Teaching on Mars

On Social Action and Guilt

2010-08-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

So I was back in church on a Sunday morning for the first time in a month, as I've finally cleared my schedule of trainings, conferences, and assorted things which wanted to take over the first morning of the week. It was good to be back, though the fact that the old people that irritate me so who sit behind me finally know my name is upsetting for a whole variety of reasons.

The sermon was the second part of one two weeks ago, and since I hadn't listened to the podcast (Sorry pastor!) I felt a little lost. I was posting a couple of my pastor's quips on my Twitter feed when the folks whom I follow started to comment on points from Pete Wilson's sermon at CrossPoint Church in Nashville. Jonathan Acuff then tweeted the following:

"26k kids starved to death yesterday & I got mad emails cause I'm in a Taylor Swift video? Christians are bored"

Now, I have to say that I really like Pete Wilson and his book Plan B. However, the tweet didn't sit well with me, so I immediately shot back a response that I thought the comment was begging to receive.

Just to play Devil's Advocate, but 26k kids starved while he was in a Taylor Swift video. Statements like that can backfire.

Before I go on, I think I should toss some caveats out there. First of all, I had to google whom Taylor Swift was (No, you're not surprised). Second of all, it's not that I disagree with the entire statement per se, as I think that Evangelical Christians are world-famous for majoring on minor issues and blowing them all out of proportion. However, the tone of the statement smells suspiciously like it's meant to elicit a response via guilt, which just rubs me the wrong way. Because I didn't hear it firsthand, I'm going to err on the side of caution and assume it sounds a lot better in context. However, that won't stop me from using it as an excuse to talk about social action and guilt, which is something I had to deal with the past couple of weeks.

In the past decade or so, Evangelical Christianity in America has moved with society in general to be more interested in social causes than it used to be, which is in no way, shape, or form, a bad thing. It's really encouraging to see young people get fired up about working in the community and abroad to make a difference instead of solely blindly consuming the latest in Pop Culture. Unfortunately, this raised awareness has created an army of people who are so driven for their causes that they are literally incapable of understanding that someone cannot be as obsessed about said cause as they are.

In Evangelical circles, I blame this solely on Francis Chan and his book Crazy Love, which essentially said that if you weren't spending your entire life trying to help the poor or in some sort of social action (preferably abroad), you don't love Jesus, and if you don't love Jesus, that, my friends, is a Very Bad Thing. Of course, after polemicizing for 200 pages or so, he backtracks at the conclusion that maybe we're not all called to treat foot fungus in Ethiopia like one of his examples, but apparently I'm the only person to have noticed this comment when reading and discussing this book.

Having sat through two (Two!) studies of this book, I admit I groaned silently and rolled my eyes as either the book itself or a wide-eyed ideologue lectured me on how because I don't spend every penny and every waking moment helping the poor, hungry, disadvantaged, oppressed, etc., I'm either some baby-eating non-Christian or some soulless corporati. Of course, in the latter's case I didn't help things one bit by slipping into a rich vein of passive-aggressiveness and began singing the praises of unfettered corporatism and consumerism. But what can I say? No one's perfect.

I think it goes without saying that this view on life is flawed to say the least, and people who want to guilt you into following their pet social cause with the same alleged intensity runs into trouble. First of all, if I'm going to take your cause as seriously as you want me to, I need to quit my job and sign up at the nearest monastery, as that is the logical conclusion of your rhetoric. And with all due respect to my Catholic friends and readers, the last thing a monastery needs is for me to show up to join their order.

This leads to the point that when someone is this fervent about the totality of their cause, and is busy guilt tripping you into aiding their cause, it makes it easy to poke holes in their arguments. For the angry ideologue, I asked why he was sitting at home playing video games instead of solving problems abroad. For the quote from Wilson, I merely asked what taking a part in a country music video would do to help the 26k kids who starved while he took part in said video. Is pointing things like that out a bit out of taste? Yes. But then again, guilt tripping people into helping your pet causes isn't exactly great either.

I'm pretty sure by now you're sitting smugly in your seat wondering if I actually do care about anyone but myself. Well, if you want to be honest, I have a real soft spot for helping out gifted kids in pretty much any way I can. Yes, it isn't helping people with foot fungus in Ethiopia, but to blow off gifted kids' needs is as callous as I'm often accused when I don't swoon over the latest cause in need of my assistance Right. This. Minute. As events in the UK showed this past week with the mysterious murder of a GCHQ cryptanalyst, gifted people often grow up into solitary individuals that people look at quizzically, only to remark that they are "extremely polite and amiable" without doing much else. As someone who tends to have people look at me and say that I am "extremely polite and amiable" without doing much else, I see needs that I have a unique understanding and toolkit to take care of. Does that make my cause less important than starving kids 3/4 of a world away? For some people, yes, but for the rest of us, we know better.

To sum this all up, we can't save the world all by ourselves no matter how hard we try, but instead of trying to get as many comrades-in-arms for our cause-du-jour via guilt and peer pressure, let's just realize that some people are busy saving their corner of the world so you don't have to also.

Until next time.

The Burden of Command

2010-08-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

I was going to make this post about my first two weeks of school, but rather than focusing on my classroom, events today are making me think about my responsibilities outside the classroom and how I need to deal with them.

I must say up front that I am not shy about taking charge of something for better or worse. If there is a power vacuum, I tend to fill it. If there is an ineffective leader in charge, I pressure them to improve or outright take over. It's not because I have delusions of becoming a tinpot dictator or anything, but I'm a pretty meticulous person, and I like things done correctly. So if I'm not in charge and it's not getting done correctly, that drives me batty to no end. For most of last year, our team leader was trying to dump the job on my lap because it was obvious that she couldn't do it and I could. As you've read on this blog, I was kind of too busy taking classes and figuring out how to teach to take the job, but when she declared to everyone that she was not coming back, I volunteered for the job.

It's not a hard job per se, but it's a bit of a petty bureaucratic feel to it because I'm essentially the liaison between the administration and my fellow seventh grade teachers. The most tedious part of it is heading up our daily team meetings. With a good team, it's a breeze. If you don't have a good team, it's like pulling teeth. Thankfully, this year's team is like the former instead of the latter, and my fellow teachers have done a great job of taking on roles that I wanted to delegate. What I'm left with is essentially being the face of the team and the person who can spin anything that needs to be said to administrators either at the school level or above.

So today we came into teaming and I was looking to finish up a lesson for my Honors class the next period. In walks a Central Office employee to complete an inservice on drug abuse. I had another activity planned, and was caught flat-footed. My principal looked at me quizzically and told me that this was on the weekly announcement e-mail. I responded by smirking and sheepishly admitting that even though I've been there for over a year, I still don't get school e-mails due to not being assigned to the school by the e-mail server. The COC employee looked at me strangely, but my principal started laughing and told her that this is really a shame since I have pretentions of being a good team leader and best of all, I am the school's technology lead teacher, after all. I could only fake a shameful look and talk about the irony of it all. I then apologized to the COC employee about being clueless about her coming, and she sweetly brushed it off, calling it all a part of being in charge of something.

And you know what? She is completely correct. Leading is really a series of unexpected situations that not even the best planning and bureaucratic paperwork can prepare us for. Though this was a pretty amusing example of dealing with unexpected events on a moment's notice, it pales in comparison to the daily fun of being our school's technology lead teacher. That position is essentially the technology resource person at school who is in charge of professional development for technology, writing the school's technology plan, and most mundanely, doing basic troubleshooting of our school's PCs and assorted hardware, and putting wha can't get fixed on our HelpDesk. Our last TLT was our curriculum facilitator, who has since moved on to being an assistant principal at a school on the East End of the parish (Jerk. [Not really. I'm quite happy for her, but I miss her so.]), and I filled in the position (See a trend?) with the expectation that I'd get to do some neat professional development using technology and use my deep knowledge of technology to help my colleagues.

Instead, I spend my free time (and some of my teaching time if it's an emergency) making printers work, "fixing" e-mail, and crawling under desks to reconnect cables that were somehow disconnected. I could already write an article about how silly some of the problems were, but that would be unfair to my colleagues since a lot of them just aren't anywhere as immersed in technology (Much less knowing a handful of programming languages like I do) as I am, not to mention it wouldn't be very nice.

Suffice it to say that sitting under a desk spraying canned air to clean out a filter and reconnect some cables can really show you what leadership and the burden of command really is: your subordinates look to you to solve their problems because you've shown the aptitude to be placed in charge--and their faith in you and your abilities can really be quite high. I could easily get perturbed that a student asks me to hurry to their class to save their teacher's technology crisis while I'm teaching a lesson, but I've decided to take it as evidence that they wouldn't be asking for my help if they didn't think I could fix it right then and there. It's the burden of leadership that I'm more than willing to carry--even if it means embarassing myself by being the only teacher to not be on the e-mail server list despite being in charge of technology.

Until next time.

And So It Begins (Again)

2010-08-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

I oftentimes quip to others that I'm a sad, sad geek with no life. Those others tend to nod their head sagely in agreement with me that I am indeed a sad, sad geek with no life. However, it stands to imagine that I am perhaps the busiest geek with no life in existence. After all, how else can I explain the fact that I've been doing so many things that only now, after the ninth day of the school year, do I actually have time to make a blog post.

To sum up my summer activities, I essentially killed myself going to class every day in order to finish my teaching certificate a year early. It wasn't all grueling work, as I spent my June class ignoring what the professor said as I watched the World Cup during class. Having said that, taking classes meant I had to miss the summer camp I usually work at (The last time I missed was in 1997... back when I attended as a camper) as well as the MLS All-Star Game which was held next door in Houston. I was a bit bummed to miss it, but I made up for it by seeing Theirry Henry's debut in MLS that next weekend... after the end of classes.

When I wasn't in class churning out gristle in the form of writing assignments, I was feverishly trying to land a very nice science position at an elementary school here in New Iberia at a school that's generally regarded as the best elementary school in the parish. I chased the job down, and finally got an interview. I blew the interview away as only I could, but was passed over for the other person who interviewed--a lady who came in with a single-page resume and not really dressed for the occasion.

