ONE YEAR LATER
When Tommy Shaw wrote "Too Much Time on My Hands," he was thinking about what my adult life would be like in the summer. Example: Today I decided to reinvent my iPhone. I'm about a year into the contract with a year to go, so it seemed like a good time to make a few changes and pretend I have a new phone. I bought a new case for it, I replaced my scratched up face cover with a shiny new one, I cleared out the apps I never use then reorganized the ones I kept and even downloaded a handful of new ones just for kicks. Then finished the process with updating the music and the photos I keep on the phone. Now it's all kind of vaguely unfamiliar. So, no real changes, but it did keep me busy for an afternoon.
THE GREATEST COLLECTION OF SONG TITLES EVER
I haven't done a music post for some time, but this was worth commenting on. I downloaded a new album by the band Fair to Midland last week. Pretty heavy and noisy stuff so it's perfect for the Y, but also melodic and complicated and literary enough to show a certain amount of intelligence goes into this music. However, my favorite thing about the album has to be the song titles. From what I can tell, there isn't a single title that has anything to do with its song -- they're all just crazily arbitrary, hilariously head-scratching names. Some examples, and I promise I'm not making these up:
Whiskey and Ritalin
Amarillo Sleeps on My Pillow
Typhoid Mary Sends Her Best
Short-Haired Tornado
Three Foolproof Ways to Buy the Farm
YES, THAT WAS REAL
For any of my Facebook friends reading this who play Bejeweled Blitz? Yeah. You saw that right. My score last week was 992,500 points. Just sayin'.
WHEATLEY ENTERPRISES
Call me a nerd if you must, but I do dust off the XBox in the summertime, and I just finished one of the most original games I've played in a long time: "Portal 2." It's hard to describe briefly, but I can say that it comes down to a series of physics and logic puzzles with deceptively simple solutions that can be unimaginably frustrating. The storyline is somewhat involved and filled with some pretty dark humor. There was one bit of dialogue that had me laughing so hard at its audacity that I lost track of what was going on in the game for a moment. It might not translate so well out of context, so I'll give you a little background: This was a pre-recorded message that was played over an intercom system in an abandoned laboratory that had once used human test subjects:
"Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, so if you're thirty or older, you're laughing. Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of Canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries. I punch those numbers into my calculator, and it makes a happy face."
THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Long time blog readers -- both of you -- know that my ultimate summer guilty pleasure is watching the televised human carnage that is "Big Brother" on CBS. I seriously believe that watching this show and seeing how these voluntarily lab rats treat each other over the course of two televised months gives me great insight into how the minds of 10 and 11-year-olds work. At least on Wipeout the contestants get to wear helmets, and their indignity ends after one episode.
EPISODE 5?
I'm starting to think that writing a book about my almost twenty years of teaching would be next to impossible. The thing is? Any story I could tell that would be really, really interesting (and there have been several I haven't explored here through the episodes that have come up so far) would wind up making some people very angry. The interactions between the students, the parents, and the school staff are where stories would come from because that's what goes on in a school. And the real storytelling gems would still be really obvious to the people involved, even if I changed up the names and tweaked the details. So honestly, I'm rethinking that whole project right now. Maybe if or when I decide to use my school experiences to write something, it will have to wind up being fiction. Because frankly, some of the things I could write about wouldn't be accepted as truth anyway.
PURE HATE
I don't like running. When I treadmill at the Y, I'll walk. Gets the job done. But now that the 2011 Lazyman Triathalon is over and I've earned the free t-shirt that came with my entry fee, it might be months until I even consider using the bikes there to warm up. Seriously? One hundred twelve miles? Who does that because it's fun?
