Dropping the Education Ball... so I Have To

I wasn't on the Internets yesterday because I spent the morning being a chaperone for Mason's class for a trip to the Ordway. Then I spent the afternoon catching up on all the housework I didn't do in the morning... including baking chicken (turns out Mason LOVES chicken drumsticks, and he requested that we have the same meal two nights in a row.)

Anyway, the Ordway show was a lot of fun... for me. As I told Shawn afterwards, I wish that *I* were Mason's full-time teacher. Because, you know, in retrospect and with 20/20 hindsight and armchair warrioring and all that stuff, my ideas are *always* cooler. There was for these kindergarteners, many of whom have never seen live theatre of any kind before, no prep. No explaination about what they were about to experience. For a teacher who seems so into rules, I was surprised there wasn't even a moment when she explained the types of behavior that are expected when seeing a play (ie, when the lights go down, voices get hushed.) Because, believe it or not, those are learned behaviors. Most of the kids, when I asked them afterward on the bus, didn't even know what to call what they'd just seen. Tina, for instance, kept saying, "Yeah, I liked the movie."

It was a play. It was not just a play, but a musical. From India. This was the show we watched: Katha Dance Theatre's Sundari Aur Nag.

I asked Mason whether or not the class retold the story of the play, talked about the play, plays, musicals, dancing or even India afterward. He said, "No." Then, knowing us so well, he added, "I guess the teacher kind of dropped the ball."

In the words of a certain VP candidate, "Ya think?"

I got the sense that the trip to the Ordway was very much a surprise in that even the teacher didn't know the class would be going until a few days ago, but... she knew well enough in advance to put a notice in the Thursday folders last week. That's two days in which there could have been some discussion about plays, behavoir at theatres, etc. Given that they're currently learning about the difference between fiction and non-fiction, it seems that a trip to the theatre is a perfect opportunity to talk about and reinforce the experience they're about to have. I was able to google information about the performance in about two seconds. It's a re-telling of BEAUTY and the BEAST for chrissake. There are about a million children's picture books of the beauty and the beast. Seems to me, it was ready built for a whole lot of discussion and retelling.

*sigh*

I guess I'm off to the library to find some books about India and a nice picture book of Beauty & the Beast for Mason. If his teacher won't reinforce her own lessons, then I will.

Someone in Hollywood is Dating my Ex-GF

I was watching season 2 of "DEXTER" my latest television series obssession (which I catch via Netflix), and I realized that someone in Hollywood is dating my ex-girlfriend.

Briefly, I dated someone in NA (Narcotics Anonymous), and the resemblence between her and the woman who portrays "Leela" in season 2, Dexter's sponsor in NA, is rather... haunting. In fact, I think Shawn is feeling generally turned off by this season because of Leela's resemblence to my ex-GF. Leela's boundaries are slightly worse that my ex-GF's, but she did, ocassionally have a tendency to wander around naked without a whole lot of self-consciousness (a lot like Leela) and her sort of crazy/artistic vibe (my ex-GF is a costume designer rather than a sculptor, but you know it's all "arty") is similar (although again my ex-Gf tended to think about things in a way that was far outside of the box and Leela is clearly just plain criminal...).

And she's so not working the steps. Dexter is far too new to recovery to be hopping into bed with his sponsor. You're supposed to wait a year, kids! Leela is a really crappy sponsor, but I think she's supposed to be... but it still makes me yell that the TV. (Although, for the record, I think this whole "serial killer in 12-step recovery" is a hillarious take on the whole thing, and, for the most part, I think the show has done really fun things with it.

But, I think they're a little off track. The best part of "Dexter," in my (and Shawn's) opinion, has been completely dropped this season (so far,) which is his emotional disconnect as a sociopath.

Dexter is having a lot of feelings in this season, and they're kind of out of character, IMHO. He's supposed to be the self-proclaimed "little wooden boy," and weirdly, that was a key part of how the writers walked the line of making a serial killer sympathetic. His often wry, but always strangely innocent and genuine outsider observations on how other people react to the world always grounded him as sympathetic for me.

Without that, I'm somehow expected to root for a serial killer. That's a much tougher sell.

Plus watching my ex-GF every night is getting kind of... freaky.