That obviously meant that I'm back at my school teaching Reading. I can't say I'm 100% thrilled about it, but this year is off to a bit of a flyer. The kids are well-behaved, the Promethean gadgets are all up and running, and even my struggling students are happy to be in class. Harry Wong would be happy with me as I leave at the end of the day full of energy, whereas my kids are a bit worn out from a long day's work. And that's a good thing, as I'm our Seventh Grade Team Leader, on our school's School Improvement Plan Committee, our school's Technology Lead Teacher, and most important to me, I start the road to my Master's Degree in Education of the Gifted. Needless to say this year will be packed to the gills, so that means there will be plenty for me to opine. As it stands, this semester looks to allow for a Monday-Thursday-Friday/Weekend posting format, so that's how posting will be for the time being. Feel free to drop a line and give your opinion on matters. Otherwise it'll look like I'm sitting here on my lonely online perch whining about the world--which isn't why I blog.

Until next time.

Teaching on Mars is on Summer Vacation... Kind of

2010-07-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

So I haven't posted for a month and I received a couple of e-mails from people wondering why. Simply put, I've been on a summer vacation that's consisted of me taking two college classes and being smack in the middle of our church's big children's drama that starts on 18 July. I should be back into the blogging swing starting in the beginning of August, so until the you folks have fun while I, erm, kill myself trying, ironically, to better myself.

Oh, and to the folks who've come from Throw Mountains as a result of my article on being a single guy (Yes, I managed to get one article done in about 90 minutes of downtime.), welcome! Check out the place and see if you like it. If you do, come back with the rest of the handfuls of people in a couple of weeks when I'm back up and running. You won't regret it. (I think.)

-Loren

Life as a Soccer Missionary

2010-06-13T21:08:00.000-07:00

I've been trying really hard over the past couple of weeks to get into a rhythm of working on classwork and blogging. Considering I'm in a class that shrinks a semester's worth of work into four weeks, my work is cut out for me. What makes things worse is the fact that the World Cup is this summer, and that means that for hours at a time a significant portion of my focus is on the match at hand... even if it's between teams like Paraguay and Switzerland. The quadrennial festival of football is truly a sight to behold, and the prospect of watching three matches a day for almost two weeks straight is true delight for a football supporter like me.

However, living in a semi-rural part of the United States means it is often quite a lonely exercise. Soccer and I have been joined at the hip since an early age through both playing the game and being a spectator. My younger years were pretty much dire, but our local public broadcasting station played ancient reruns from the brilliant series Soccer Made in Germany got me well in touch with my German ancestry, so when my teammates were busy trying to pick daisies out of the midfield, I was busy trying to be south Louisiana's own Karl-Heinz Rummenigge... and usually failing miserably because I was even shorter than he was. The growth of the spectator side of the sport in the 1990s allowed me to finally follow my teams in Holland (PSV Eindhoven), Germany (Hamburger SV), and England (Arsenal) from my home over satellite television. However, like a lot of things in my life, it was merely tolerated by my parents mainly because they wanted to be nice to me and didn't (really) want me to be seen talking to myself, even if it was about the majesty of Dennis Bergkamp.

Fast forward well over a decade, and with a good-paying job and spare time, following the game now is really easy--just like spending lots of money on it. I'm currently investing in some World Cup scarves and a couple of posters to go in my classroom to accompany my Arsenal scarf so when people walk in they will know for sure which sport I follow--as if the PSV Eindhoven polos, soccer books from Europe, and German men's national team lanyard my ID hangs off of isn't any indication, that is. When my students ask what I watched this weekend, I'd pull out the English Premier League highlights online and show them the best goals of the week, much to their consternation.

On Saturday I headed over to Lafayette to watch the England-USA match at a local eatery. I was astounded to see the place packed to the gills with folks wearing kits from over 20 countries and a good 10 club sides. With nowhere else to sit, I plopped down at the bar between an Englishman and a loud-mouth American that knew nothing about the game despite claiming to have played high school soccer for four years. When the US scored off of Robert Green's horiffic error, the place exploded with cheers, including myself in a rare case of openly cheering when watching a sporting event. When it was over, I left satisfied in a good time, but wondering where all of these supporters came from, because whereas I wear my club allegiances pretty openly, I can count the number of non-rec soccer kits I've seen in the area, apart from the Mexicans and their innumerable Chivas and Club America kits. There was that one guy I saw wearing an Aston Villa shirt with Gabriel Agbonlahor on the back, but apart from that, I'm all alone.

It's weird, but in some ways I'm just one of an ever-growing number of soccer missionaries preaching the good news of the beautiful game to this nation of uncultured savages. Of course, I say that with my tongue firmly in cheek, but there is something that, despite the ever-growing status of the game in the American sports scene, makes Americans scoff and act a smidge hostile. Despite the scenes across the country like I experienced on Saturday, people frowned at the fact the England-USA match ended in a draw, much less the fact that there was celebration for a draw, and typical complaints about a lack of scoring, and a general "lack of action", and whined that they were going to have to put up with this nonsense for a month. Of course, some people have found the secret lair where I get my marching orders, and blamed this all on the liberal media, which I find most amusing considering where I stand when it comes to politics.

I don't think I'm too offencive of a missionary. I mean, compared to some of the American football shrines some of my colleagues have, my scarves and books are small time. When the New Orleans Saints were on their Super Bowl run, the mad dash to get on the bandwagon was startling, as was the garish amount of black and gold everyone wore, not to mention the kitsch people plastered on their walls, windows, and sides of their automobiles. I think best of all, I don't sit there and constantly carp about why football games on TV last over 3 hours, referees never call basic penalties in basketball on star players, not to mention the fact that cheating and our national pastime have quite the symbiotic relationship. Oops.

Regardless, I think a big frustration in my soccer-watching life is that, apart from being the only one around here that follows it like I do, is that a lot of US sports fans don't want to give me the same consideration that I give them. I'm not expecting them to quote Jonathan Wilson of the Guardian and Inverting the Pyramid fame, or comment on the game like folks on Zonal Marking, at least they could attempt to wrap their heads around facts like you might not need constant scoring to have an exciting game, sometimes it's OK to not have a winner if the result of the game isn't life or death, or even getting kicked in the shin still hurts a lot... even if you jump right back up after rolling around on the ground for a couple of minutes. Well, a man can dream, eh?

Until next time.

Teaching Post-Mortem- Planning

2010-06-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

Well, after a crazy two weeks of getting ready for the summer session of college where, after pleading with a department head, I managed to get a screw-up on the university's part fixed, enabling me to get my Alternate Certification program completed this summer as I had planned, as opposed to the worst-case scenario where I would have to spend another year to complete just two classes. Now that I am in the class, I am doing the logical thing when presented with the case of being in a class where the content is literally what I did every day for a year: blog!

As I stated in my last post, I wanted to look back at the school year like any responsive professional and reflect on what I did with the purpose of taking those lessons learned and apply them to my conceptual fram... Er sorry, got a little too eduspeak-ey there for a second. In normal language, by talking about what I did this past year, I could figure out what went wrong (and right!) and fix those problems in preparation for next year.

Simply put, this year was horrible for me planning-wise because I was only five days before school started to teach in a subject area that I'm simply not qualified to teach, much less have a clue how to teach reading to students who are up to five grades behind where they should be as readers. The day I was hired I sat at home looking at all of the material that was given to me and felt totally lost. Thankfully for me my school board created a 180-day calendar for teachers to follow, so at least I could use that to get going. The next four days I spent, not planning, but simply getting my classroom ready for the impending school year. As a result, I was flying by the seat of my pants for the first two months of the school year just trying to figure out what I was doing teaching Reading. Of course, once I figured out what I needed to do, things began to go a lot smoother, but the issue remains that I'm teaching something I haven't the foggiest as to how to do what I'm supposed to do.

I think that this is going to plague me as long as I teach this subject. I am a Social Studies/Science, and even to an extent Math teacher. I look at the subject materials in those subject and know what and how to teach without too much effort. Reading? Not a chance. Even though I had the assistance of our consultant getting me up to speed, I was still spending eight to ten hours a weekend working on lesson plans, only to spend over an hour a night looking at my lessons trying to change them since everything went wrong. By the end of the year, I was in a rhythm of lesson planning.

Looking to next year, if i can continue to plan deliberately once I got going in the school year, I'll feel a lot better about the planning aspect of the job. However, I still feel like I'm still behind the 8-ball because I don't feel as though I'm adequately prepared to teach students who, frankly, need someone who specializes in teaching struggling readers. I wish I could say that I can turn it around this next year and really become an effective reading teacher, but I know better and am tempering my expectations... and hoping I can get an assignment at my school where I have a better chance of utilizing the teaching talents that I have.

Until next time.

The End is Here

2010-05-31T20:18:00.000-07:00

*phew*

After almost ten months, 180 school days, and almost 900 individual classes, this school year finally came to an end. Unlike my growing up, the end of the school year came with a whimper and not a bang. When the final bell rang, my students went out of the class just as they normally do, and I plopped down into a chair in my empty classroom and realized it was all over. For over two months there will be no super-early mornings, dull commutes, classes with students who are not terribly interested in the subject matter, bureaucratic headaches, and everything else that makes school school for a teacher. Instead, I'll be taking a couple of classes to finish off my teaching certificate, assessing where my career is going, and hopefully get that done in time to have more than a week's notice in preparing for the next school year.

Over the summer I'll be blogging in the usual format, looking at the school year in retrospective, look into how I'm planning for next year, the world around me, and some other subjects that interest me than hopefully you'll find the same. So until later this week, I have some personal business I need to finish off.

Until next time.

An Ode to Secretaries

2010-05-20T20:33:00.000-07:00

With the end of the year approaching, everyone is counting the days until summer vacation begins. With less than a week to go, even someone like me is simply out of fuel and looking to wrap things up. And with wrapping things up means that teachers assume their duty as accountants as they categorize and label everything in sight in preparation for school to go into its annual hibernation. At the centre of this operation is our school secretary, for whom this is just another series of checklists in a lifetime of checklists and forms. When you think about it, a school secretary has its own niche in the school ecosystem. They're not teachers or administrators, but without them the school grinds to a halt.

