Estación Liceu

Of easy wind and downy flake...

This week flew by. I had my SLA class on Monday night, went out for Indian food on Wednesday night with Sean and Angie and their friend, went out with Austin on Thursday night to the restaurant where we got married, graded approximately 800 compositions, and then woke up to this, the crown jewel of the week:



There was a prediction of 1-3" of snow but when I woke up at 6:00, I think we had already met the goal. It was snowing at a rate of 3"/hr, that's the rate that means you pull your car out of the garage, stop, run back in for a scraper, come out, and end up with huge, heavy flakes covering your hair so that all the straightening you did that morning is shot to hell and when you get to work, you have to pull it back in an awkward ponytail and make a more awkward joke to your students about why it looks like you just got back from your 7am class (inside joke, eeep!).

I know it's not the snow's fault, but the rest of my morning went a little crazy. I had a language lab activity that failed spectacularly in spite of the fact that I had the appropriate training AND had successfully set up the activity with colleagues in the lab so I knew I could do it. Then I had to sort of reorganize what I had planned for the remaining classes since it was a failure on the part of the technology and not as much the user, so there was little I could do. The day was saved, though, when my last class made fun of my drawings on the board but applauded my last one. Like actually clapping, it was pretty cute. They also cracked me up when I made them do conversation exercises that were set up like a speed-dating format (i.e. moving around a lot, not actually hitting on each other en español). The groaned a little in protest but a handful of them said "At least we don't have to dance. We had to dance for a whole class period in my other Spanish class. It was like awkward middle school gym class." Hee hee.

I love my students and I love my work. They are so creative and even when I'm having a bad day and don't want to go to class, in the end I'm glad I did. I tell them to write a Halloween story and some how it's a story about Dennis Hopper falling out of a tree. I have them do conversation practice about finding an apartment together and they make up a story about kicking their aging grandpa out of his house and making it a party pad. I have them practice health vocabulary and they make a huge picture of a Power Ranger suffering from obesity. Why a Power Ranger, who knows, but they managed to incorporate amazing amounts of vocab in their little story about him.

Alright, enough of my cute little students stories. This post was originally about snow so here are a few more pictures I took after work. I'm sure the snow will melt before the stuff that stays all winter comes but it's still kind of sucky to deal with it in the first half of November. Ah, the joys of the upper midwest...

posted by Kelly @ 8:33 a. m.