Chris Wondra . com

I love great movie speeches. Don’t you? Here are maybe my four top movie speeches of all time–as I remember them.
Though you may have to forgive me. The seventh graders down the hall started dissecting things this week. I may be a little foggy on exact wording for a few of these.
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I’m wondering if anyone else out there has noticed anything suspicious about the bugs around their house lately. The word “bug” is a scientific term biologists use to combine two species:
The Family of Animals That You Can Kill With A Rolled Up Magazine, and The Family Of Animals That Are Too Quick For That.
I ask […]

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“Something’s wrong.”
I’m not a high stakes gambler. I’ve never made or lost millions in business. Never fought in a foreign war (hell, never even been in a fist fight). I’m not a superstar anything. Don’t drive fast cars, drink, mess around with either women or drugs.
So how do I know I’m […]

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 Let’s face it, some people think better in pictures.
They think with their eyes.
For the most part, I am not one of them. But I still think visual literacy is pretty cool. I wrote a longer post on this topic and offered up a couple of tools here.
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Way.
Thanks to Mrs. Chili, a junior college English teacher who, interestingly, seems to have the same sorts of challenges that I have as an 8th grade teacher. Talk about “things that make you go hmmm. . . ”
Anyway, she shares this cool web site, where you can spend hours playing language related games, […]

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How Peter Answers works like magic

Like an evil spirit, Peter Answers swept into my room and magically hypnotized over half the kids. I tried shouting. I tried clapping. I tried cold water. But nothing I did helped. Peter Answers (Peteranswers.com) kung-fu was too strong.
Its magic was hypnotic.
“NO WAY!! How did it know that?”
“Ask Peter who […]

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Students. You gotta love ‘em. Sometimes they write the darndest things (these students are mine, these aren’t).
And sometimes they say the darndest things. The context of this assignment is a presentation for a speech class. The assignment was for each group to present a newscast complete with visuals (via powerpoint), sports, news, […]

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A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine received a very exciting email informing him that he’d won a huge amount of money from some odd (but very official sounding) oversees organization. They didn’t ask for any personal information so my friend replied, thanked them, and let them know he couldn’t […]

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A couple of weeks ago I read an amusing column by Joe Soucheray in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In it he wrote about how the educational system we’re pouring billions of dollars into is failing because it continues to crank out idiots who (among other things) don’t understand that you can actually die […]

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I snapped this picture around noon today. Before then this pheasant was huddled in the bushes near our house. But almost every day around noon, he flies into the branches of this crab apple tree for lunch.
The cool thing about this tree is that the crab apples don’t drop off and it’s smack […]

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