Preparations

Spring flowers, butterflies, a ladybird, a cat, a chimney-sweeper and a horseshoe (for luck). This is what I prepared for the 11 girls in my tutor class. There are 12- the piglet in the right bottom corner will be just to tease a girl who is a real pest- always fighting, calling names, yelling. She will get the starfish in the end, because it's a very quiet and discreet animal.
The spring seems to forget it should be approaching this year, but I enjoy preparing these amulets and thinking of the meaning I could add to each one. And although (unlike the girls in school who pin all of them and look like a Xmas tree) I only wear the one from Sorin, usually, I enjoy getting them, keeping them and thinking what they could mean, unless it's an elephant, a pig or a witch on a broom!
Yours is on its way.

Never-ending story

I'm in a learninglab about Geogebra, this is a homework. I could only upload it as a picture here, but in reality it's dynamic. It probably means nothing to you, and it's just an exercise, but I thought you might like how it looks and I felt like sharing it.
Good night.

St. Valentine at school

Students in 1st Bachillerato go on a trip together before entering the last year at school. In order to raise money they sell lottery at Christmas, have parties at discos and sell flowers for Saint Valentine. Carnations are always the same colours. White for friendship, pink for secret love and red for passion. You pay one euro for each you want to send your mates. Write a small note and put it in an envelope. Then on 14th February, a group of the students from 1st Bachillerato goes from one place to another in the school looking for the people the carnations have been sent to.
I got two white carnations this year. One form the headmaster thanking me for the services and recognising the work I do for the school and another one form Choni, thanking me for the new possibilities I have shown her to teach history through projects. I had sent carnations to everybody the first year in the project.
It was a nice feeling, getting them in the department. Nobody else got any, it was a bit embarrasing.Oh!, yes, our hardworking conversation assistant got a pink one. But he was not there, he had started a week vacation.

Inside & Outside

Both Shakespeare and Dickens have almost no equal when drawing the inner landscape of characters. Nothing escapes their deep observation. This is why I like them. But there is also an outside landscape that needs to be told. I find Phinn's novel about the Dales in Yorkshire a wonderful descriptive example. If I read between lines I can even feel the water in the fields, the thin air, the solitude. And of course, nothing better than learning to cope with our own pains.
These three books are my companions these days. They are completely different but even so, they share human landscapes inside.

Sunny cold, freezing sun

It's not madness. Just a thought about some winter evenings in this town. A very thin wind gets through the clothes like a sharp pocket knife, temperature gets minus and nevertheless there's always the reward of walk in the sun by the Walls, where light plays with weather to encourage poor inhabitants to leave their comfortable heated lodgings and enter the last rays from the sun. One feels good!

Fighting Cold

Finding shelter and good company for a lively chat seems to be the best way to fight cold weather. Fluffy feathers help, too.

Last from Seville

Remembering the sun from under the snow. Schools are closed for 2 days. Oh, the clear sky and the orange trees...