Grace wins a poster contest

When I was in middle school, my mom was all about winning contests. Please note that I said my mom, not me, not my my brothers, not my sisters, and not any other family members. My mom just wanted to see her kids succeed at something, and while that was nice, I really didn't want to be writing essays about who-knows-what in my spare time. Curating my National Geographic collection was much more fun. By 13 I had collected every issue from 1980 to 2002, had been gifted a monthly subscription for Christmas, and had plastered my bedroom walls with the map inserts. I still have all my past issues in boxes in my mom's basement and in Dan's mom's basement, and my mom bugs me every six months to get all those stupid magazines out of her house. I don't subscribe anymore because now National Geographic is less about geography and more about crappy environmentalism, which I don't give a poo about (nothing against saving the earth, it just doesn't tickle my fancy quite like information about the cultural customs of ethnic groups in Northern Thailand).

So anyway, against our collective will, my mom entered us in all these annoying contests. Somewhere there's a terrifying photo of me wearing a fancy Easter hat for the Easter Hat Contest. At the age of twelve I had a gig writing funny essays for the local free newspaper because my mom made me. Don't even get me started on the spelling bee, where I actually did get to the regional level. I was out in the fourth round because I spelled "assess" as "a-s-s-e-s", possibly becoming the first regional spelling bee contestant who actually had two reasons to be booted off the family-friendly stage.

I mean, it wasn't all bad. We did win lots of stuff and were showered in fame and fortune. I mean, I even got my name in the library catalog. I won a write and illustrate your own book contest about an Egyptian kid who got lost in a sandstorm. My prize was library immortality - to this day, you can go check out my book and bring it home for three weeks if you so wish. I still can't believe they rejected my book featuring anthropomorphic cleaning supplies, but whatever. And yes, it was funny. Think Toy Story, just better and with Harry the Hand-Vac instead of Buzz Lightyear. (I actually do have this story floating around on a computer somewhere.)

And thus, by the age of 12, I was actually pretty loaded. I had amassed 750 dollars in savings bonds, redeemable at some date in the future. I never did cash the bonds because my dad refused to acknowledge that I had ever received the bonds when I asked where they were ten years later. Fine, be that way.

But every year, without fail, my mom made us enter the most annoying contest of all time. The AAA Traffic Safety Poster Contest. It was the stuff of nightmares.

It should have been easy enough. The deadline was mid-January. They gave you a theme. You made a poster illustrating the theme. You submitted it. Life went on.

But no. We had at least five kids entering the contest in any given year and nobody actually gave a poo except my mom, who insisted that the posters not only be the product of hours of unnecessary toil but that each and every one was unique. First, you had to think of a snappy slogan for the provided theme. Ugh. Then you had to think of an idea to illustrate the snappy slogan. Ugh. Then you had to trace your idea in pencil on the poster board. Ugh. Then mom had to tell you that your drawing sucked and needed more interest and symbolism. Ugh. Then you had to erase it all and start again. Ugh. Then you actually had to make the poster using some untried and untested medium, which was usually untried and untested for a reason.

The year I won first place in the contest (not to be confused with the year I won second place, or the year I won third place, or the year my brother won second place, or the year my sister won third place), the strongly-suggested medium of choice was cut paper. The theme was Road Safety at Night. The snappy slogan, strongly suggested by my mom, was Carry a Light at Night: It's a Bright Idea. The poster itself was a smiling girl standing on the side of a road holding a flashlight so it shined on the creepy slogan floating around in the sky at the top of the poster. Since I normally participated in art only if it involved laboriously tracing and transferring a map of Azerbaijan to my bedroom map wall, I thought I had done my part. But no. My mom said I needed more background interest and symbolism. So I made an owl, which was only one or two colors and fairly low effort.

