Lemon Meringue Moosh

I baked pies on Saturday night to give to a few people for Easter. My inspiration for baking the pies was Sherry. Emery and I visit teach Sherry, and she is great! It just so happens that she and her husband, Jerry, are also our home teachers, so we get to see them even more. Double great! So, I made key lime no-bake pie and lemon meringue pie. The key lime turned out well, or so I was told. (Lactose intolerant!) But the lemon meringue turned out to be quite gooey. It's tasty goo, if I do say so myself, but it doesn't really cut into slices. We ended up serving it in bowls when it was eaten at Emery's mom's house as Easter dinner dessert. The meringue also has some issues. It has continued to sink more every day. I got the recipe in foods class in 1995, and somehow thought I would have retained my high school cooking class skills, but apparently I'm rusty. Ah well... I guess that's one recipe I will need to continue to work on.

I go back to work tomorrow. My off-track time technically ended March 19. I tracked on that day (moved all my things back into a classroom), but then went immediately into my Spring Recess. I'm never really ready to go back after being off, but it usually only takes a day or so to get back into the swing of things.

I will be jumping right back into a busy schedule, that's for sure. Just before going off, I held auditions for my class play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The kids were assigned to memorize their lines while we were off because starting tomorrow it's full speed ahead with rehearsals. We perform the play in about one month!

I was asked if some university undergrads could observe me teach a lesson tomorrow. So, at 10:00 I will have four pre-service teachers in my room to watch me teach moon phases. It will be a fun lesson - we will be creating and labeling the phases of the moon using Oreo cookies. I do happen to have my most challenging kids at 10:00, but I will have leverage to make them behave: Bad Behavior = No Cookies! It should be a good lesson.

I am currently in the midst of filling out three applications:
1) My school district's version of tuition reimbursement (I know, about time since I've been going to grad school for seven months now...)
2) UCET's Technology Grant - Ross convinced me to do it, and I want money to get a student news broadcast going at the school I'm at. It's the one thing Garth (my principal) asked me to do, but we haven't had the means thus far.
3) The Lunar and Planetary Institute's field-based workshop for science teachers - I want to go to Montana and Washington to study the sites of ancient glacial lakes and flood waters and use the information to form hypotheses about the land forms on Mars. Cool, huh?

So, that's my update for today. Time to sleep, and then back to work.