So today I was doing my Obsessive-Compulsive best to finish up my textbook count to turn in to our secretary. My back bookshelf had all of my textbooks catalogued into my own little system, and I was sitting in the dark (My not-so-subtle hint to people to leave me alone when I'm in my planning period) writing down the names and addresses of the students who did not turn in their books, as well as the names of the students who damaged class copies of my textbooks. Because the sheets were due at the end of school, I felt particularly hurried, and rushed to the office to turn it in. When I did, the secretary was obviously unamused by events happening, but commented that I was the only teacher to do my bureaucratic duty thus far.

When I plopped back into my chair in my dark classroom, I began thinking about our secretary and the rather fantastic job she does. At a school I used to teach at, our secretary frankly was not very good and it showed. Everything was a mess and even simple things got screwed up when it came across her desk. She was unmistakeably kind and friendly, but if I learned anything in my first year teaching, it was that I should become as self-sufficient as possible because relying on the secretary was a crap shoot.

Fortunately, our secretary is about on the opposite end of that spectrum as one can get. It still doesn't stop me from being as self-sufficient as possible, mainly because I don't like imposing on other people. I could go on about how secretarialy our secretary goes about her job, but that would bore you like counting paper clips. Instead, I'll just say that her sense of humour is simply outstanding, and to see her just shrug her shoulders at some bureaucratic nonsense and let loose a macabre one-liner always makes me grin, as well as how she is able to sweet-talk a central office employee on the phone, and immediately put one of our seedier students or parents in their place with a glare or statement without a blink of the eye.

I know it's a bit late to talk about how awesome secretaries are considering the day for that was a month ago, but with the school year winding down, I couldn't let the school year end without complimenting our chief paper pusher/receptionist/impromptu nurse/greeter/disciplinarian of students we don't have time to deal with. Oh, and for my colleagues who haven't turned in their textbook lists, please do so lest she comes to your classroom and demand it herself. You've been warned. ;^)

Until next time.

History Bee Post-Mortem

2010-05-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

Growing up I always wanted to be in professional sports. When I was young I dreamed of lifting the Stanley Cup after scoring the winning goal in overtime, or lifting the World Cup after hammering home the crucial penalty in front of billions on TV. For all of those dreams, I was pretty much doomed to only dream, because when you're small and not very athletic, you're never going to reach those heights--especially when you don't ever play those sports in an organized fashion until high school.

As a result, I figured coaching was more my style since I was one more for brains than brawn. I always saw myself prowling my technical area during the Champions League final staring down Jose Mourinho or Sir Alex Ferguson as my players executed my plan to perfection. And when they shocked the world by giving PSV Eindhoven or Arsenal the trophy through their victory, I'd give my counterpart a sly smirk and a wink as I shook their hand, letting them know I had out-thought them and my players had outplayed theirs. Well, at least it worked that way when I played FIFA 09, that is. Since that won't happen either, I've been looking for other methods of venting that competitive spirit.

In the parish I work at, we have an annual quiz bowl program that is recorded on a local TV station dedicated to social studies. It's called History Bee, but it operates like your regular quiz bowl. The six public junior high schools compete along with the Catholic school in Franklin. In all reality, it's a small-time operation that's fairly straightforward, but it's good fun to have, not to mention a way to compete outside of the athletic realm for once.

Last year at Franklin, I volunteered for the coach's position since they did not go to the previous year's event. I took my writing students and drilled them every day for two months. We even got out buzzer sets and a video camera to practice being on TV. We got the schedule, saw we would be playing BEBMS, and began plotting our strategy against the perennial champions from Berwick in the semifinals, since the first round match would be a cinch. When we got to the studio, my players immediately got stage fright, and I sat in horror as my well-drilled players got smacked across the stage by BEBMS and their cocky little captain that answered every question. I ended up covering my face because I didn't want them to see how terrified I was by their performance. By the last round, they had recovered, and promptly proceeded to trounce BEBMS. Unfortunately, it was a bit difficult to come back from being down 78-12 with a quarter to go, but the 84-36 final score made us feel only slightly embarrassed, though the proceedings at the Taco Bell after the match showed that for the players, the hurt was only skin deep.

Fast forward to this year, and I'm at BEBMS armed with our cocky little captain and the rest of the team. They lost a close game to Berwick in the semifinals and were out for revenge. I carefully crafted my team, blending experience with new players. I drilled them for two months, but this time we kept our sights low, since we were drawn to play the perennial finalists from Hanson in Franklin. Having said that, we knew that if we beat Hanson, we could get to the final because we'd be playing Franklin, and since I was their coach last year, they wouldn't have someone obsessed with winning a competition--not to mention the fact I only had eighth graders on last year's team, so they would be no match for my squad.

We went to the studio, and took our places. I sat in my same seat as last year, fully expecting to relive the horror from a year ago, but trying so hard to hide that. We took early control and stretched the lead to 20 points going into the final quarter. Despite having a team that played well the previous year, they were in shock that we had taken such control of the match. However, in the final quarter they found their legs and came charging back. Our lead suddenly shrunk down to a whisker, and I felt the pain that only a parent or coach has when they want to jump in and save the day, but can't because they did all they could as a coach. When the final buzzer sounded, I knew we had thrown away our lead and lost. I was gutted--plain and simple. I got up to shake the opposing coach's hand, only to hear him congratulate me for my team's talent and toughness for pulling out the win. I looked over and saw we had won 68-64.

68-64.

We won.

My kids came and gave me a big group hug chattering excitedly about their chances against Franklin, and a possible rematch with Berwick, who had beaten Morgan City by over 100 points in the first round, in the finals. That afternoon, we found out Franklin wouldn't be sending a team, so we advanced to the finals.

On Friday, we arrived at the studio to watch the semifinal, and observed Berwick slug their way uncomfortably to the final, though they ended up winning by 50+ points. I was visibly nervous, and took my seat for the match for the trophy and the glory, knowing it was up to my kids since I took them as far as I could. We came out strong in the first quarter, but folded in the second, falling behind by 40 points at the half. We swept through the third quarter and pulled within 12. I kept on gesturing to my kids to keep it going since we had them on the ropes, and could win it in the last round if we continued. We promptly folded again, and the match ended 104-77. I got my team captain's chin up, and we shook hands with the opposing team, and their coach who was duly impressed with our performance in comparison to their previous opponents, and we went on the stage to receive the runner's-up trophy from the president of the local bank and our superintendent, smiles and all. Upon leaving, the president gave my team a cash prize for their performance, and another compliment for their play. Right before we left the superintendent shook my hand and complimented me for my students' job and my job personally, as my school had never been in the finals before, much less play so well throughout the tournament, and that caught his attention.

Looking back at the competition, I really got a good look at the difference between being a player and a coach. Though my kids felt the weight of the competition in their own way, I felt a completely different weight than them. Had I been on the stage as a player, I could have single-handedly mopped the floor with any of the teams in the competition because I know American History so well. However, that's useless since my job is only to get my students ready for the competition, and leave the rest to them. I have to admit that there were few times in my life where I was as stressed and helpless as I was during the final quarter of the Hanson match, where our goal of a finals rematch with Berwick felt like it was slipping away.

Now, you may be asking why I would get so worked up over a silly game that no one cares about, much less watch on TV during the summer? Even ignoring my competitiveness, History Bee is a chance for my school to show its academic prowess. Though our reputation isn't quite as subterranean as Franklin's is, I believe that we are chronically undervalued because all of the struggles a lot of our students have. It really drowns out the fantastic work a lot of our students do, and frankly our top tier students could go toe to toe with any other school in the parish. So, being one concerned with such big things, doing well in History Bee was my way of showing the parish that we can hang with the rest of them, and aren't quite worth our reputation, even if it's on an afternoon in a TV studio.

I think that's the thing that separated coaching from playing: you see the big picture and plan accordingly. Just like Arsene Wenger has to be concerned with more than just the activities on the pitch, but also how his club measures against the rest of the Premier League and Europe in general in so many categories, even if it's in a relatively small venue. The fact that our superintendent knows enough about our school and the competition to make note of the fact we did something that had never been done before as a school means that even though we lost in the finals, it was a major victory for the school, even if the trophy doesn't quite say that.

As great as all that sounds, second isn't good enough for me. I want everyone to see what we're really capable of, so I'm planning on lifting the trophy with my captain next year... and not on a TV screen playing FIFA either. BEBMS: 2011 History Bee Champions. You heard it here first.

Until next time.

When is Criticism not Criticism?

2010-05-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

Criticism. We all dish it out, but loathe taking it. We tell people all the time what is wrong with them, yet we get rather indignant when someone mentions our flaws. When we see someone criticizing, we often chastise them for being critical. Someone who doesn't criticize often has a lot of friends because they are never rude enough to. Simply put, criticism is something we think about and deal with every day.

Once upon a time, yours truly was a master of giving criticism, yet never being able to take it. When you are almost always making perfect scores on tests, at the top of every academic list for achievement, and never get in trouble for behaviour, you tend to think you have all of the answers, and you often feel free to dispense it to those lesser souls whom you feel are in need. On those rare occasions where I did receive criticism, I didn't know how to react, and usually simply collapsed into an emotional fit, which usually consisted of me being pouty and moody.

Over the years, I got a little better at handling criticism, but where I really stepped up my efforts was in how I dished out criticism. On one hand I discovered that I actually did not know everything, so I limited my commenting to stuff I actually knew about, that way I wouldn't be considered a hypocrite. After all, everyone hates hypocrites. On the other hand, I really discovered the depths which I could shoot at folks through sarcasm and snark, and I got very good at that--much to the chagrin of people in my sphere.

Once I started teaching, I began to look at criticism in a completely different manner through two realizations. Over the past two school years, I've been scrutinized through informal observations at least once every two weeks, and had to sit on meetings where everything I did in the classroom was commented and critiqued upon. It was all done in a professional manner with the goal of making me a better teacher. Rather than get upset over it, I took it for what it is and I am now an exponentially better teacher than I was before.