Then it was time for the most annoying art project of all time. Cut paper. My mom insisted that my poster must not be colored with markers, no matter how fancy the markers, and it must not be decorated with glitter, no matter how sparkly the glitter. No, I had to cut everything from colored paper. Car headlights? Neon yellow paper, two circles, which were not good enough and had to be oval, so two ovals. Girl's nose? Pink paper, which even I admitted kind of looked like a peach cucumber growing out of her ear, so I had to change that too. We worked on this thing for three days straight. I even had to cut the owl's eyes out of paper. Those eyes were almost the death of me. They had to be tiny, because they were owl eyes, but they were so tiny that the glue didn't really make them stick too well. They kept falling off and I kept putting them back on. Pain. But finally, finally, finally, the poster was finished and my mom thought it was passable. We sent them in, two days late, because my mom's always late. Thanks, mom.

About six weeks later, the lady from the AAA Traffic Safety Poster Contest Board of Directors and Torturers rang me up. My poster had won first place and 250 bucks in savings bonds. I was a little happy, just a little.

"We loved your poster!" gushed the Director of Poster Contest Pain. "The slogan was so imaginative. We loved how you used paper to create the scene. You obviously put a lot of hard work into your poster."

If only you knew, if only you knew.

"But do you know what we liked the best?"

"What?"

"Well," said the Director of Poster Contest Pain, in a secretive tone, "We thought that the owl was a great touch. He was winking, just like he knew it was A Bright Idea!"

"Winking?" I was a little confused.

"Yes. You know, how you only put on one eye? It made him look so wise!"

Oh. Those stupid owl eyes. Only one of them had survived the grueling trip to headquarters by mail. And the Director of Poster Contest Pain thought that it was intentional and he was supposed to look wise. Oh.

And let me tell you, I took the money and ran. Well, after the awards banquet. I ran to the eclairs and then I took the money and ran.

Yeah, this would be why I still hate art, to this day. Thanks, mom.

On burping

As I've previously written, one of the reasons I love working in education is the freedom to be insane (within reason and legality) and the freedom to use insanity to get desired results.

This summer, I had six kids, four of whom were boys entering middle school. All awesome kids and all very Aspergery. They did what most boys entering middle school did, but then the Asperger's kicked in.

So all the kids would be sitting there working on something quietly and all of a sudden one of the boys would find it necessary to break the silence with the most epic belch of all time.

I glared. The kid would ask to be excused and be forgiven.

Several moments of silence.

Yet another epic belch.

I glared again. The kid would once again ask for forgiveness. But not before another boy would let his belch join the rising crescendo.

Exasperated, I'd ask why the heck they needed to spend a quarter of their summer burping as loudly as possible.

Oh, responded the Asperger's, because their stomach juices were spinning around and made the burps come up.

Well then.

So the next day, when the first belch broke the still morning air, I turned and faced the culprit and spoke both strongly and sternly.

"Kid, in this room, we have a burp quota. A quota means that you can only do something a certain number of times per day. In summer school, the burp quota is one. Because you just burped one time, you filled your burp quota and are not allowed to burp any more at school until tomorrow."

"Oh, OK, Miss Grace."

Another kid burped. I told him about the quota.

"Oh, OK, Miss Grace."

And from then on we all came to school, burped once, apologized once, and did not burp again the rest of the day. The end.

Pinning overthinking

I believe I've blogged (tangentially) about Pinterest a little bit in older posts. But let me just throw it out there - I heart Pinterest! It's colorful, fun, addicting, enlightening. It also makes me feel fat and makes me notice the flaws in my lack of interior decorating, but according to numerous ecards, those are totally normal feelings for us pinners. Overall, Pinterest is a wonderful thing. Heck, if it weren't for Pinterest, my summer school kids would not be doing half of the crafty junk we get to do, because my "art" consists of stick figures, geometric shapes, and derivatives. Not kidding about the derivatives. I rarely doodle, and the only real doodling time I had was in college, when I was taking calculus, and derivatives are curvy, mindless to draw, and make you look smart.

But of course, being Grace, I also love analyzing Pinterest. Pinterest boards are like the visual representations of the brains of random females (75% of users are women, if I'm remembering the stat correctly). See, my brain is full of random crap. Like this.

