Making Lemonade

Well, Duke may be out, and Carolina may be rolling, but yours truly is still the queen of HORSE in THIS household.

Utah Trip

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to get to take a trip to Salt Lake City to visit our college friends Steve and Sarah, as well as to do some skiing with them and other Greenmen that came to visit! Sarah already beat me to the punch with pictures on her blog, but I thought I'd include a few here to show you how beautiful the Wasatch in the winter are and how much fun we had. My pictures are online, and Gordie took some nice ones too that are also up.

Day 1 at Solitude - lots of snow all day long!


Somehow we managed to survive...


Our group at Alta, Day 2


Steve leading us to one of his favorite spots at Alta


Gordie drops in!


Silliness


Erin is happy to be out in the snow!


The beautiful vistas over Snowbird's Mineral Basin (Day 3)


Ari, Steve, Steve, and Sarah

Tom's snow-beard


Steve and Sarah at Snowbird


Hooray, fun trip

Thanks, Steve and Sarah for hosting us - and it was great to get to see your dogs and the city, too. Hope we can do it again sometime! For anyone else out there considering a ski trip to Utah, the mountains are really quite impressive and we all had a blast exploring them. Maybe next year we can get everyone to come out to California for some Tahoe adventuring...

A moral quandry

When I was in high school, the most common cheating was "borrowing" homework answers. Cheating on a test was a much bigger deal, and I can only recall one instance where I knew of people cheating on a test.

By all accounts, cheating is much more prevalent in high schools these days. So far in my teaching career (3 months), I have caught and referred two students for cheating on a test, and there were two more that escaped for lack of hard evidence. It creates quite the dilemma for a teacher. Should I...

A) Make my tests as cheat-proof as possible. This creates problems in its own right - more work creating and grading multiple copies of the test, photocopying students' answer sheets to ensure they don't change them, strict rules about bathroom breaks and what students can and cannot do after they're done with the exam, calculator and cell phone monitoring, and constant vigilance.

OR

B) Create "normal" tests and make students take ownership for their own behavior.

I'd love to be able to use option B - I feel like high school should be "practice" for real life, and students of that age should be able to make their own ethical decisions. But if a student is caught cheating, there are major consequences, including failing a course for an entire semester and notification of any college they may have already been accepted to. So, what to do?

Uvas Canyon

Saturday morning offered a rare, brief window free from both lesson-planning and rain, so we went out to explore a new park nearby which purported to have some good waterfalls. Given the recent consistently heavy precipitation we've been having, this sounded like a good option. Uvas Canyon is maybe 45 min South of us, kind of towards Santa Cruz but further East. The many waterfalls were nice - kind of reminded me of hiking in New England where the trails often follow a rocky creek through the woods. Banjo, as always, loved getting to romp around a bit and sniff a bunch of new smells. And apparently this place is ladybug Mecca. Check out the conglomeration of little red bugs below! There were masses of them on rocks, trees, sticks, leaves, you name it! Strange. Although our sighting was apparently not an isolated incident - I've since learned they like to winter in Santa Clara county. It's fun that we are still - after five years living in the Bay Area - still discovering new places to explore!

Ladybug convention on a mossy rock

Closeup of some of our ladybug friends

Group shot, sans Tom