Maggie’s 6th Tooth!
Sep 17th, 2007 by Bethany
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Maggie got her sixth tooth this weekend. Now she has three top ones and three bottom ones. She was a little grumpy and had a little fever the day before, but nothing too bad.
She is in the kitchen right now, banging with a spoon on my metal bread pans. She really likes getting stuff out of the cupboards and making noise with them. The other day I thoughtlessly let her play in the cupboard that held my glass water pitcher, which she quickly pushed out the cupboard door onto the hard floor. My lovely $9 Walmart pitcher broke, but luckily didn't hurt her. So sad–I now have no pitcher, so if you ever come over don't expect to see one any time soon.
Meanwhile, Degen is watching a Caillou cartoon on TV in the living room while carefully sorting grapes in his own indiscernible order into the lid of his Duplos box (the lid looks a little like a big yellow plastic muffin tin when turned upside down). I have them in different rooms because Maggie is insatiably curious about everything Degen does and wants to get in on the action, but unfortunately she doesn't know how to play along very well and nearly invariably messes his project up. As a result, Degen often ends up in time out for pushing his sister away and accidentally hurting her in the process. It seems best to protect them from such sad consequences by keeping them separated some of the time.
Today I'm going to help Colin a little bit with grading his student's quizes and homework papers. I've found that grading middle school Spanish (although I don't know any Spanish but what's taught on Sesame Street) is pretty entertaining work. For example, who knew that New Mexico and Africa are "countries where the official language is Spanish?" Of course, I don't do the final grading–when I do help, Colin gives me an answer key of sorts, then I go through and mark the ones I can tell are correct, then I try to get him to check to make sure I didn't miss something.
Colin is what I call an "easy grader." He doesn't believe in failing students if it's possible to do anything else. He thinks giving a student a bad grade discourages them and wipes away any motive they once had to sincerely try. So, whenever he can give a student any credit for an answer, he does. Admittedly, before meeting Colin I'd been on the opposite end of the spectrum of grading, although I'd often benefited from the charity of teachers like Colin. Now I'm starting to see the wisdom of giving people credit as often as possible for anything they do well.
