Mouch Potatoes and "It's not slime, it's mucous!"

At Elk Ridge Middle School, seventh graders were set free on June 3rd, teachers on June 4th, even though we were all ready for school to end in April. My summer vacation started with teacher dreams. I had four dreams--or more aptly put, nightmares--in four nights! This is not normal. In one dream it was the first day of school in seventh grade, but I had some of the same students--the ones who turn into eighth graders in February and would rather watch paint dry and listen to Ke$ha than me (I mean seriously, where's the competition?!), or think me unreasonable when I ask them to please stop walking on top of their desks. Somehow these students had made it back into my classroom for another fun year of seventh grade, and were tossing two-liter bottles of soda back and forth across the room, swinging from hammocks on the ceiling, and playing tag. Tag. In the classroom. And none of my Harry Wong classroom management tricks were working!!

In another dream, it was the last day of school and I was trying to keep students contained in my room. They were behaving like Brendan Frasier on Encino Man. Pink and yellow silly string and shaving cream materialized out of nowhere and was smeared all over the carpet and the walls in the style of the Lascaux Cave Paintings. And then they wouldn't clean up before the bell rang. And then I ran shouting after them into the halls, a stream of obscenities spewing from my mouth while all the ninth graders laughed at me. And then I got fired.

Besides dreaming about my seventh graders, I have undoubtedly annoyed the BYU Library Circulation Desk staff by inundating them with endless book titles on which I have placed holds for thesis research. I'm failing miserably in the attempt to avoid the trap that befalls almost anyone in academia--reading too much. At some point, you just have to start writing. "At some point" for me, my adviser says, is July 15, no excuses.

I have also turned into a "mouch potato." It's a cross between a "mouse potato" and a "couch potato." In the terminology of lethargy, hedonism, or what have you, a mouse potato (added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition in 2006) is a not so distant cousin of the couch potato. Mouse potatoes are people who spend inordinate amounts of leisure time at computers. I've spent the whole of one week at the computer doing homework for my reading endorsement course, which ends this week. On the days when I've gone running in the morning, I've come home with the harmless intention of taking, in my nephew Evan's words, a "quick snooze" on the couch. A quick snooze always turned into two hours. Hence the term "mouch potato."

Tomorrow ends the mouch potatoing. Work starts again. I'm going to my first day of "teacher boot camp," a.k.a The Central Utah Writing Project. I'm not technically a boot campee, but a research assistant for a dearly beloved professor who established a branch of the National Writing Project to serve teachers in the central Utah area. The National Writing Project started in California in 1974, as a professional development program for teachers of all grades, all subjects, who could apply for the program and attend a month-long session of work shops, Monday through Thursday, that focused on improving the teaching of writing in their classrooms. Currently, there are branches of the National Writing Project in every state, and the CUWP is one of the newest, as this only its second year. More on this later.

The highlight of the summer thus far has to have been watching The Princess and the Frog. Jesse usually brings home good movies from the library, so I was confused when he checked it out in February. I was not interested in a "Disney cartoon." He tried again last week, mandating that I choose the latest rendition of Jane Austen's Persuasion or The Princess and the Frog (it was girlie movie week. But I made up for it by watching the Lakers overtake the Celtics in the fourth quarter of the championship game). I couldn't decide, so he picked The Princess, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. This is not a girlie movie. There's something for everyone--reptiles and mucous for the boys, a song every five minutes for the music lovers, romance, a dumb blonde, even a "death" (gasp! because it's Disney!). The film features a virtuosic jazz-playing alligator, a gap-toothed firefly who speaks with a lisp, hoo-joo mamma foo hoo (or whatever, I'm not really sure what this is) and frogs. And of course culturally diverse minority representation!! So now I have "Tiana fever" and I want the movie, and the costumes, cookbooks, and dolls! The movie will suffice for now, but I'll have to live vicariously through my daughters for all the other paraphernalia. Except they won't be black.