Grace's Brain Content

• Food is good
• Traveling is fun
• I sure hope I remembered to take my ADD meds this morning or I'm screwed
• Look at that random barn in the middle of that development
• Kids are awesome
• How can I milk my virtual Civilization cottages for maximum science
• What will happen in football in 2014
• Man I am so angsty about work
• Jewelry is so pretty and I'm such a scrooge dang it
• How can I inch ever closer to my goal of looking fashionable
• Dan doesn't do anything right and I hate him
• Dan is the perfect man and I love him
• I love working out because I can watch NFLNetwork and The First 48
• I hate working out because pain
• Please bipap don't explode
• Wow, the air is blowing way too hard in here
• Analyze analyze analyze analyze
• Sociology blogs
• Trade journals
• JCPenney's profit margin and viability status (no, really)

And according to Pinterest, this is what other people think about.

Typical Pinner Brain Content

• My future haircut 
• My kids
• Maximum mason jar efficiency
• Maximum old dresser redo efficiency
• Cute animals
• Stop abusing cute animals
• Look a cute bunny and a cute puppy ALL IN ONE PICTURE
• Easy crockpot meals
• The healing powers of kale and spirolina
• Working out for maximum efficiency
• Inspiration for working out for maximum efficiency 
• Hot shirtless males
• How to do photography
• Teaching stuff
• Craftivity instructions for maximum child abuse
• I'm so fashionable yet I ACTUALLY CURSE LIKE A SAILOR
• Harry Potter
• Other geeky things like Harry Potter
• Best books ever like Harry Potter

So I look at Pinterest and I analyze. What do women want? How do I become more standard population? Do I really have to find puppy pictures cute? Do I really have to shell out for spirolina? 

But I can analyze only so much with the limited sub-par data set I have (my own observations). That's OK, though, because people have actually analyzed Pinterest in academic journals already, confirming my observations and making me feel smart.

Here's some of the fun stuff about Pinterest that makes you question your motives for pinning that spirolina and kale shake recipe. Seriously, is it really you pinning the recipe, or is it the expression of the binary real/idealized self that's making you do it? (That's actually a thing, I've found).

Stuff About Pinterest That Makes You Go What

• Pinterest is by-and-large a female domain - seventy-five percent or more of all users are women.
• The prototypical pinner is a college-educated woman ages 18 to 49 (like me!).
• Although pinners are heavily female, male pinners are more likely to have their pins shared.
• Words expressing positive emotions are common in Pinterest descriptions (love, happy, etc.). Words expressing negative emotions are rare.
• When compared to other social network sites like Twitter, Pinterest users use a lot of action words (do, need, want, should), while Twitter users use words suggesting immediacy (morning, tonight, right now).
• The most common words found in Pinterest descriptions include love, make, chicken, Christmas, cute, cream, chocolate, made, wedding, recipe, best, butter, ideas, and want.
• The most followed boards are travel, education, health and fitness, and home decor.
• Five percent of pins are original, uploaded content. The other 95% are repinned from existing sites. Google Images and Etsy are the most popular.
• I've seen a lot of pin descriptions that go something like "I love this site for house design! Must pin and read later!". This is actually a thing. A good hunk of pin descriptions rely on first-person language. 
• Data analysts have found the perfect Pinterest picture, and it's everything you probably thought it would be - delicious-looking food arranged artfully in a dish and photographed off-center (I don't know the photographical name for this technique).
• If you want your pin to be repinned 23% more than everybody else's lame pins, make sure you crop out your head when you take pictures of your fashionable self grabbing a Starbucks. Case in point:

• Follow me on Pinterest if you want to be subjected to pins about highway on-ramp designs appearing in your news feed.

Everything Is Awesome: Housing 1

I think, sometimes, that graduating college and not taking any classes for a two-year period (but now I'm baaaaaack!) was one of the best things that happened to me in terms of understanding the world in a Grace kind of way - the way where I analyze the social constructs that led us as a nation to think that grabbing a coffee at Starbucks is fun. Paradoxically, that's also how I have fun - analyzing social constructs at Starbucks while drinking... Starbucks. You know how you make a tall-decaf-skinny-cinnamon-dolce-latte-please taste so much better even with the empty calories? Corporate social responsibility and America's search for the communal third place. Oh yeah.