The other thing that changed my view of criticism was how, through teaching, I began to notice that I stopped criticizing as much as I began to observe things--both right and wrong in everything I taught. I noticed that for all of the ink I spilled all over tests and projects that failed, I was spilling equal amounts of ink pointing out the things I liked in what I saw. Since I was spending the same amount of energy doing both, as well as the fact I was doing both without much compunction or bias (e.g. the positive and negative comments came without a care as to whose paper it was, which shocked a lot of my lower-performing students would find positive comments... and vice versa), I found that I had turned criticism into observation--and I have to say I liked that very much.

Recent events have made me wonder if I'm all wrong about this. As most of you know, I use Twitter all of the time, and I've begun tweeting what goes on in my local church service. I have to admit that I absolutely love livebloggings/livetweetings of events mainly due to the amount of wit and humour most bring, especially ones like the Guardian's minute-by-minute reports of football matches. I admit I try to emulate it in a certain fashion, but I find making my opinions really known to be hazardous to my mental health, so rather than be critical, I decided early on to just make observations, and leave their meaning to be found by the reader. For example, a couple of weeks ago, during the sermon a woman put on her sunglasses and started brushing her hair. Now, I could have tossed the lady under the bus, but instead I just mentioned it and asked the reader to make of it what they would. Some would laugh, others could complain about the distraction the lady was making, or I was making by sitting in the back corner of the sanctuary, or by not being 100% focused on the pastor, or any other thing I could come up with.

The problem is, of course, most people don't see things that way. I had an interesting conversation with someone on Twitter who was saying I was far more critical than I seemed. I must admit that I was impressed by the discussion because it wasn't a reaction per se, but rather an honest investigation of my motives and a friendly set of observations rather than pointed bickering and angst. Simply put, it wasn't pointing out flaws, it was just making an observation. Like I said, this has had me thinking for the past couple of weeks about it, and I think I've come to a consensus (at least to me) about what I view as criticism vs. observations.

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary (UK Edition), the dictionary of note for yours truly, I've looked at some definitions, and I found them to encapsulate my ideas pretty well.

Critical, by definition is (1) expressing adverse or disapproving comments or judgements. [sic] (2) expressing or involving an analysis of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work.

Criticism, by definition is (1) indicate the faults of in a disapproving way. (2) form and express a critical assessment of (a literary or artistic work).

Observe, by definition is (1) notice; perceive. (2) watch attentively; monitor. (3) make a remark; say.

Observation, by definition is (1) the action or process of closely observing or monitoring. (2) the ability to notice significant details. (3) a comment based on something one has seen, heard, or noticed.

So, having laid out these definitions, I think I can make a case for there being a rather distinct delineation between criticism and observation. The definitions clearly state that criticism means you're looking for negative things whereas observing requires you only to notice something, regardless of its positiveness or negativity. Even though people don't believe me for a second, in the end, that's what I'm wanting to do. I just want to see things and pass them along without passing judgment. Being a teacher, I'm finding that I have an obsession with observing but not criticizing because since most people mistakenly conflate criticism with emotional feelings toward someone, I want them to know that I am being as unbiased as I humanly can so they can see that I am trying to improve them in every way I can--regardless of whether I find their personal life or conduct pleasing to me.

Having said all of this, you can feel free to drop by in the comments section and tell me how deluded I am, how even though I "observe" things, I'm still only observing negative things, as well as how I did all of that research just to put a fig leaf over my critical spirit. You're perfectly entitled to do so, and I wouldn't mind if you did (OK, I wouldn't mind if you commented, not being a tool just for giggles). However, I went through all of this thinking in an attempt to make sure how I see things in both my job and personal life are in as healthy of a view as possible. I find it especially pressing as tomorrow I will be going to my year-end evaluation and hope my bosses will summarize all of their observations of me in this past school year with an equal eye for observing and not simply criticizing. Or if anything, be less critical of me than I was on my self-evaluation. There was very little observing going on on that sheet of paper, let me tell you!

Until next time.

Why Walmart Makes me Hate Teaching

2010-05-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

A good Internet friend of mine is a lawyer by the name of Yale Hollander. He writes a weekly column for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that takes a rather whimsical view at news in general. His column this past week covered the realm of Internet friendships, but he and I get our kicks recounting our tales of adventure when we head over to Walmart and observe humanity at its most abnormal. People may sneer at the retail giant, but I find the sociological implications of a visit to be generally highly entertaining. However, there's days like today where I loathe Walmart for the same reason.

I dropped into a local Walmart to pick up some lunch items, and as I was pondering whether to buy sliced medium cheddar cheese or the sharp variety when someone I went to high school with literally bumped into me. When they apologized, they realized who I was and commenced to catching up on lost times. I have to admit that I was ambivalent at best, but I was polite. It went a bit like this:

Old Acquaintance: We're taking our kids out of public schools after this year. I don't know if you know, public schools are getting bad. Worst of all are the teachers. They don't care about their students' well being; all they do is try to brainwash them with nothing but nonsense! What kind of people would do something like this.

Me: *nods politely*

Old Acquaintance: But enough about me, what have you been up to?

Me: Erm, I'm a public school teacher.

Old Acquaintance: Oh. Well. Erm... I wasn't talking about you, obviously.

Me: Of course not.

Old Acquaintance: Well, I've got to run. Nice meeting up with you!

If there's one thing that really eats me alive, it's how my fellow evangelicals love to throw us public school teachers under the bus for everything. As far as they're concerned, we're a bunch of godless Commies whose only goal in life is to brainwash everyone into a bunch of atheists. Never mind the fact they base this on half-truths and worst case scenarios, not to mention there are plenty of teachers who go to their own churches. Then when you mention the fact you're one of those horrific creatures, they don't know what to say.

The other incident was when I was headed to check out. Because I live a good distance from where I teach, I rarely see my students out in the wild. So to see one in a Walmart so far from their home was a bit surprising. I saw them down an aisle, so there was no way for them to recognize me. However, what I saw absolutely broke my heart, as I saw their mother absolutely verbally undress them in front of everyone in the store. I couldn't quite figure out what it was for, but the tone was nightmarish, and the vocabulary used was even worse.

As I stood there for what felt like an eternity, a couple of things passed through my mind. The first was that this is what I hate about my school to no end. This was just another reminder that a lot of the problems my students have stem from what they go home to every day. No matter how much some of them get under my skin to the point I want to tell them exactly what I think of them and the decisions they make, I would never verbalize these feelings, much less use such obscene and crude language to get such an ill-thought point across. It doesn't take much of a leap to think that this was far from an isolated incident, and my students have to put up with this on a daily basis. Considering the damage that I've had to fight through and currently walk with just from some innocuous statements said at some bad times in my life, I can only imagine the kind of hurt my kids walk with into my classroom.

The other was the fact I wanted the old acquaintance I just met up with to hear what was going through my head at this time and dare them to tell me to my face that teachers do not care about the students under their care. Even if I didn't want to, the homes my students come from compel me to care about them because no one else will. If I don't care for them, their chances of making something out of their life becomes almost nil, ensuring another generation of children being subjected to continuous hurt and humiliation. I do what I do because my students deserve something better than what they have--no matter what some people may think of what I do.

Until next time.

Goodbye, Video Games

2010-05-03T20:30:00.000-07:00

I had my brother over for the weekend as we went backpacking at Chicot State Park on their backpacking trail. We hiked about half of the 19-mile trail, and had a rather decent time, all things withstanding like extremely muggy conditions in the evening, deer flies that hunted in packs, and our compatriots that canoed back to the starting point... and arrived three hours later than expected. For my brother, as much fun as the trip and bonding with his older brother was, the real priority lay when I woke up on Sunday morning to get ready for Church, as he was busy playing my copy of Call of Duty 4 online. Being 15, he is fully in the swing of loving video games, though his Internet connection at home is rather slow, meaning that he can't scratch his itch unless he's at my house.

As I was sitting in my rarely-used recliner watching him hunt down terrorists with the glee that only a young military history nerd can have, I realized that I had not touched the game, or any other one for a good four months now, and really haven't noticed. It was in my rarely-used recliner that I realized I had finally given up a big part of my Twenties, and in coinciding with discovering some grey hair, brought home the fact that I'm not getting any younger, and whether things that I'm going through are related to this.

As I've stated ad nauseum, I grew up in a very sheltered household. One of the things that was simply banned was video games. When I was six and afflicted with one biannual bouts with tonsilitis, my parents decided to fork over the money to rent an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System with RBI Baseball and 1942. After about six straight hours of playing both games, my parents fears were realized and never again would a video game system come into the house. Sure, I got to play games at my friend's house, but a couple of hours a week compared to what most of my peers played simply leaves me clueless when they get all nostalgic over Bad Dudes.

By the time I got to college, I got a PC and dove into PC gaming with seeming intent to make up for lost time. Of course, it didn't help my entire dorm floor played Half-Life's Counter-Strike, making full games as easy as a round-up down the the hall. When I moved home, my parents disapproved of my enjoyment of video games that involved me mowing down people, but they tolerated it due to the fact that I was an adult. I responded by keeping my gaming within the realm of realistic military shooters, and delving into strategy games that allowed me to play armchair general to my heart's content. I used gaming as a conduit to make friendships and get the social networking that I had trouble making in the outside world. After all, it's far easier to meet and befriend people who have essentially the same interests as you do.

By the time I moved off to Franklin last year, I fully considered myself a gamer. I read the magazines, participated in discussions on the big websites, and bought the paraphernalia of my favourite games, especially VALVe's Team Fortress 2. To me, gaming was part and parcel of who I was. I played video games and looked at the nooks and crannies of the plot of the story, and became interested in the social interactions of the multiplayer environment. I thought of myself as a cultured, if not outright snobbish gamer because I eschewed the popular gaming consoles for my PC, which sheltered me from the festering immaturity that infests game franchises like Halo, Call of Duty, and Madden. On Internet forums, I found myself to be the elder statesman in many ways because I was in my later twenties whereas the rest of the population was either in high school or just getting into college. I saw myself in these fellow travelers, and I found myself passing along my views to another generation of gamers.

Then, it all kind of fell apart.

I guess it's a part of the tectonic shift of priorities in my life that's been happening over the past six months, but I just stopped being a gamer full stop. I quit the forums, stopped reading the websites, and essentially divorced myself from the entire subculture (I still wear the odd t-shirt though.) I can't tell you what made me just give up a major portion of what I thought was myself, yet I still did it, and don't really feel like going back. As I watched my brother play Call of Duty 4 on Sunday, I could see myself playing as he was, but there was no desire to play alongside him or even after he was gone. When he shut the program down, it will remain unused until the next time he comes because I won't be touching it.

