High Drama, Low Cost

I borrowed this image -- copyright goes to the artist on DeviantArt -- because it made me laugh. I seriously need laughs this weekend since it's right before the ELA TAKS ... and the scores on that test will impact my evaluation AKA "Classroom Effectiveness Indices," which is number-crunching to "prove" how good I am in the classroom as an education ... After the TAKS tutoring at Saturday school, I don't know whether to be very worried or merely concerned. These 10th graders are very blase about the whole test-taking stakes, and their scores will rate our school for the next 2 years while Texas brings out a whole new (much harder) test. The schools are losing money, and TEA is developing a new test to "prove" how badly the districts are educating their "stakeholders," AKA students.

Four Winds Faire opens next weekend, followed by another week of school before we're out for spring break. We have kittens to distribute, older cats to find fosterage, and tons more tasks to fill several weeks -- and Faire!!! We get to see the Fairemily once more and catch up on the changes, major and minor, that occured during the last 12 months. I only hope the weather stays good for most of the run ... A repeat of this month's killer cold would be awful, though we have had snow on occasion. We shall see.

Follow the Bouncing Budget

Joy found this winged fairy cat for me ... The copyright belongs to the artist. I think the best series of such stories was written by Ursula K. Leguin; we never meet the tomcat who fathered the litter of winged kits ... Momma kitty is quite mundane and content to remain with her human while her offspring explore the world.

I normally don't discuss school on the blog -- this site is meant for more enjoyable subjects, like dolls and cats and faires. However, real life has a way of creeping up and ambushing you in very annoying ways ... and, at least for the near future, in rather dramatic ways.

It seems that the government wants to balance the budget ... and they're willing to sacrifice the futures of millions of Americans. Since those Americans can't vote for years, if not decades, then they feel the protests of millions of teachers and parents don't count for much. After all, the country (state, school district) needs to balance the budget. We still have to meet the higher education standards; all they tell us is "Learn to do more with less." Uh-huh ... I have yet to see a veteran politician come into a real classroom; when they visit, the districts take them to the schools for the best and brightest, where the kids have to go through a selection process in order to enter the school -- and where, if a kid doesn't measure up, he or she can be sent back to the home school at the end of the year ... It used to be at the end of a semester, until the home schools protested that they shouldn't be used as a dumping ground just before test time.

Our high-stakes test in ELA (English-Language Arts) happens on March 1. It worries me, since we've had such mixed results. I think the kids will pull off the passing scores ... but I don't know whether we will reach the 15% commended rate. Right now, they're trying to round up the 95% of the class that we believe can pass -- or at least need to take the test, so we don't lose points for non-participation. It's a numbers game with heavy consequences if a school doesn't hit the mark set by the government ... few, if any, of whom were educators -- or who had their kids in public schools.

Dancing Hearts, 1

"Pas de Quatre," Mme. Krassavska in center

The bad weather swooped in before I could write about the 2011 performance dedicated to Madame ... For those of you who are asking, "Madame? Isn't she a puppet," I'm talking about Mme. Natalie Krassavska, who retired to Dallas and trained many professional ballet folks here in Texas. Yes, Dallas was a nexus of classical Russian ballet for a few decades because she made it her home ... I think it was the beauty of the Turtle Creek area (oh, those azaleas!) and Nieman-Marcus downtown that she liked. (Now I know why they had borcht at the Zodiac Room there.) St. Seraphim, a Russian Orthodox Church, is located near her old home & studio near Wycliff. Yes, she's the one who helped fund its building.

In 2010, the cold was brutal. Prince of Peace Luthern Church was an old Oldsmobile dealership showroom and automotive bays ... Now, only parts of the rear exterior reveal its original purpose. Unfortunately, when your dressing rooms are concrete-block walls, heat tends to seep away quickly. Everyone clustered in the make up rooms because the lights (and body heat) warded off a little of the chill ... That was the year that Hope and I re-purposed antique tutus designed & made by a New York (Russian originally) designer in a marathon 12-day sewing sessions. They looked great, but -- oy!! -- tearing up those beautiful basques & bodices was heart-wrenching. Luckily, we didn't know where the tutus had come from (well, Madame's estate sale, yeah) until we had the tutus in pieces.