About two years ago I read a book called The Warmth of Other Suns. It's 640 pages of beautiful writing by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist about the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North during the 20th century told through the life experiences of three people. This book literally changed the way I look at the world, which is ironic, because usually I try to avoid books by journalists because they're often pretty sensationalist and not backed up by footnotes, and I always avoid books with a terrifying page count because ADD doesn't usually let me read beyond 250 pages without losing interest and moving on. This book explains a major reason for the present composition of our communities, and manages to do that in a way with incredible emotional impact - and remember, I'm half Vulcan. A two-word sentence doesn't usually make me cry, but this time it did. You all should seriously read this book. I promise they don't mention corporate social responsibility anywhere in the book.

But anyway, Warmth of Other Suns sparked one of my vaguely-creepy interests in housing. (It also made me a huge fangirl of the author, and I actually got her to autograph my copy, something I've never felt the need to do previously.) The spatial composition of America (translation: where we live and why we live there) is so important to your opportunities, your economic status, your social status, your perspectives, your life experiences. OK, now I'm just going off on a tangent.

Houses are fascinating. A little more than a hundred years ago, only a third of the American population lived in or near the cities. Cities were not especially fun places to live in the 1800s. Basically, there were a lot of people squished together, and there was no trash service, no indoor toilets, minimal public hygiene, and no separation of functional buildings, which meant you could live right next door to a 24-hour textile factory. Summer in the city was rarely fun due to the yearly epidemics of a variety of deadly diseases. To be fair, though, rural life wasn't much fun, either. If you lived on a farm, and you lived on a farm prior to the development of modern agricultural technologies, you were normally a subsistence farmer and could starve or lose your home if it didn't rain for like two weeks when it should have been raining. And while you weren't living in a city of half a million and didn't have to deal with piles of trash in your back yard, you also weren't living in a city of half a million and didn't usually have access to people like doctors. It was a lose-lose situation for lots of people, and if some health magazine starts going on about how we've polluted the earth and everyone is sick and unhealthy and we need to get back to the days when everyone respected the earth, I'll see you a failed potato crop and raise you a cholera epidemic.  

And here we are, 150 years later. I think, don't quote me on it, that the last statistic for the urban/rural balance was 80/20. How the heck did that happen?

Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion!

Grace the motivational speaker

One of the reasons I love working with elementary-school students is because I can, within the limits of professionalism and human kindness, mess with their minds to coax out the desired results.

While I certainly have a very dry sense of humor, it doesn't really make an appearance most of the time. I think slowly in situations that require a lot of verbal interactions, which is why I generally suck at life and socializing. I'm often jealous of Dan and his perfectly-timed zingers. He's drummed up quite a reputation at work for being, well, hilarious. I normally can't pull this off unless my meds are somehow working in high gear and everything is going in high gear. Most of the time somebody will make a comment or ask me a question and I'll start stuttering, make some kind of feeble non-remark ("Wow!" "That's cool!" "Really?"), randomly insert the wrong sounds into common words ("I love to raid! No, wait, I love to road! No, I mean I love to read!"), or, my favorite no-no, I'll stumble over my own monosyllabic utterances to such an extent that I accidentally spit at the other person, mercifully ending just another awkward episode of Grace making friends. Thankfully, I have strong writing skillz which allow me to be as dry and sarcastic as humanly possible on paper. I have heard that the writing process is channeled through a different segment of the brain than the verbal awesomeness part, which is good for you, as otherwise you'd be reading an awful lot of yeahs and uh-huhs on this blog.