Monday, July 25, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Episode 4: Paying Back Karma
It’s fair to say that a lot of events from my own school days have played a part in the development of my teaching style. For example, I was kind of famous in junior high and high school, and in college, and at church, and occasional days of staff development if I’m being forthcoming here, for falling asleep when I’m supposed to be paying attention. Now, I really don’t consciously try to do this. But I have the attention span of a gnat, so there you go. But now? If I have a kid nodding off in class? I don’t feel like I’m in any position to be critical. I totally get where that kid is coming from. Most of the time I’ll just let it go, figuring if the kid is going to fall asleep in school she or he probably needs to get in a little catch-up nap, and crashing for ten or fifteen minutes isn’t going to keep them from passing fifth grade. Been there myself, often.
But sometimes I can’t resist a little prank to wake them up, depending on who’s taking the nap and how well they can take a joke. Because after all, as anyone who has spent significant time watching me teach will attest to, I’m pretty much a goofball in the classroom. Which started very early in life.
When I was in 6th grade my reading group performed the play “St. George and the Dragon” in the school gym for the other classes, with a script that was only ten or twelve pages worth of illustrated text right out of our reading books; I suppose since we were the high reading group our teacher, Ms. Fischer, was looking for a way to challenge us with the truly minimal resources available in a tiny parochial school. The dragon’s speaking parts had been divided up into four roles: The head, the tail, the left paw and the right. The kids playing the dragon were covered with by a sheet during the performances, and would wave around a cardboard cutout of their assigned body part whenever they read their lines. I played the role of the dragon’s left paw.
Being stuck under the sheet with three other kids was pretty boring compared to the other kids, who dressed up as villagers and knights and such. And I’ll admit it, I was the kind of kid who wasn’t always shy about making my own fun when the chance presented itself. The conflict in the script involved the dragon taking over a village to eat all of the sheep, but when we found a stuffed pig buried in all of the random junk stored on the school stage we begged Ms. Fischer to let us change the script from sheep to pigs. She agreed to the edit before going back to the classroom to work with the other two reading groups. It’s important to remember she wasn’t actually there during the performances....
The narrator got to the part about the pigs being eaten and someone slid that stuffed pig across the floor to the dragon, then the left paw (me) grabbed it, pulled it under the sheet, and all the little kids would laugh. Our own joke! It worked like a charm! Problem was, I was now in possession of the pig for the rest of the show, and I lived with a dangerous combination of a non-existent attention span and a desperate need to make people laugh, so I don’t know why it surprised anyone when the pig started peeking out from underneath the sheet and waving to the audience. Every kid out there laughed big, and started watching for the pig’s next appearance at the expense of the rest of the play. I thought this was hilarious. The others in the reading group did not.
When Ms. Fischer returned to the gym between shows to check on things, it was obvious she had been tipped off about my improvising. Everybody tried to be the first one to tell on me. But she cut them all off and just made a generic point about how everyone needed to work together and do what they were supposed to for the play to work. Granted, she said this in a very stern voice and stared right through my soul as she said it, but that’s as far as my well-deserved discipline ever went. (On a side note, it was many years later when Ms. Fischer’s nephew actually turned up as a student in one of my classes. Thankfully he was much easier to deal with than I had been.)
Since I was let off the hook in such a big way, I now feel obligated as the teacher to pay off that debt sometimes when one of my students gets a little out of control. For example, we’ve got the little girl who really wanted to get called on but didn’t, and expressed her disappointment with a word I won’t use here. Everything in the room came to a holy grinding halt, and when I slowly turned around to make sure I heard her correctly I saw her eyes were already filled with tears. “We’ll talk about this later,” I said, and went right back to the lesson. I did talk about it later with the principal, who laughed harder than I’d ever seen before. I think the girl wound up getting one of the worthless token disciplinary slips we used, but I never gave her the verbal throw-down she was expecting and fearing.
And then there was the kid years later, a quick enough thinker to come up with a well-timed “That’s what she said” in gym class, even if it wasn’t appreciated by the phy. ed. teacher and got him sent to the principal. This was a decent kid who lived in dire fear of what would happen to him if he ever crossed a line so he wasn’t a trouble maker by any stretch, and he surely didn’t expect a trip to the office for a stupid offhand remark that was probably louder than he intended. He’d already gotten an earful from the phy. ed. teacher and the principal, so when he got back to me and I brought him in the hallway to talk, he was crying violently and fearing for his life. (Apparently I’m a pretty intimidating figure -- I don’t see it.) He was so surprised when I told him I wasn’t angry, he nearly stopped breathing.