I've been wondering what exactly caused me to do this, and all I've come up with is that gaming was just a hobby that worked for me in a particular period of my life, and as I'm seeing in a lot of other things in my life, I must be on the verge of a very different period of my life that requires me to give up a lot of the things I found to be normal and interesting to me. I find it a little disconcerting because so much stuff that I held onto as things I enjoyed and was interested in suddenly look so grey and boring, but I've as of yet to have found something to replace them. As a result, I spend a lot of my time sitting down contemplating where I am now with my life and how I got to this point. Not really finding any answer, but the time is being used up just the same.

Until next time.

The Downside to Being an Intelligent Teacher

2010-04-29T21:30:00.000-07:00

Our ever-so-late Spring Break is winding down, and when it's over it'll be an 18-school day sprint to the finish line and we'll put another school year in the books. Of course, on 27 May when we hand the students their report cards and disperse for the summer, it'll probably feel like we've stumbled across the finish line than anything else.

This Spring Break, I haven't done much of anything apart from catching my breath from the previous week where I presented at a conference and took two Praxis exams. I've been spending some time with pretty much my closest friend and his wife, mainly because I haven't found anything to do. This evening I was looking at my bookshelf and realized the sheer paucity of books I've read this year thus far. Normally I'd down thirty books a year, but nearing the halfway point I've only read ten or so. This really concerns me because this a symptom of the biggest problem I've had teaching middle schoolers--I feel like I'm not learning when I'm teaching them.

I know it sounds a bit oxymoronic to learn while teaching, but I personally get my kicks when my brain is fully engaged and I'm learning and discussing. In these three years that I've been teaching middle school, I feel like I'm not being mentally stretched because the content I'm teaching requires very little mental effort to teach the content itself. After all, what I'm teaching is really ground-level skills, so I'm really only teaching what I've learned long ago. Simply put, the subject matter bores me because it's not challenging me. On many occasions this school year I've found myself literally daydreaming when I was teaching. Sure, my kids and even my observers didn't know it, but the mundane tasks of discussing simple plots, making sure students acted like normal civilized humans, and keeping students on task simply bored me.

I think this is the biggest hurdle that a middle school teacher who has a mastery of the content knowledge they teach has to master. When I taught high school, especially upperclassmen, discussions often strayed into territory that was not covered by the textbook, and I got a real kick out of pulling out something I read recently or some old research to bolster the discussion or activity. Even with my really bright students, questions that extend from our reading are really simple. So since there's really no need to stay sharp, my learning and reading has decreased--and that's not good by any stretch. The last thing I want to be is someone who feels as though they've arrived in terms of knowing the content that they teach. If I were to do that, I would instantly stop being a good teacher.

I see too many of my colleagues, especially when I go to conferences, fall into this trap. They teach a fairly easy subject and decide to rest on their content laurels, instead focusing on new tricks for their classroom. Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, but if we're teaching a content area, I think we as teachers should continue our learning in the areas that we teach so we can bring new information to the table if need be. And to be honest, a lot of teachers need to be hitting the books so they can be at least a bit more competent at their subject field than the teacher's edition than they're teaching out of. We as teachers are our subject's ambassadors, and why would our students care about the subject we teach if we can't show them that we love the content of what we teach enough to have the knowledge to answer their questions with confidence, rather than shrugging our shoulders and saying that we don't know, only to change the subject.

In a perfect world, I'd get a phone call tomorrow from a principal begging me to teach honors and Advanced Placement (AP) social studies at a high school, but that isn't happening. However, I took the Praxis exam for Science as a step to getting an add-on to my certificate in Science, and I'm thinking about making the jump to teaching science in the near future. It's a subject that is near to my heart since, though I have a degree in history, I began college life as an aerospace engineering major and took six science classes in high school (As opposed to only four social studies!). Even if I don't quite get a job in a high school in the immediate future, middle school science offers me avenues to not just use knowledge I already have, especially in the field of earth science, to teach kids, but also give me subjects that I could read and increase the depth of my knowledge in. I've been dying to find some reading material on the history of Dutch land reclamation efforts as well as the science of flood protection, and becoming a science teacher would give me the proper itch that reading about that stuff would scratch.

Until next time.

Going Mad over Mad Men

2010-04-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I'm not really one for television, even though I pay $70 a month for digital cable. In reality, I spend all that cash to watch soccer, ice hockey, and lacrosse. I'm not a terribly big fan of a lot of today's dramas mainly because their topics either don't interest me, or they're a LOST clone where the scriptwriters make the narrative complicated for its own sake because that guarantees a cadre of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder that will bicker and fight over every easter egg in the show--real or imagined. However, there are three shows that I do watch, mainly because I find them entertaining and they tell a good story.

Of late I've been rewatching AMC's Mad Men, and have found it entertaining and thought-provoking. The show is set in the early 1960s, and through the story of an ad firm on Madison Avenue in New York, explores the changing social mores in that timeframe in addition to the lives of the story's main characters. Having watched the previous three seasons a couple of times and having just finished the first season again, I've come up with some observations about various things. Needless to say, if you're obsessed with not seeing spoilers, well, don't read the rest of this article, or any article I write for that matter. Revealing spoilers is a matter of course for me.

Five Things I've Picked up while watching Mad Men

(1) The show really nails the visual feel of the 1960s.

One of the draws of Mad Men is really how they nail the visuals of the 1960s. My grandparents' house was built in 1961, and the interior of the Drapers' home is virtually a carbon copy. Their dress? Couldn't have done it any better. Pete Campbell's haircut? Everyone wore that back then. And the office furnishings look straight from the era. Simply put, it looks like the show was filmed in a community that was tossed in a time capsule in 1960 for use at a later date.

(2) If you lived in the 1960s, you smoked like a train and drank hard liquor like a fish.

I think I've damaged my liver and upped my risk of lung cancer by at least 10% just by watching this show. In virtually every scene on the show, the characters are lighting up cigarettes, drinking hard liquor, or both. Sterling Cooper (the ad firm in the series)'s apparent response to anything positive to happen to them is to break out the glasses and the decanter. I understand that times have changed and that I'm completely clueless as to actual people's drinking and smoking habits in general since I do nor have ever done either in the past, but the drinking seems a little more excessive than what I would expect. However, knowing how attitudes toward smoking were in the past, the amount of smoking displayed isn't too shocking.

(3) There's a little too much presentism going on in the show.

On one hand, I do understand that one of the pillars of the show's plot is to show the changing mores of society during the early 1960s, but it seems to be a little hard to believe that Don Draper comes in such close contact with a civil rights activist (Paul Kinsey), two closeted homosexuals (Sal Romano and and a short-term ad executive named Kurt), some beatniks (Midge, one of Don's mistresses, as well as her friends), and an alleged friend of Ayn Rand (Bert Cooper) within such a short period of time, especially for being a guy with no more than a high school education. Like I said, I understand why it's done within the context of the story, but it still feels shoehorned into the plot. It would have been a little more believable had Don interface with perhaps the hipsters, and some of his coworkers have some brushes with the other groups mentioned, rather than Don having personal contact with all of them.

(4) Mad Men does storytelling right.

I absolutely loathe what LOST has done to dramatic storytelling. In their quest to make an immersive story experience, the screenwriters seem to have the idea that a plot that's complicated for complication's sake is somehow better than your normal narrative experience. To their defence, it's done well for them as people with no life and an obsessive-compulsive disorder have duked it out on Internet message boards for years over the minutae of the series and what they may or may not mean. However, I think it's pretty dumb to be honest. I much prefer how Mad Men tells its story. The narrative is rather straightforward, but the characters are written in a way that allows the viewer to not just see the characters operate, but also use them as a mirror to view their own lives and analyze their decisions and motives. Perhaps the best example is character of Pete Campbell. Sure, Pete is an obnoxious corporate ladder climber, but once the story explores Pete's motives, you find that Pete's motives are more for showing his family and his in-laws that he is his own person; not so much climbing the corporate ladder solely to make a name for himself and boost his ego. If I had a literature class that was mature enough to deal with the themes, I would gladly use Mad Men as an example of good plot development and characterization.

(5) Don Draper's lack of introspection is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the entire series.

Don Draper has the perfect life. He's the partner in an ad firm on Madison Avenue, has an attractive wife and two (now three) children, owns his house, and truly is a self-made man, since he took on a new identity in order to escape from the Korean War, after all. However, this secret proves too much for him to bear, and in the process he throws all of his perfect personal life away through an ever-increasing series of affairs. By itself, Mad Men proves to be a compelling investigation of how people throw away everything through completely illogical self-destructive behaviour.

However, I think something that hasn't been explored in depth in the series thus far is exactly how Don Draper feels about this. Why does he think that the best solution to expunging his past from his present is to sleep with a wide variety of women, after all? What does he expect to gain from his unfaithfulness, a couple of hours where he could just forget about his problems? A way to have control over a situation that he feels is becoming less and less under control? If the latter is the case, what caused him to want to be unfaithful in the first place? It's questions like these that I would like to see discussed in the next season of Mad Men, because it is something I find fascinating.

Maybe it's because I feel that I'm missing those things in my life that I find Don Draper's actions so reprehensible, but at the same time, I also realize that we as humans are never really satisfied with our situations no matter what. I'm sure my more evangelically-minded readers will immediately jump to the conclusion that Don Draper needs to become a Christian and all would be well, but I tend to disagree. In looking at my own life, I am by all measures a mature Christian, but I'm not satisfied with my current situation in the least. I've always thought that I would be in many ways complete once I was a husband, father, and schoolteacher. Even though I only have one of those checked off, I don't think for a second once I check off those other two objectives that I will feel satisfied, as each of those provide new challenges, and to be frank, opportunities for indigestion for me to deal with. We're always striving to improve and refine our situations, and I don't think there's ever any true solution to this, much less a nice, neat solution that only takes a sentence to state.

