Wednesday, October 22, 2008

A good thing about living in Washington

Currently reading: Seeds of Hope, Short stories from 7th graders

I got my ballot in the mail the other day. All Washington ballots are mail-in ballots, so I have to wade through a bit of paper-work before I mail it in. The thing I'm excited about is the way that Washington doesn't make you register with a political party to vote in a primary. The rule is that you can only vote in one, but it can be either major party and it doesn't register you for that party. I've never been able to vote in a primary before, because I've always had a problem with the whole system. This is my happy moment voting wise. And it only took four years at Rutgers to make me a semi-liberalish person. I still don't like to label it.

My students are convinced that I'm the least patriotic person ever. I won't let them talk about politics in my religion class because I am a strong believer in the separation of Church and State, and I don't want to waste time arguing politics with 12 year olds in a class where I'm supposed to be teaching religion. But today in my literature class, Iraq came up, and I said something about destroying their country and one of my kids asked me, in all seriousness, "Miss Appert, are you proud at all to be American?" I tried to explain to them that disagreeing with a war has nothing to do not loving one's country, but eventually we gave it up and moved on with the class.

A funny Yakima moment. We were making lists of sounds of Autumn, and without realizing it, we compiled the following list on the board.
Sounds of Fall
gunshots
screams
family

I think I laughed for a good fifteen minutes about it. Only in Yakima are gunshots the first sounds that come to mind when brainstorming about fall.

Off to eat and then to trivia!
Emily

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

that was the list??

seriously??

what does FAMILY have to do with fall??

all the other ones make at least a little bit of sense...

but family??

jeze *rolls eyes*

Emily said...

it was the order that amused me...it makes it sound like they were shooting the family.