Have I told you lately...

...that I love my job?


Sure, there are frustrations.
There are problem students.
There are discipline issues and kids who won't turn in homework.
There are many wasted minutes trying to get them to shut up.



But, there are also students who listen intently as I lecture, quietly taking pages of notes, because they find the subject interesting.
There are students who steal my coffee cup and encase it in jello, knowing I'll find it hilarious.


There are drama students who gave each other such convincing "black eyes" that we had numerous people fooled.
There are students who make me laugh so hard I end up crying.
There are students who spend all day Saturday working on a paper that's not due until Thursday, because they know they will be having a busy week.
There are students who work hard in everything they do, even if it seems like an inconsequential task.
There are also students who turn in papers, on time, well written, correctly formatted.....


attached to chocolate.

Have I told you lately I love my job?

So how many have you read?

If you have a facebook, you've probably seen this floating around already. Apparently the BBC believes that out of their list of 100 books, most people will only have read 6. I'm proud to say that I've read many more than that, but I still have a long way to go!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen – love it and teach it!
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – read all three
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte – love it, and teach it!
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – love it!
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee – love it, and teach it!
6 The Bible – of course!
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte – started, but never finished
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – read it in high school
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens – used to teach it, not my favorite

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – not all of them, but quite a few!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – read it
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger – read it in high school
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger – want to read it
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – taught it last year
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams – own it, but never read it
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky – only book I’ve ever hated
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck – should have read it in high school
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol – great story
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy – own it, but never read it
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis – read them as a child, re read some as an adult
34 Emma-Jane Austen – not yet, but I want to!
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen – not yet, but I want to!
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis – great book
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - :)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell – not my favorite
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery – read as a child
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding – graded lots of papers on this, but never read it
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen – started, but not finished
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens – own it, but never read it
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – own it, but never read it

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – taught it a couple years ago
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas – want to read it
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett – one of my favorites when I was little
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante – read parts of it
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens – read it
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White – loved it as a kid
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom – read it
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad – teach it
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas – want to read it
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – teach it
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl – loved it as a kid
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So I've read 26 of them, and I teach/have taught 8 of them. There are a bunch more I'd like to read, but also quite a few I know I will never get around to. Moby Dick? No thank you.War and Peace? I don't think so. I don't blame you if you don't want to repost, but I would love to know what you've read, and what books you love (even if they aren't on the list). I'm always looking for news things to read.

Friends

This summer I got to shoot pictures for two awesome young ladies.

J is a former student of mine, who is just starting her first year of college, and M is a current student of mine in her senior year of high school. These girls have been 'besties' their whole lives, so before J left I was able to get some pictures for the two of them. It was a fun morning, plus, it gave me more experience, so we all win!

While I so often hate the Central Valley, it does have its own, special (hot) beauty, so we capitalized on that while we could. When all fields were green and the hay was golden, we drove through the country looking for places to stop.

A few more of my favorite pictures from the day...