of our kitchen (the sun porch idea had not yet struck me). After we finally caved and drove it all to the recycling center, we were amazed by how large our kitchen actually is. I'm sure I could just call the garbage department or someone and get them to tell me the schedule, but now it's become something like a challenge. Will I fail to solve the pattern and let the recycling once again smother our kitchen? Or will I emerge triumphant with our paper products vanishing on a regular schedule? I'll keep you posted.

the ladies can't resist the fresh scent of...lysol?

I find it highly disturbing that the Country Scent Lysol TM with which I just cleaned my toilet smells exactly like the cologne (?) one of The Boys I Made Out With In High School wore.

why i won't be going to my high school reunion

Writing yesterday about AP tests and classes in high school led me to thinking about my high school experience. I don't think a lot about high school, It's been 5 years (!) since I graduated and I only keep in touch with a handful of people I know from that time. I hated high school. I went to the same private school for elementary and middle school. It was a small but very good school with only about 25 kids in each grade and very individualized learning. Each year we were all split up into at least three groups for things like reading and math, and I never felt forced to work below my level. I took Algebra in 7th grade because hey, I knew how to do the math. Especially once we got into middle school, we were offered a lot of freedom. There were no bells for classes, you knew that you had 5 minutes to do what you needed to do and were expected to show up at your next class on time. And you know what? People followed by the rules. During lunch we were allowed to play in the gym or go outside (but not leave the campus), and due to a 6 day schedule we could take art AND choir AND band AND TWO languages. My parents decided to switch me from this school to a Catholic high school with 1,300 students when the time came. I'm still not entirely sure what their reasoning was, I think they believed my original school was too small and I needed to be exposed to more people and a larger variety of classes before I went to college. I spent the first two years there being absolutely miserable. I only knew 2 people out of 350 in my freshman class; both boys, one of whom was borderline learning disabled. Everyone else coming into the school arrived with their classmates from the feeder Catholic elementary schools or with a large group of people they had attended the public middle schools with. They didn't all know each other, but they basically all arrived with a group of friends. In addition to not knowing all those kids in their preformed cliques, I was placed into french and math classes with juniors and a biology class with sophomores. This meant I was only spending half the day with kids in my own grade which gave me even less of a chance to make friends. I spent two years dreading getting out of bed in the morning and I had very little that resembled a social life. Now, had I been a different person, it might have been a little easier. I'm not a social butterfly today and at the time I was rather shy. But I had been friends with just about all the kids in my grade in middle school, plus half the kids in the grades above and below me. In terms of that school, I was one of the popular kids, and it was a great shock to my system to suddenly become invisible. One might wonder why I didn't just hang out with the kids I was friends with at my old school, but circumstances conspired against it. Having kids leave for larger high schools was kind of a rite of passage for that school, and less than half of my original class remained at the start of freshman year. Being an excellent private school, kids had come from perhaps a 50 mile radius to attend. Many of them returned to their local public high school, one good friend's family moved to Atlanta, and my closest friend left for boarding school in, funnily enough, the St. Louis area. Had I remained at my original school no doubt I would have become friends with those new kids, but I was suddenly an outsider there. Perhaps even more than not having friends, I hated the atmosphere of that school. We had uniforms, and I still resent the fact that girls had to wear skirts year-round, even when it was -5 degrees outside in January. Demerits and/or detentions were issued for many violations such as: having your shirt untucked, being just a moment outside the door when the bell rang, speaking quietly to someone in study hall, or not having white socks for gym class. I hated being treated like we were all a bunch of little delinquents who had to be kept firmly in check. I once received demerits and detention for needing to use the bathroom between classes, having to wait for a stall, and being 5 seconds late into the classroom. The passing period was only 6 minutes despite the fact that the furthest classrooms were almost half a mile from the gym. We were not allowed outside under any circumstances between the first bell and the end of the day. I had played volleyball and soccer in middle school, but was no longer allowed to participate in either sport because my mother didn't want to deal with the practice schedule and number of games required for the competitive division that the largest schools played in. I hated the inflexibility of our schedules, we had the same classes at the same times every day, and you could only choose two electives. Depending on the year, science was seen as an elective. We had to take religion classes. Half of freshman year English class was a mythology unit, which I had already covered in far more depth in 6th grade. The biology and chemistry teachers were ridiculously bad. Again, I repeat, science was an elective. The only year I paid attention in English class was AP English senior year, the other years I spent my time reading the 3/4 of the textbook that we didn't cover in class or reading other books on my lap. Come to think of it, reading other books was how I spent most of a year in chemistry, too. At that school, everything was this giant high school cliche. The big social events were basketball and football games and the 'mixers' afterwards. The football players hooked up with the cheerleaders. Looking back it makes me throw up a little. At my old school, there was no football team or cheerleaders. And dammit, I LIKED it that way. That paragraph of whining is ridiculously long, but i REALLY hated it there. I never rebelled or anything, I was a very well behaved kid who cooperated with the system, but it didn't mean I wasn't miserable. I did make friends junior and senior year, and I got pretty good grades and took all those AP tests and got a scholarship to a pretty good university, but still. I occasionally have nightmares where I have to go back to high school. Perhaps my complaints aren't that bad, considering that some kids are bullied, beaten up, neglected by teachers, etc., but oh, what a soul-sucking prison it really was. If I had to go to that high school, what I learned could have easily been taken care of in two years - 3 years of history, 4 years of science, 2 years of french, 4 years of math fits neatly into two years of 7 classes a day - and then spent some time in community college. If I had the chance to do it again, I would have gone to my original school. They offered a better variety of better classes, and if it meant I ended up with a small group of friends - well, my eventual group of friends was no larger than 25 anyway. Making friends in college would have been no harder since everyone is new, and I would have been better prepared academically. It doesn't really matter, though, because I can't take it back, and even if I could I wouldn't really, because I met D. through my best friend from (the big, awful) high school. I'll just consider him my reward for putting up with those four years of misery.