“You’re not?” he asked with open confusion. “How come?”
I shrugged. “You made a mistake,” I said. “You weren’t trying to be disrespectful. You were going for the joke. You just didn’t put a lot of thought into the whole right time/right place thing. Which obviously it was not.”
He went back into the classroom, still amazed to have dodged the metaphorical bullet, and thanked me as he walked through the door.
I think he should have been thanking Ms. Fischer.
But sometimes I can’t resist a little prank to wake them up, depending on who’s taking the nap and how well they can take a joke. Because after all, as anyone who has spent significant time watching me teach will attest to, I’m pretty much a goofball in the classroom. Which started very early in life.
When I was in 6th grade my reading group performed the play “St. George and the Dragon” in the school gym for the other classes, with a script that was only ten or twelve pages worth of illustrated text right out of our reading books; I suppose since we were the high reading group our teacher, Ms. Fischer, was looking for a way to challenge us with the truly minimal resources available in a tiny parochial school. The dragon’s speaking parts had been divided up into four roles: The head, the tail, the left paw and the right. The kids playing the dragon were covered with by a sheet during the performances, and would wave around a cardboard cutout of their assigned body part whenever they read their lines. I played the role of the dragon’s left paw.
Being stuck under the sheet with three other kids was pretty boring compared to the other kids, who dressed up as villagers and knights and such. And I’ll admit it, I was the kind of kid who wasn’t always shy about making my own fun when the chance presented itself. The conflict in the script involved the dragon taking over a village to eat all of the sheep, but when we found a stuffed pig buried in all of the random junk stored on the school stage we begged Ms. Fischer to let us change the script from sheep to pigs. She agreed to the edit before going back to the classroom to work with the other two reading groups. It’s important to remember she wasn’t actually there during the performances....
The narrator got to the part about the pigs being eaten and someone slid that stuffed pig across the floor to the dragon, then the left paw (me) grabbed it, pulled it under the sheet, and all the little kids would laugh. Our own joke! It worked like a charm! Problem was, I was now in possession of the pig for the rest of the show, and I lived with a dangerous combination of a non-existent attention span and a desperate need to make people laugh, so I don’t know why it surprised anyone when the pig started peeking out from underneath the sheet and waving to the audience. Every kid out there laughed big, and started watching for the pig’s next appearance at the expense of the rest of the play. I thought this was hilarious. The others in the reading group did not.
When Ms. Fischer returned to the gym between shows to check on things, it was obvious she had been tipped off about my improvising. Everybody tried to be the first one to tell on me. But she cut them all off and just made a generic point about how everyone needed to work together and do what they were supposed to for the play to work. Granted, she said this in a very stern voice and stared right through my soul as she said it, but that’s as far as my well-deserved discipline ever went. (On a side note, it was many years later when Ms. Fischer’s nephew actually turned up as a student in one of my classes. Thankfully he was much easier to deal with than I had been.)
Since I was let off the hook in such a big way, I now feel obligated as the teacher to pay off that debt sometimes when one of my students gets a little out of control. For example, we’ve got the little girl who really wanted to get called on but didn’t, and expressed her disappointment with a word I won’t use here. Everything in the room came to a holy grinding halt, and when I slowly turned around to make sure I heard her correctly I saw her eyes were already filled with tears. “We’ll talk about this later,” I said, and went right back to the lesson. I did talk about it later with the principal, who laughed harder than I’d ever seen before. I think the girl wound up getting one of the worthless token disciplinary slips we used, but I never gave her the verbal throw-down she was expecting and fearing.