So there you go. Those are my observations from watching Mad Men thus far. Considering I'm off of school this week, and there's not much going on educationally wise, much less anything for me to complain about at church to catch some flak, so I figured some media discussion would do nicely. Hope you enjoy it, and feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments section.

Until next time.

LMSA Post-Mortem

2010-04-25T22:26:00.000-07:00

So after a really grueling week of studying, presenting, and testing, I'm really looking forward to this coming week without school. Of course, I still have college school work to take care of, but I'm over the hump of some heavy duty stuff--which makes me very happy. This past Wednesday-Friday I attended and presented at the Louisiana Middle School Association's annual conference in Lafayette. I had a much better time than I did last year, especially since people actually presented things that interested me. So here we go, these are the things I learned:

(1) Men are an Endangered Species at Conferences.

One thing that really stuck out while I was there was that, well, I stuck out for the single reason for being a guy. It was like the inverse of when I was at LeTourneau where there were nine guys for every gal. It wasn't threatening or anything; just different. The biggest sign women were the primary target of these conferences? The peddlers selling kitschy jewelry and home decorations outside the presentation room. I could feel the testosterone draining from me every time I got near them.

(2) Attending Conferences by Yourself Stinks.

It's true, especially when you tend to get a bit overwhelmed in unfamiliar crowds like I do. I went to my sessions like a good little conference attendee, but did little talking to anyone in any way, shape, or form. It's a bit hard to do when (A) you can be a bit awkward at social situations at times and (B) No one would want to talk to you anyway because they're too busy talking to their colleagues. Worst of all was the opening session, where I ended up being tucked in a corner with no one else sitting at my table for eight. I was tempted to carry sign that said "LEPER! UNCLEAN!" after that, but decided not to. Regardless, having a sidekick would make making snarky comments in some sessions a lot more fun.

(3) Lots of Teachers don't know the Content Knowledge in their Subject.

Yes, this is one of my pet peeves. Yes, I know I am the massive exception to the content knowledge rule because I scored two 200s on my Praxis II exams for Social Studies. And yes, I know nothing I can say will change the situation. That still won't stop me from being perturbed at how little my colleagues know about the subjects they're teaching. My top three moments were as follows:

Having to explain to the session presenter and the rest of the attendees that the reason the example of a diary entry of the girl from around Gettysburg was so blase about the battle as opposed to the Confederate diary entry was because the Confederacy only made two incursions into the North: Maryland campaign (Ending at Antietam) and the Gettysburg Campaign. OK, so the details may not be known, but to hear a teacher tell me that they didn't know the South actually invaded the North was a bit unsettling.
In a session on astronomy, I was the only teacher out of thirteen earth science teachers that could point out the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion, Canis Major, & knew that the centre of Orion's sword is the Orion Nebula, Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, and that Polaris is a circumpolar star. Considering that discussing the night sky and the constellations is an entire chapter of earth science textbooks, at least someone pointing something out would have been nice.
In a session on Science in the News, an earth science teacher asked the presenter why Iceland has volcanoes. I literally facepalmed myself.

(4) There's a lot of Teachers Presenting Cool Stuff.

Now that I vented at the general incompetence of several of my colleagues in the profession, allow me to point out that the sessions I went to were well done and I got several ideas on doing some really cool stuff--especially if I teach science in the near future. I really enjoyed the reflection lab that used laser pointers to hit targets around obstacles with mirrors, the floor map with strings and cardboard, and the session that took us outside and taught us how to have a functional class outdoors teaching traditional topics.

(5) Always have a Plan H, Just in Case.

My session that I presented at our ShareFair in January was a modest success by my low expectations, and I expected similar for LMSA. However, it still ended up being a bit of a fizzle, mainly through technical problems. My session was immediately after one involving making large maps of the world, and the class was packed with fifty people. By the time I was ready to roll, there were five people in the room, including myself and the two presenters who would go after me. As you can guess, I was rather deflated.

My PowerPoint presentation went along just fine, though I lost my hardy band a couple of times. When it came to the demonstrations, my products made by ESRI, which were the cornerstones of my demonstrations, refused to work, and crashed. I internally panicked, but on the exterior I blamed it all on bad luck, and opened up Google Earth, showing some things you could do with regards to drawing polygons that I had used in my reading class. I then showed off the Night Sky, Moon, and Mars functions of Google Earth, and all five of us were wowed. The crowd thanked me for the presentation and said they were impressed with my quick thinking. However, I was embarrassed by the fickleness of the programs and how unprepared they made me look.

As an aside, let me throw the LMSA under the bus by mentioning the fact I had to pay $32 for Internet access for the day. Why? Because they refused to buy wireless Internet access for the conference and didn't let anyone know until the day of registration. Good thing I shelled out the cash, because I would have been sunk otherwise. Real small-time move by LMSA that should not happen again next year.

(6) Even Though your Session is a Miserable Failure, you don't have to Mention that on your CV.

Because all that matters is that you have this to put it on your CV.

OK, I ~~may be~~ am a bit vain (They forgot to give me my presenter ribbon at first, so I wrote it on my tag), but I put a lot of work and heartburn into making sure I got that little ribbon attached to my name tag. :^)

Until next time.

Programming Note

2010-04-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

Just a quick programming note here: I've been trying to get into a routine of posting three days a week, but for the next week I probably won't be able to keep that commitment as I am preparing for my presentation at the Louisiana Middle School Association convention on Thursday as well as two Praxis exams (PLT and 7-12 Science) two days later. Needless to say, as much fun as it is to blog, those things are a little more important. If you're dying for my irrepressible wit, just follow me on Twitter.

-Loren

And Now for Something Completely Different...

2010-04-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

With iLEAP testing in full swing, there's not too much to do with regards to being a teacher apart from reading directions aloud from a testing guide verbatim, wandering around your classroom aimlessly, and envisioning your school's SPS plummet because your entire class completed the maths portion of the exams with a full two hours to spare. So, I'm sitting here in the back of my classroom writing this blog entry instead of dying of boredom.

I freely admit that I haven't blogged too much about my school lately because, well, my classroom experiences have been a bit mundane. After all, it wouldn't be too exciting to have a pile of articles with the topic of "Student Who Never Does Anything in Poor Grades Shocker." The only real item of note was the fifth fight of the school year in my seventh period class that, in all reality, was more amusing than violent. But enough of the usual; here's some good news about my school for a change!

(1) Our Chess Team is Flippin' Awesome.

Due to the diligence of our school's counselor and one of our social studies teachers, we have a really thriving Chess Club. It meets every Thursday after school, and averages about 40 students on a very consistent basis. Last weekend, they attended the district middle school meet, and completely dominated. They won individually first place in the K-6 category (Won by the social studies teacher's son--a Kindergartner), first and third in the K-8 category (two of my history bee members), and won the overall trophy. The state meet is in a couple of weeks, and though it will be tough competition, I won't be surprised when the come back with trophies.

(2) We had a Program That didn't Stink for Once.

Face it, most school programs are terrible. The topic is uninteresting, the teachers are miffed class time is being interrupted, the student are bored, so they search for ways to get into trouble, and the administrators and speaker are shocked that this is all happening. He had a speaker earlier this year who did a Huey Long impersonation. Long was definitely an interesting human being, but this guy was boring, muddled in his focus, and talked over virtually the entirety of the student body's heads.

A reward for a recent fundraiser was a traveling BMX show. Kids who sold enough stuff got in for free, and everyone else paid $5 for the honour of attending. All that was there was a ramp, so my skepticism was naturally high. Thankfully, they put on a show that dazzled our students, and proved my skepticism wrong (for once). The guys were former X-Games participants, and took time out after the show to talk to the students. Having met some similar folks in my days of playing Paintball, it was nice to see these guys living the best life one can have: getting paid to do what you love to do.

(3) One of Our Teachers is presenting at a Conference.

In a sign that our faculty does not rest on their laurels--rather continually seeking to learn and share with other what they learned with other professionals, one of our own is presenting at a professional conference. Who is it? Why it's me of course! I submitted a proposal for a session at the Louisiana Middle School Association's annual conference, and on my first try it was accepted! The session will be on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the Middle Schools, and I will be talking about what GIS actually is, and showing how to use GIS tools in all subjects in middle school. As you know, I presented at our parish's Technology Share Fair earlier this year, and it was my first session I did solo (I rode shotgun for one the year before). Considering how successful it was, as well as the fact I enjoyed doing it immensely, I decided to step up to the plate and share with fellow teachers what's been percolating in my head about the profession. If I manage to not screw it up, I'll take the really big step and apply to present at this December's LaCUE conference in Baton Rouge.

So there you go! As amazing as it sounds, there's actually positive things going on in schools these days, much less in the circus that my school tends to be at times. Hope it (slightly) restored your faith in the American educational system.

Until next time.

Of Multi-tools and Spud Wrenches

2010-04-07T19:46:00.000-07:00

Aaron Eyler, my favourite educational technology blogger, made a tweet yesterday about differentiated instruction and standardized testing. He said "It is hypocritical for any educator to advocate celebration of ind diff and standardized testing simultaneously (You heard that [DoE Secretary Arne] Duncan?)" I think it's an interesting statement, to say the least, because both seem to be on polar opposites of the pedagogic discussional spectrum (See what I did there? New buzzword!) at the moment. What I want to talk about isn't exactly the merits or flaws of that statement, rather the line of thinking I took when pondering the tweet, and specifically differentiated instruction. Now, I'll freely admit in advance that what I'm talking about isn't based on any sort of real research or anything, but rather something I was thinking about. As a result, you can put your stones down... for now.

I must admit that I'm a bit divided on the whole differentiated instruction/multiple intelligences bandwagon, mainly because it seems the only folks who seem to really buy into it are educators, and cognitive psychologists pretty much have thrown the theory into the dustbin. On the other hand, I do see how students tend to respond better to certain types of assignments that are out of the ordinary paper-and-pencil type. I can see how providing a variety of assessment types can be beneficial to all students, but I think the concept of really differentiating our instruction to meet all students may have unintended consequences.