AP testing, one two three

Today, I read this article (and ensuing discussion here) with some interest. The assessment of school rankings merely by the percentage of students taking AP or IB tests seems pretty lazy, when there are many other pieces of information that could be included to more completely rank a school. What does taking AP or IB tests tell us? Not much other than the schools push it and can cough up the $75 or so to pay for the tests. It seems that even taking into account how well students do on AP exams would be a better indicator of school quality. I took 5 AP tests in high school and did well enough on all of them for some sort of college credit except for French, although I later tested out of the 3 semester language proficiency so there you go. (I ended up with enough college credit to finish a semester early, although this did not actually happen due to changing my major rather late in the game). Not a lot of kids in my high school took AP tests, probably about 25 out of 300 seniors sat the ones for which there was a specific AP class (English, Calculus, American History, and Psychology), with a few people taking the language ones or a science one on occasion. My high school had three tracks: remedial, regular, and honors, with about 1/3 of the kids in honors, 1/2 in regular, and 1/6 in remedial. AP classes and the test at the end of the year were only for the brightest students, the ones at the top of the honors track. It seems highly unlikely that having more of the honors kids or the average kids take the AP tests would have made my school better in any way. That said, my high school was and still is private, so it wouldn't really matter in this case as private schools were not included in the listings. I believe the point still stands, though - that having lots of kids who are not on an educational track to do well on AP tests take those tests does nothing to indicate that a school is 'good'.

the show me state

Missouri's subtitle (tagline? slogan? theme?) is "The Show Me State". Since moving here, D. and I have been trying to figure out exactly who is supposed to be showing what to whom, without ever coming up with a good answer. But now, I think I'm starting to figure it out. Missouri has a surprising number of things to do and sights to see that I never expected to find here, and I imagine this is true for a lot of other people too. So the exchange goes something like this: Me: I like wine. Not like there's going to be anything to do with wine in Missouri. Missouri: Oh, I'LL SHOW YOU wine! Me: I like caves. Got any caves, Missouri? Missouri: I'LL SHOW YOU some badass caves! Me: I like climbing mountains. How bout that one. Missouri: I got nothin'. Anyway, the point being that there are lots of cool things to do around here that most people aren't expecting, so the slogan seems to be along the lines of hah, I'll show you what not to expect. Kind of feisty of them, really.

big surprise, this one

Jolly good, wot! Anyone for tennis? That'll be ten ponies, guv. You're the epitome of everything that is english. Yey :) Hoist that Union Jack!

How British are you?