eCache

12 of 12 March 2010

A big day with lots of activities kept me moving. I am so exhausted. Despite the rain, the weather is breaking, which is helping us with being upbeat. Share our day with us.

Fritz and I drove through downtown Millville to check out the sights this morning. We love this old Ivory Soap sign.

We were blessed with two boxes of wonderfully rich books to add to our classroom library. I have been busy adding the titles to our online card catalog.

Lunch at Michael’s Pizza was a bit disappointing today. The new guy wasn’t there; his pizza is good. The normal guy cooked this . . . it was spotty, but still better than Joe’s. No meat today . . .

Today the students made Irish Potatoes. They will need to teach a class of kindergarten students next week how to make these. This went extremely well. The students did a great job!

Michael Dooling presented to the students today. He is a children’s book author and illustrator. He put on a fabulous assembly. The students were amazed at his craft . . . as was I. He painted a boy with the help of a couple students. That is Dooling’s wife with him.

Dooling posed for a photograph after I snapped the shots with the students.

Beetle danced this evening. The studio has closed-circuit television so we can watch her lesson. My tiny dancer did a great job with tap and ballet tonight.

Beetle and I attended the Fairy Tale Ball tonight. Beetle was all about drawing early on. She is so talented. Her first drawing was an abstract, as she explained to me.

Beetle playing Skittles. I helped out with the Skittles game . . . it was the precursor to bowling. Beetle enjoyed playing, as did every other child. It’s tough setting pins by hand on one’s knees.

Beetle made a fairy princess hat and then modeled it. She had so much fun this evening. From the moment she woke up, Beetle expressed eagerness to return to the Fairy Tale Ball. I am happy that all lived up to her expectations.

Finally, on the way home, we stopped by McDonald’s for a Shamrock Shake. Such a glorious evening should be punctuated with a treat. And there’s nothing like a Shamrock Shake.

Tags: 12 of 12, Beetle, classroom, Cumberland, Education, food, Millville, New Jersey, restaurant

Moat

SH024D

Disguised coordinates: 39.502517 -75.5373

Have you seen this in Delaware?

• Find the exact spot these photographs were taken. Post your find along with a photograph of you at the spot here.

Tags: Delaware, GPS Games, ShutterSpot

Dot . . . Dot . . . Dot . . .

It appears Gypsy Smokehouse is out of business. I am not surprised, but it is sad. Their Southern Pride smoker is for sale . . . Michelle Malkin advertises an open thread, yet registration to her site has been closed for years . . . Racial discrimination in pricing of Barbies or inventory control? . . . Excellent videos on how to break down a chuck roll . . . How did my watch become three days out of date? . . . Driving through Buena the other day I saw a few children playing on the front lawn of a house. Three of them were kicking a ball while a fourth was taking a leak by the tree . . . Gert has the pet frog in the classroom, yet I am the one who buys the crickets each week . . . There is something about March. The weather is breaking and two days until the clocks change. This is when I used to see lots of Grateful Dead shows . . . According to YouTube, because I watched JB’s Smoked Chicken and Ribs video, it has recommended I watch Tiger Woods’ presser. What is the connection? . . . RIP Merlin Olsen . . . I watched my first baseball game earlier this week. Bring on the regular season . . . hankering for paella . . . big day tomorrow and I am wondering how I am going to procure food, not only when, but what since it will be a meatless Friday . . . Facebook is where different groups of friends should never meet . . . Hey, any locals want to get together for a friendly BBQ cookoff sometime? It would be a fun excuse for a party . . .

Tags: BBQ, character, Cumberland, food, Football, Grateful-Dead, Millville, New Jersey, restaurant

Graduate School, Part One

Once spring 1993 arrived I was a full-time student again commuting from Cape May to Glassboro.

The very first thing I ever taught was my adult classmates how to make an origami butterfly. Each of us was assigned/selected a topic. I spent a week or two (whatever amount of time we were provided) practicing in a bar. Each night after work (I was waiting tables at the time) we would go out for cocktails. I’d take a stack and practice. I then began teaching my friends how to make these. I then created a board with each step and successfully taught my peers. Pretty cool.

Olivet School
I took classes through the summer. My first in-classroom experience was at the Olivet School in Pittsgrove. I was teamed with another graduate student, Mike from Atlantic City. We we assigned to a first grade class. I really enjoyed the experience.

I recall teaching the students the number nine. We used a balloon on a stick to model. I also recall making a bulletin board with a tree. I have little artistic talent, but I was Renoir compared to Mike. His tree was dreadful.

Wood School
After leaving Pittsgrove, Mike and I headed over to the Wood School in Millville.

Johnstone School
My student teaching experience was in a third grade class at the Johnstone School in Vineland.

That summer I completed my thesis The Effects of Multimedia On Student Writing. Interestingly, I entered Glassboro State College, but was graduated from Rowan University.

Tags: biography, Bob, Cumberland, Education, employment, FAQ, Millville, New Jersey

Post-Boston

Defeated, I found myself once again in my parents’ home in New Jersey. I had to admit to myself that my way hadn’t worked. But rather than beat myself up over all that had gone wrong, I have always felt proud of how I reacted. I decided to start making decisions that were in my best interests. Some never understood that for the previous few years, my decisions were being made with someone else in mind.

The first thing I came to terms with is that as much as I would enjoy going through the CIA, I had no desire to remain in the restaurant industry. That was an easy decision, what was not easy was determining what I would do instead.

I had at one time fancied myself a university professor of philosophy. I kept looking at PhD. programs. All required a foreign language. At 26 I had learned a little about myself by then and I knew picking up a language was not going to happen. My friend Steve had found his way to elementary teaching and he loved it. In addition, he mentioned how starved for male teachers schools were.

I began researching and there was a program at Glassboro that would be perfect for me. I was too late to enroll in the first year of the MST program, so I set my sights on spring of 1993 to enroll.

That meant I had nearly 18 months … what to do?

I worked and I learned computers. My folks were the local computer experts and I spent my days learning. At night I built systems with my father. During the day I learned software from my mother. It was the best of both worlds. I was on the RIME network and a couple others. This was pre-Internet, as we know it today.

Being an adult living with your folks is not ideal for anyone. I decided to head to Florida to live with my grandmother for a bit and work. I figured I could pocket a good deal of cash for graduate school.

I was wrong. I worked at a seafood restaurant in Dunedin called Jesse’s Dockside. They were so overstaffed money was hard to make. On occasion there was a good payday, but not usually. I looked around and found a high-end placed named Bentley’s. I changed jobs. It was a mistake. While Bentley’s was an awesome place, it could not draw enough customers as it was so high priced. We did tableside service and I learned how to make Caesar salad from scratch, Bananas Foster, Baked Alaska, etc. Money flowed no better here. My grandmother had a stroke and it seemed prudent to get out of the way, so right after Christmas I returned to New Jersey.

Soon enough spring came and I became a student once again.

Tags: biography, Bob, FAQ, Florida