Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

First -- my help request:

Every year our school puts on a full Christmas dinner for our students and their families. Not everyone comes but we usually serve about 150 people. On Tuesday I'm going to arrange the students into groups and give each team 30 minutes to take still photos and make short videos to be complied into a sort of 'Christmas Card' to be shown at the dinner.

I'm looking for ideas online. What's your favourite bit of video, music, holiday cartoon, or Christmas card site? Please leave suggestions in the comments below & thanks!!

These are 2 Nings that I have been read/writing this week, so today's post is about Getting help from my friends 2.0 and BADGES.

(DRAT -- they aren't working!!!! I've emailed the support team to find out why, so please bear with me if you are seeing this before it's fixed.)

The first is Steve Hargadon's Classroom 2.0. This is a great place to pose questions and to get and give answers. There are no foolish questions and plenty of contributers who are willing to share ideas and dilemma fixes.  I work in a small school and so to have this kind of outreach is refreshing and gives new meaning to the word 'colleague'.

(first badge should be here!)  [POST SCRIPT NOTE: THE fIRST BADGE DID NOT PRINT, AND THE LONG CODE WAS SKEWING THE PAGE SO I HAVE REMOVED IT AND DO NOT THINK I CAN ADD PICTURES HERE AFTER THE FACT.]

I have also joined Vickie Davis and Julie Lindsay's  Flat Classroom project as a judge. I'm grouped with teachers from Pakistan, the US, Thailand and Australia; how cool is that!!!  If there's time during the last week of school when the videos have all been posted, I want to get my own students involved in the judging so that we can develop a group who will be interested in participating in a similar project for Earth Day '09.

(second badge should be here!) [POST SCRIPT NOTE: NEITHER DID THE SECOND BADGE]

Later in the week the Glocal people are coming to our school to prepare the staff for a digital imagery workshop they will be doing with our kids in February. This project originates oin Surrey, BC -- right up the hill from where I teach and looks amazing. Anyone can download the software and contribute to the global project.

December starts Monday -- and as you can see from the above, I have a lot to pack into the 3 short weeks left until the holiday starts!!!!!

I have reached that point in my career when certain small happenstances have begun to take on extra significance.  Whether such episodes really are more meaningful that I ever realized or whether I am just elevating them to the status 'signs' in an effort to convince myself that I ought to grab early retirement sooner rather than later, I'm not sure.  In any case the delivery of this year's school picture is one such event that has left me wondering about how much longer I ought to stay on the job.

For those of you who are not teachers, every year when picture day comes round in BC schools, teachers get theirs done free of charge. These photos are used in yearbooks and those graduating class photo collections that often adorn hallway walls in school buildings. When mine were a reasonably flattering, I used to send them to my mum. Generally though -- especially in the past 7 or 8 years,  they have piled up at the bottom of my bottom desk drawer -- souvenirs that document the wear and tear that too much sun exposure in my youth and too much time spent with other people's children in the rest of my life have had on my face.

This year, however, the photo definitely reminded me of better days, so rather than automatically toss it into the archive with the others, I took a closer look. First I thought it was because I 'd had a good hair day; then I thought maybe it was because the guy hadn't made me wait until the smile froze on my face before snapping the image. Then I was astounded to realize that I looked about 35!!!  

Now I have always said that teaching will make you old very fast or keep you young forever & that I hoped my career would put me in the latter group, but I didn't think it could turn back the 'hands of time'. In my youth I was a fair haired girl who slathered my face with baby oil and repeatedly burned it on purpose to make it look tanned. I now use it as direct evidence of the effect of prolonged exposure to UV radiation on your DNA and skin cells in Science 10 class! There was something fishy about that picture!!!!!!!!!!!

The upshot of this is that some thoughtful young person with a little extra time on his or her hands and a deft hand with some sort of paint program had retouched my photo. All evidence of sun damage was gone; the deep black circles normally hanging under my eyes were gone and smiling back at me was the face of a happy, young woman who clearly enjoyed her work and looked forward to picture day every year. She looked so relaxed -- the way that teachers who you see a year after they retire look relaxed and 10 years younger than the day they walked away from their desks.

I now find myself at odd moments totting up just how much a plastic surgeon might charge to restore my face to that condition. Would it be so much per mole or bag or wrinkle? Or would he charge by the cm²? Could I be buffed and bondoed into shape like an old car? Could I get a special license plate that would label me as 'classic'? Suddenly now I can identify with aging stars surrounded as they are by the evidence of their former youthfulness -- old scrapbooks and pictures and movies everywhere to remind them, not just how much better they looked, but how it felt to be carefree and so sure that their lives would count for something -- and now desperate to destroy all evidence of encroaching old age in their faces and their bodies.  

QUESTION: What are the signs that one ought to consider retiring?  I would think that when they begin retouching your photos, it's probably time to pay attention!