And then there was the kid years later, a quick enough thinker to come up with a well-timed “That’s what she said” in gym class, even if it wasn’t appreciated by the phy. ed. teacher and got him sent to the principal. This was a decent kid who lived in dire fear of what would happen to him if he ever crossed a line so he wasn’t a trouble maker by any stretch, and he surely didn’t expect a trip to the office for a stupid offhand remark that was probably louder than he intended. He’d already gotten an earful from the phy. ed. teacher and the principal, so when he got back to me and I brought him in the hallway to talk, he was crying violently and fearing for his life. (Apparently I’m a pretty intimidating figure -- I don’t see it.) He was so surprised when I told him I wasn’t angry, he nearly stopped breathing.
“You’re not?” he asked with open confusion. “How come?”
I shrugged. “You made a mistake,” I said. “You weren’t trying to be disrespectful. You were going for the joke. You just didn’t put a lot of thought into the whole right time/right place thing. Which obviously it was not.”
He went back into the classroom, still amazed to have dodged the metaphorical bullet, and thanked me as he walked through the door.
I think he should have been thanking Ms. Fischer.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Turn the Page
For someone like me who reads constantly and lives with the quiet hope that someday I'll be able to write something that could see the light of day in the publishing world, it's been a rough week. If you haven't heard, Borders is closing. Not just the local one, but all of them.
The local one of course hits me the hardest. This is the store where I waited in line for the last three Harry Potter books; where I have probably done 50% of my Christmas shopping in the past eight or nine years; where I have discovered so many different books and authors just from having the chance to browse the shelves at my leisure. This was the store that provided me with my favorite gift cards.
Let's face it: This is happening for two big reasons that are kind of related. First of all, the economy isn't great, and for too many people buying books when you have the public library available isn't going to be a priority. And pair that up with the rise of the eReaders in the past few years and, I hate to say it, but it really seems like this is one more step in print books losing their cultural relevance, much like CDs and DVDs have in the past five years. I don't think actual print books will ever disappear -- there's just too much power in the tangible feel of a book in your hands, and anyone who doesn't get that... I can't help you.
I'm not saying that eReaders are worthless. I downloaded a Nick Hornby book onto my iPhone last summer just because I wanted to use the feature, and even though I had to turn a page every 14 seconds, the story (or at least one of the two stories) was compelling enough to keep me involved. What matters in the end is the content of what you read anyway. And there is an argument to be made that a huge traditional bookstore like Borders going under could possibly open up the publishing industry; after all, a digital download is a LOT less expensive to produce.
I ordered quite a few books from Amazon back before Borders opened up in my neighborhood. It looks like I might be returning to that option, if not possibly taking the step into an eReader sometime soon. But for now, I still have a month or two of liquidation to look forward to.
And I'm stocking up.
The local one of course hits me the hardest. This is the store where I waited in line for the last three Harry Potter books; where I have probably done 50% of my Christmas shopping in the past eight or nine years; where I have discovered so many different books and authors just from having the chance to browse the shelves at my leisure. This was the store that provided me with my favorite gift cards.
Let's face it: This is happening for two big reasons that are kind of related. First of all, the economy isn't great, and for too many people buying books when you have the public library available isn't going to be a priority. And pair that up with the rise of the eReaders in the past few years and, I hate to say it, but it really seems like this is one more step in print books losing their cultural relevance, much like CDs and DVDs have in the past five years. I don't think actual print books will ever disappear -- there's just too much power in the tangible feel of a book in your hands, and anyone who doesn't get that... I can't help you.
I'm not saying that eReaders are worthless. I downloaded a Nick Hornby book onto my iPhone last summer just because I wanted to use the feature, and even though I had to turn a page every 14 seconds, the story (or at least one of the two stories) was compelling enough to keep me involved. What matters in the end is the content of what you read anyway. And there is an argument to be made that a huge traditional bookstore like Borders going under could possibly open up the publishing industry; after all, a digital download is a LOT less expensive to produce.
I ordered quite a few books from Amazon back before Borders opened up in my neighborhood. It looks like I might be returning to that option, if not possibly taking the step into an eReader sometime soon. But for now, I still have a month or two of liquidation to look forward to.
And I'm stocking up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)