But when it comes to kids... I'm much better with the verbal sarcasm. A very good part of this, I'm sure, is that I'm a lot more comfortable with those of us ages thirteen and younger. Kids don't have fully-developed social acuity yet and usually chalk up my failed stuttered sarcastic jabth to my advanced age of grandmotherhood (I know I'm not fat because no child has ever told me I'm fat. I'm not sure, however, how old I am because one child asked me how many grandchildren I had.). Also, thinking quickly in kid time is like thinking slowly in adult time, so I can really hold my own with the second-graders.

So I eventually learned to use my sarcastic weirdness for good in the school setting. Depending on the student population of the day, I'd set the limits, turn on the charm, and then just go nuts. My formula was generally this.

1. Tell kids what to do.
2. Veer into insanity.

This formula worked especially well with those kids who were a little harder to crack than the others. For some kids, you could ask them nicely to do their math problems, and they'd do it. No need to go to step two. For some kids, you could tell them to answer question three on their paper, and they'd tell you to go jump off a cliff, or at least out a second-story window.

One second-grade student, who we'll call Jaden because just about every other second-grader in that particular school was named Jaden, became my poster child for my formula. I was subbing for the learning support teacher and was trying to complete a reading lesson with Jaden. Jaden had other ideas.

It's not like I missed a step. I did tell Jaden what to do. Questions one through five in lesson five. It'd only take him five minutes to do, if he actually sat down and did it.

Jaden gave me a withering look. I was a sub. He was eight. It was clear who was winning out in this game.

"Miss, I ain't doing reading today."

"Oh?" I said.

"Yeah. I did my reading yesterday. You're not the teacher, so you can't tell me what to do."

I couldn't really argue with that logic, but I was the adult here. It was time to implement step two of The Plan.

"Jaden," I said, trying to be all secretive and confiding but probably just coming off as really creepy, "Trust me, you want to do your work."

"No."

"Well, you want to know why you should do your reading?"

"No."

"I'll tell you anyway. If you don't finish your reading, then I'm going to eat your lunch tomorrow."

Jaden looked a little shocked.

"You ain't gonna eat my lunch. You ain't gonna even be here tomorrow. Miss Smith will be here tomorrow."

"Exactly! Miss Smith will be busy in here. You'll be doing the reading you missed with her, so I'll be able to go on down to the cafeteria and get your lunch and eat it."

Jaden was wavering. I could see the terror rising. The threat of chocolate milk deprivation could do that to you.

"Miss, I know you ain't gonna eat my lunch. You don't even know what we having."

"Pizza, pineapple, and corn. Chocolate milk." Thank you, Miss Smith, for having a very messy desk topped by the lunch menu. But seriously, sub plans go at the top of the pile, not the bottom.

"Chocolate milk?"

"Chocolate milk!" I said, enthusiastically. Time to come back from the edge a bit and get some work out of Jaden. "Although, I don't really like chocolate milk too much. I might let you have the chocolate milk."

"Miss," chided Jaden, "You should like chocolate milk. Everybody likes chocolate milk."

"Well, I'll try it. I used to drink it when I was a kid, but it really tastes too sweet for me now. In fact, maybe I won't eat your lunch tomorrow if I can have a taste of your chocolate milk when I come back some day."

"Sure," said Jaden, now totally thinking about chocolate milk and not about work refusal, "I'll give you some, Miss! It's really great. I love it. Sometimes my mom, she buys it for me, but I always drink it for lunch. I wish I could only drink chocolate milk for the rest of my life."

"I'm looking forward to having some! Look, though, we've only got fifteen minutes before you have to get packed up. Let's see if we can quick get through your reading before it's time to go."

Would he bite?

Jaden sat up straight and picked up a pencil.

"OK, miss. Which questions again?"

"One, two, three, four, and five."

"Oh!" he squealed. "I did five questions yesterday, too! That was easy. This will be so easy."

Thus did the power of humor triumph over the power of eight. The battle was won. Jaden did his work. I never did, unfortunately, have the chance to pretend that I actually was going to drink chocolate milk, because I never subbed in that classroom again. Which is part of the sadness of subbing, but that's for a future post. This post is all about the funny.