This year the weather was mild -- girls could sit around in their tutus or wander around in the hallways backstage. The performance went very well -- although there was the usual drama since these ballet directors have old rivalries that date back to when they were Madame's students back in the 70s and 80s ... I guess you could say it was a ballet family reunion honoring the ballet grandmere of them all. (Yes, I know it should be a Russian phrase, but French was the universal language for art until English took over.) We did 2 numbers -- Cherny's "In the Flower Garden," which once again featured our re-purposed tutus, this time with flowers instead of dragonfly wings, and "Can-Can," with net underskirts that dated back to the time when Hope danced for Madame. I think that "Can-Can" was the biggest hit of all the dances -- before the first interlude was finished, the audience was clapping. The dancers backstage started clapping, too, and bouncing with the music. Shouts that echoed the Moulin Rouge crowds rang in the auditorium ... We may be a tiny company, but we can outdance most of the others!

On a more serious note, Governor Rick Perry and his Republic cronies have decided to balance the state budget by sacrificing the education of our children. We went through a similar budget crunch a few years ago, when teachers were shifted around among DISD schools that didn't meet their student numbers. This year, they say that 4,000 teaching positions might be cut -- I remember teaching classes of 35 students, and you can't prepare folks who are already behind by stuffing them in classrooms like sardines ... They'll have to move most of the core classes into the new building to accommodate the numbers. My room 313 was built in the 1920s, when class sizes were less than 25, and you can't move -- let alone use any technology -- when you stick 5 more desks in that small space. I can name a few initiatives that will go: the hated enrichment period will probably be cut, as well as our collaboration period. The question remains: how many teachers would they cut from our campus? We only have 3 regular English teachers and 1-2 pre-AP teachers for grades 10-12. The 9th grade team has as many teachers as the other levels ... We just have to wait and see how all this pans out.

Polar Cats & Arctic Dogs

Ha! If I thought it was "freezing cats & dogs" back in January, that was just a foreshadowing of the polar blast that hit us the first week of February ... I haven't missed 4 straight days of school since ... well, I don't know when. Maybe 15 years ago -- that's the date that the weatherman says we last had more than 1-2 days of below freezing temps. Considering our furnace decided to give up the ghost last week, Joy and I spent a frigid 4 days under blankets and bundled up in layers of clothes, a lesson we learned at Four Winds Faire when the Mother Nature reminds us that spring doesn't really happen until March 22, which is midway through the run of Faire. I only hope that the weather settles down after this. Yes, we have another 1-2 days of cold this coming week, but nothing like the Groundhog Freeze of 2011.

So, what news since January? I have started a rough draft for "A Fairy Tale Wedding," which stars the BJDs owned by Mariann, Joy and myself. I finally read through a 19th century analysis of the Italian Renaissance by a Swiss author ... very dense, a mix of confirmed fact and speculation. I suppose it's similar to works by Robert Graves (I,Claudius) and other writers of the late Victorian Age. I could tell that the Swiss was not a Roman Catholic; he had some unstated comments about the foolishness of Catholic customs, although he was too well-bred to put them into prose.

Ironically, the Duchy of Savoy was a country that I researched (lightly) when I was "Misling Nicola di Palmieri" in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronisms) back in the 70s. The really old days when TRF (Texas Renaissance Festival) was a new concept for entertainment ... Back when Don Juan and Miguel let amateurs participate in their routines. Let's see -- that was what? 3 or 4 decades ago ... How time flies like a Lear Jet when you're busy doing other things.

Savoy is located on the borders of France & Italy -- depending on which map you check, you'll find some Savoy cities now located within Italian borders and others in France. Officially, Savoy is a French province ... but its port area was located in Monaco.

I haven't gotten very far -- Until Saturday, my fingers were too cold to type more than a few minutes ... I may need to sit down with the girls and brainstorm the conflicts -- and figure out who (at the moment) is ally or enemy of whom ... This wedding party puts on a happy face, but there's intrigue in the background. No one, even the ingenues, is what he or she appears to be.