Simply put, the idea that a student should only be assessed in the manner which he does best seems a bit disingenuous to the concept of truly assessing a student, because we are merely providing a path of least resistance to a grade, rather than focusing on the content that they are being assessed upon. Related to that, I've found personally that most methods of assessing student work outside of objective test instruments (e.g. anything that needs a rubric) tends to become subjective very quickly, no matter how detailed the rubric or how extensive the professional development. Maybe it's the analyst in me, but if I want to see how something is performing, I want a datum that is as objective as possible. At times I've just had trouble wrapping my head around the concept of assessing students' knowledge of the Great Depression by allowing one student to create a collage since they were a visual learner, whereas a traditional learner pumps out a term paper or a test on the same topic. I might be wrong, but I just don't think they provide the same rigor and ability to extract objective data, no matter how many hoops you make the visual learner jump through.

What also piques my curiosity are two implications of differentiating instruction. The first is that the real world, which educators are constantly stating that we are preparing our students for, is remarkably non-differentiated. No matter what field you work in, from sales to construction to IT, the fact of the matter is that if you can put your thoughts down in a logical fashion that is readable to your audience, you're going places. Even in the visual learner's paradise, graphic design, the ability to write and demonstrate competence in a "traditional" manner is very important. So, by constantly assessing students in ways that come easiest to them as opposed to the unpopular idea of leaning on "traditional" methods will end up crippling our students when it all comes down to it. You may be a mean collage maker in high school, but if you can't write a good resume or introductory letter, you're going to come in second-best to the one who can--no matter how much better you are to them at the job.

In addition to this, I find it very worrying that we as educators are pigeon holing students into these differentiations at a younger and younger age, and even if not intentionally, we are doing a lot to determine their academic future to possibly their detriment. By telling little Kelly that she's a kinesthetic learner from Kindergarten onward, and focus our efforts on teaching her in that manner, with only token measures of teaching in other ways, we are severely hampering her ability to become a well-rounded learner, not to mention a person in general. I find this most disturbing in the fact that we label so many students as "visual learners" and do so much to teach them through images and visuals. As a result, I think we're creating a generation of people who will see and believe anything they see because that's the only way they know how to gather and process information. In the quest to ensure that all students can do their best, we're creating people that are the cognitive equivalent of a spud wrench: great at doing one thing (removing a flush valve from a toilet), but completely useless at anything else. Rather, we need to be creating multi-tools--tools that can tackle a wide variety of jobs within a single package.

In other words, let's create people with the ability to gather, process, and create knowledge through a variety of means, not just in the method that's easiest for them. I know I am far and away the exception to the rule, but you can't tell me someone who's a very good visual learner who's really good at what they do is better off cognitively than someone like myself who always pegs out learning style inventories in four to five categories. It defies logic to think otherwise because knowledge comes in so many formats that even though I might not be as strong in visuals as other people, but I can easily gather visual information, fill in the cracks through learning in other formats, process it all, and create new knowledge in whatever format I need to present it in.

Let's stop funneling students' capabilities into the path of least resistance, especially when that path is crippling their ability to function at a level below their capability in the real world. Let's make more multi-tools and less spud wrenches. They'll be better off for it, even if the grades don't always show it initially. The human brain has a remarkable ability to adapt and learn when giving challenges that are off its traditional operational paths; if we push our students to excel in new and different ways, they might just surprise us with their versatility.

Until next time.

The Teaching on Mars Vlog

2010-04-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

In a fit of insanity, I decided to sit down and create a vlog in response to the post last week of Groupthink. For being a teacher, I sure do have a problem being on camera as it took a good two hours of takes in order to get it down the way I wanted. I apologize in advance for not meeting your expectations in what you had in mind in terms of yours truly (Especially the preview image for the video. Crikey!). Hate to tell you, but you're far from the only one. Enjoy! (I think.)

Teaching on Mars Vlog, Episode 1: Tone from Loren C. Klein on Vimeo.

How to Create a Buzzword

2010-04-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

I've been tinkering with a response this week to my last post, which hit me with some vitriol, albeit fully expected by yours truly. I was wanting to make it a direct successor to the post, but in the end, something whimsical came up on Thursday evening that will allow for a bit of a decent buffer, not to mention allay the fears of the teacher crowd of my blog's fandom (All two of you!) that I've forgotten about talking about what I actually do for a living.

I'm taking a course offered by the Department of Education entitled "Effective Instructional Technology." It's the first of a series of courses that, when complete, will allow me to add on to my teaching certificate certifications in Educational Technology Facilitator and Educational Technology Leadership. The course I took was pretty much a introduction to utilizing technology in the classroom. As with all things dealing with education, there were plenty of opportunities for reflection, and at times I was growing tired of saying the same things over and over and over (and over!) about using technology in the classroom. My first efforts to break free and really speak what was on my mind were rewarded with lower scores than everyone else who was posting, apparently.

Being one obviously to take the concept of sticking to my opinions to heart, I was at a loss as to how to attack the assignments for the remainder of the class. I did not want to sit there and mindlessly parrot the party line with my reflections, but I wanted to make sure I scored well in a way that truly represented the work I put in to the assignments. The obvious solution was to post using vocabulary that served extra helpings of educationese that made my points, but also used the appropriate verbiage to the point it became a parody. Simply put, I decided to be subversive in my work, something that is a hobby of people like me.

The work received its desired effect, and in an instance of sweet, delicious irony, I think I created what could be the Next Great Buzzword™ in Educational Technology. In a discussion on how to use technology in the classroom to maximum effect. I chimed in with a comment about how the teacher could maximize the use of technology. Throughout the entire course, I was making the point that perhaps the key to maximizing technology's effectiveness in the classroom was to stop treating technology as some neat trick to get the students' attention--rather to utilize it like any other tool in the classroom. So in a fit of insanity, I unleasshed a message that claimed that claimed that the key to success when it comes to using technology in the classroom would be for it to become an "organic instructional component."

Organic. Instructional. Component.

What? I don't even know what that meant!

The response from the moderator stunned me even more than the fact I couldn't even figure out what I said. She complimented me on my comments and singled out that statement for particular praise due to its creativity in merging biology, technology, and pedagogy into a perfect comment. I thought that there was no way that in the process of trying to be a bit silly I created a brand new phrase. So I googled the phrase, and alas, it had never been said before. I sat there scratching my head at all of this, then it dawned on me that this is how buzzwords are created. Some fellow is sitting there at his desk trying to sound impressive and creative for a presentation, and he throws a bunch of ostentatious words together, and Presto! A buzzword is made. I have to say I was a bit proud of myself for not just pulling the wool over some educators' eyes with some high-sounding language, but also I had managed to accidentally create a buzzword.

Of course, I usually go through the more direct route of creating a buzzword when I'm in the mood, but it was amusing to see how far a little bit of frustrated imagination took me in a mundane assignment. So, if you're stumped in your presentation and need the perfect phrase to sell your clients on your training product, tell them that it's the perfect vehicle to provide an organic instructional component to their enterprise. I won't even ask for a slice of the profits--consider it a free gift.

Until next time.

Groupthink is Bad: Part 1

2010-03-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, I'm one to think for myself, and events this past week did nothing to stop reinforcing this for me. No, not the fact we had a gun incident at school, but something else. I'm using it as an excuse to begin a semi-series on Groupthink and how it's a bad thing.

This first installment involves Groupthink and the Church. Now, I know the fact I just mentioned the C-word is about to send away about 90% of the six people who read this blog, but I'd think of all of the posts in which I've shared my faith, this should be one you should hang around for. After all, I'm probably going to say things that you agree with 100% and will be shocked an Evangelical is actually is saying these things. But enough about that.

Just to lay out what I think Groupthink is, I think a good definition is the tendency of a group to have a common set of ideas and opinions that are accepted without criticism, and the group's tendency to enforce this line of thought within the group. Apparently the term dates back to 1952, when journalist and urbanist William H. Whyte said in Fortune that it was "...a rationalized conformity—an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well." Since then, it's been well-researched and accepted that groups of people who group together based on a set of same beliefs will extend the conformity to as many sectors of life as possible and those who choose to not conform in all areas will be ostracized if not outright rejected by the group.

I observe this in my school all the time, but I'm going to play with that in another post. What I am going to talk about is Groupthink in American Evangelical churches. The Groupthink that I am discussing is not regarding the theology itself, but rather the culture and worldview that has been constructed around the theology. Growing up, I always found the Evangelical subculture to be a bit odd. Even though I could barely watch TV, movies were pretty much verboten, and if my family had any semblence of music appreciation, surely no secular music would be appreciated, I always felt like something was amiss with all of this.

I never rebelled against my parents (Apart from that box of Cookie Crisps, that is.), but in my high school years, there were plenty of instances where I butted heads with the administration at my Christian school over ideological issues. Everything had to have a Biblical support, no matter how little the issue had to do with morality, much less the Bible. When I had the temerity to suggest a particular issue could be resolved without theological debate, I had to have a counseling session with the pastor because apparently I wasn't being a good little Christian. As you can probably guess, that didn't go too well when I started quoting Edmund Burke, Abraham Kuyper, Konrad Adenauer, and Benjamin Disraeli as planks of my political beliefs that came about not through the method that was preached to be the way to do politics, rather completely through my own reading and thinking. The fact they were close to what they themselves believed was superfluous. I was thinking on my own, and that was no good.

According to psychologist Irving Janis, who did a series of research efforts into the 1970s on Groupthink, my behaviour ran afoul of five of his eight symptoms of Groupthink. Those are:

Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group. (Whatever we say is right, 'cause we believe in what the Bible says!)
Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group. (If you don't agree with X because of Y, you're a liberal/commie/atheist/etc.)
Anyone who questions the facts held by the group is branded as disloyal (or, more appropriately, secular, or worse, liberal).
Ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus are censored by either banning their viewing, or disassociating with people who have anything to do with it (No kids, you can't play with Johnny; he doesn't go to our church!)
Self-appointed members of the group who shield the group from dissenting information (We're protecting you from the evil that's out there--whatever it is!)

What was odd about all of this was that I did it, not out of any sort of rejection of religious tenets, which is what often happens when one runs afoul of Evanglelical Groupthink, but rather a realization that just saying that I believed something "'cause the Bible said so" wasn't going to fly with people who didn't believe in the Bible. So, in order to entrench my beliefs, I sought out alternative sources that I could use if my beliefs were challenged. I found them, and in the process found wiggle room which I could change some things I found to not exactly compute within the conventional wisdom. What ended up happening was that I broke free of that conventional wisdom and became someone who thought for themselves.

