Catching Up

Iron Man 2 comes out tomorrow. Can’t wait!

Ernie Harwell passed away. I heard his voice probably more than any other in my childhood. I’ll have to do a longer post about this soon.

Teachers remain under attack. National Teacher Appreciation Day came and went and I didn’t hear one person say anything about it. When I mentioned it at our faculty meeting on Tuesday our principal said, “Was that today?”

There are 18 days of school left with students. Then I have four days off (including the weekend) before summer school begins. Darned lazy part-time teachers!

May 4th has unofficially become National Star Wars Day. “May the 4th be With You…” Get it? How has it taken this long for someone to come up with that?

Speaking of Star Wars, I think I’m going to wait and have Sera watch it when it comes out on Blu-Ray (now that it’s been announced) and we have a bigger TV. And, we’ll watch it at night. I want her to get as close to the theater experience as possible. I just hope we are given the choice of watching the original version. Han shot first (and last)!!

I’m still not reading much in the way of comics. I’m still reading Invincible, Astro City, and that’s about it for regular comics.

Speaking of comics, I read the first 50 or so issues of Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead” in bookstores over the past few months in a huge compendium. I normally don’t go in for zombie stuff, but his name was enough to get me to start. And once I started, I didn’t want to put it down. AMC is making a TV series out of it. Good stuff.

I’m drawing again. I don’t have a lot of time for it right now, but in a few weeks, I’ll be back at it. I got a new graphics tablet to replace the one I gave to my niece over a year ago, and I really want to learn how to use it well. She has inspired me.

I wish I could use the font that I set up as my default in Microsoft Word as my font on the blog. It’s CCComicrazy from Comicraft.

Rumor has it that through a grant, every secondary math teacher in our system is getting an interactive whiteboard next year to improve math instruction. I’m very excited about this. I’ve been using a document camera/LCD projector for a few years now to improve my instruction, and the whiteboard will allow me to do animations, show videos to get realistic data to analyze, and better capture the attention of my videogame-oriented students. I’ve been reading blogs written by young teachers who are doing some really cool stuff in the classroom and I will never be too old to learn from them. I don’t want to be one of those teachers who quits because technology and new techniques pass them by.

Facebook is great. I have reconnected with so many people I haven’t had contact with in years! I communicate with old school friends (some of whom are grandparents!), some of my old teachers, former and current colleagues, and people who post on the Tigers message board.

Economics have forced us to cut way back on everything. We now look at our expenditures much more critically. For example, going to the movies, just for the three of us, is a $35 experience if we get popcorn and snacks. We can buy the Blu-Ray of a movie for $20-$25 when it comes out and watch it as many times as we want.

Speaking of not going to the movies, I have no interest in the Jonah Hex movie. The character was retconned into a supernatural figure a few years ago, and that aspect never appealed to me.

That's all I can think of for now. Hopefully I'll get a sketch or two done this weekend and can have something to show off.