a week's reprieve

Current Mood: annoyed by lower back pain and internal discomfort
Current Music: "Strawberry Wine", Deana Carter

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Anyone know where this quote is from without using Google? (I'd add that it was one of my favorite poems when I was six or so, but that really wouldn't help most of you except Mom...and it would get me some weird looks.)

~*~

Okay, so apparently having Internet in my apartment doesn't make me post on my blog more. I have a good excuse, though. Today was supposed to be a rayon-wide teachers' seminar where I presented two "open lessons" (i.e. I teach, my children are angelic and clever, and thirty-some people stare at me), so I was doing heavy-duty prep work. As it turns out, the seminar got postponed until next week because no one had thought to let the teachers know about it until Monday, and it might not be a seminar after all, but only the inspector for foreign languages and literature coming to watch me (Nelya says that she's a foreign lit teacher, which basically means Russian lit, and that she doesn't know English...neither do my director or my vice-principal, who will also be watching). And apparently if it's a seminar, someone has to give a presentation on theoretical material (hopefully not me). The director seems to have a big grandiose idea about how she wants this to go, but no one (Nelya, me, vice-principal, other vice-principal who is also an English teacher) seems to know what it is. The solution to this seems to be everyone telling me how I'm supposed to be presenting, what I'm supposed to be doing, and everything I've forgotten. I occasionally try and stick in my own ideas, but have resigned myself to the conclusion that this really has nothing to do with how I teach.

For those of you who are interested, the lesson topics are the life and works of J.K. Rowling (11a) and youth organizations in the English-speaking Ukrainian Diaspora (8b). And I did get to pick my own topics, based on the curriculum available.

~*~

The best music I've found since getting on the 'Net...Laura Bates and Brandon Foote are a folk/bluegrass duo who are apparently connected with Riverview now and sing in one of the worship bands. They just released an album, Jubilee, recently, and four of their songs are up on MySpace. I really like their sound and also how while the songs on the site aren't "Christian music" like you'd hear on Family Life Radio or Smile FM, they operate within a Christian vocabulary and mindset, which I almost like better. Currently debating whether to try and order Jubilee trans-Atlantic or just ask for it for Christmas.