Since high school, I've had various scrapes with the Groupthink, mainly in the realm of politics. I've never associated myself with any American political party, and if you put a gun to my head, I'd admit to being a socially conservative Christian Democrat in the mold of the Bavarian Christian Social Union or the Dutch Christian Democratic Appeal. So, for someone who doesn't even consider themselves to fit within the traditional American political framework, any comment of any sort on American politics is asking for trouble when dealing with fellow members of their church, who are convinced that the GOP stands for God's Own Party.

Last Sunday, during our church service, our pastor launched an attack on the Health Care Bill from the pulpit, without a lot of scripture to back up opinions. I felt extremely uncomfortable sitting there, and when I had had enough political punditry, I got up an walked out of church. The subsequent firestorm on Facebook (via Private Messaging) I received was surprising, even after all this time. Essentially, walking out made me a godless Obama supporter, and one to grab the Red Banner of Socialism. Never mind the fact that no one bothered to ask me what my opinion was (If you really want to know, peek around on the Internet. It's out there.), my rejection of what I thought to be an improper use of the pulpit was seen as proof that I had rejected the gospel and was backslidden into dirty liberal secularism. To top it off, when I plopped into my place this morning, the annoying old lady behind me who hates the fact I use my phone to post comments on our church service on Twitter tapped me on the shoulder and bluntly asked if I was a Democrat since I walked out of the service. I looked at her, rolled my eyes, and told her that I didn't know voter registration cards were required to attend the church, but to quench her curiosity, I was a member of the Christen Democratisch Appel. That sufficiently confused her.

That doesn't begin to scratch the surface of what goes on within Evangelical Groupthink. I've been burned over the years by people shoving the latest fad in Christian living books in my face, and telling me that because I didn't read and do what they said, it was proof I was a lukewarm Christian, or worse, backslidden. When I retorted with questions to the tune of if they had checked out the contents of their fellowship's theology, much less, you know, the Bible, I usually received cold glares and statements that I was proving my hard-heartedness.

This annoys me to no end because, to me, when I became a Christian and decided to live according to Christ's precepts in the Bible, He promised freedom to me. Freedom from sin, guilt, and most of all, the freedom to be the person God created me to be. Now, I'm no theologian, but after doing a lot of reading, praying, and thinking, 1 Corinthians 10 is, to me, a systematic declaration of thought-independence for the Christian. After all, Paul was telling the Corinthians that being a Christian did not require them to adhere to the old Jewish covenant with God, which consisted of strict rules that covered all facets of life, for it was taken care of through Christ's death and resurrection, so as long as it didn't contradict Jesus' teaching and what God was laying on your heart, you were free to partake in it. To me, the key verse is verse 29:

It might not be a matter of conscience for you, but it is for the other person. Now, why should my freedom be limited by what someone else thinks? (New Living Translation)

Best of all, The Message says it this way:

...I'm not going to walk around on eggshells worrying about what small-minded people might say; I'm going to stride free and easy, knowing what our large-minded Master has already said. (Emphasis mine)

Needless to say, if we say that we believe in the divine inerrancy of the entire Bible, and that it is all inspired by Him (2 Timothy 3:16), then it sure sounds like that when we become Christians, God gives us the freedom to think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions to things, and not rely on others to tell us what to think and reject us if we are not in 100% agreement with them. So you know what? Think for yourself. Be free to disagree with the culture of American Evangelicalism. Sure, stick to what the Bible says and stand on that when you need to, because that's what it tells us to do, but otherwise, put that brain He gave you to some use. Christian (and for my purposes Protestant) history was shaped by people who thought for themselves and rejected the Christian Groupthink to find the freedom God has for them. Luther, Calvin, Arminius, Wesley, E. N. Bell, and so many others who led the way for people like me to find that freedom for myself.

Phew. That was a lot of stuff percolating in my brain all of this time needing to get out. Until next time.

Silence!

2010-03-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

Silence and I have a funny relationship.

On one hand, there are times where I crave silence, especially when I'm trying to teach my critters something. You see, my students like to talk. The problem is, they haven't the foggiest as to what they're talking about. To listen to them speak is an exercise in attempting to decode gibberish. What they need is to be silent so they can listen and actually learn something for a change. Once they know something, then I can let them talk to their heart's content. I keep on telling them that I would let them talk and discuss things freely, but I won't let them until what comes out of their mouth is something worth talking about. They may not like it, but the normal middle school drama is not worth talking about.

I was observed in my lowest class yesterday, where I have six students who deliberately come into my class looking to disrupt proceedings. Considering there were a gaggle of administrators in the classroom, everyone was on their best behaviour. The class went fantastically, and at the end of class I let them talk to their neighbour about what they learned in class. The class was full of noise, but it was the good kind of noise--the noise of learning. Today, with no one but me trying to teach them, normal service was resumed. One of the students commented that they had more fun talking about the lesson yesterday than all of the nonsense that took place today. I just looked at them and said that sometimes, silence is a good thing, since that was what was needed for them to learn what they talked about.

That's all warm and fuzzy, I know, but as much as I like silence at times in my classroom, there are other times in which I completely loathe it. For example, any time in which I am not in my classroom. And lately, it's getting worse. I live alone in a very small house. It's rather quaint, and to be honest, it suits me just fine. If I had my way, I wouldn't even half a fourth of the furniture that I own, but my family says I need something other than a milk crate for guests to sit on, so I have some to appease their complaining (even though they're the only ones to ever visit me).

But in the past six to seven weeks, I've found myself spending a lot of my evenings with silence as my only companion. I sit at my desk in my comfy old desk chair, and stare at nothing in general listening to the silence. One night I know I spent over an hour sitting there, with just the computer screen providing ambient light, contemplating whether the silence says a lot about my life or not. In the end, I came to the conclusion that it does. To me, it's a rather interesting symbol of my personal life at the moment... which means that there is none.

Since the beginning of the year, I've had to struggle with a lot of things in my personal life, not to mention a crisis that really kicked me in the stomach about a month ago. In that time, I've pretty much seen the things I previously enjoyed in life just completely fall apart and become nothing to me. Saturday evening I just sat in my chair, and contemplated the fact that my life feels like it is turning into a rice cake--completely bland and tasteless. No matter what I've tried to ameliorate it, it just hasn't worked out. I feel a lot like Don Draper in the opening credits to the AMC series Mad Men...without alcohol or cigarettes, of course.

Mad Men Main Title Sequence from Steve Fuller on Vimeo.

I find this to be a rather perfect visual of what I've just described. I come home from work, everything falls apart, and I drift on down to a place where I'm just staring off into space wondering what's happened. The worst part of this is perhaps how I feel. I'm not terribly depressed or anything, just monotonous. Bland. Boring. You get the idea. I've tried to break out of it by trying things that I thought would interest me, but never tried before, but that didn't work. I even took the advice of a good friend and simply told some acquaintences that I was in a bit of a rut and wanted to hang out with them to get me out of it. Their response left me sitting in my house Saturday night contemplating my relationship to the Styrofoam of the culinary world. I don't want to give up, but geez, what else do I need to try to get someone to do something with, or God forbid, a date? That's something I just can't answer at the moment--and no one's really helping me to answer either.

So I sit here at my PC, listening, and hoping that I might hear and learn something that will get my life back to the noise I'm craving to hear.

Until next time.

The Moment We all Dread

2010-03-15T17:45:00.000-07:00

I've had about four or five blog posts percolating in my head over the past several weeks, and now's a great time to let one loose upon an unsuspecting public (Read: The the dozen or so readers I have. You're all the greatest! [Yes, even you!])

Growing up, we all have things which we swear over any number of books of varying levels of holiness that we will never be like our parents. Inevitably, we end up doing those things and kick ourselves and say they can't believe it happened to us. Sometimes it's something which just happens because we're adults, and that's what adults do. There's other things that our parents do that we shouldn't emulate, yet we do them anyway.

The first reminds me of my greatest rebellion against my parents. I had just started college and was on my first shopping trip. I was a big breakfast person (Not so much now. I'll explain that one of these days.), and was in search of cereal to eat. My mom was always adamant that sugary kids' cereals were out, apart from the odd box of Cap'n Crunch or Frosted Flakes. Instead, I was raised on a steady diet of Frosted Mini Wheats and Honey Nut Cheerios. Since I was away from home, and my mom wasn't over my shoulder, I decided to indulge in some decadence.

I bought a box of Cookie Crisp. (Just as an aside, it's things like this that cause people to think I can't relate to them very well. Yes, it's the most rebellious thing I've done to my parents in my entire life. *sigh*)

Anyway, I got back to the dorm, and the next morning, before church I poured a bowl of my cereal and took a bite. It was disgusting. It tasted nothing like cookies, and in no time it was inedible because it was so soggy. I opened the dorm room window, and tossed the contents out. I sat down and realized that my parents were right--kids' cereal is pretty much pants. When I did that, I winced because I realized I was thinking just like my parents. I sulked in Sunday School, and the teacher wanted to know why. When I told him, he just laughed and said as long as I didn't emulate them in bad ways it wouldn't be so bad.

Lately, I fear I've had some incidences where the latter has occurred.

Growing up, my mom would on occasion just get fed up with myself, my dad, or most often life itself, and completely lose the plot. We'd all duck and cover and hope it would blow over, but it usually didn't for a good day or so. I was always scared that I would make her more upset, so I would hide from her and do my chores out of her sight. I would be infuriated when the phone would ring or someone would come to the door, and that person would get treated to my mom acting completely normally. On one occasion, I tried to see if the coast was clear immediately after she got off the phone, and learned that apparently those moods could be turned on with a simple switch. I always told myself that I would never act like that. It hurt so much because it felt like it was either a show, or the simple fact that it was all my fault.

I have a rather odd dichotomy in that my honours class immediately preceeds my worst class: a class full of several repeaters of seventh grade (four of them are repeat repeaters), chronically lazy individuals, and a couple of poor kids caught in the crossfire by the the vagaries of the scheduling gods. My honours class is a bit draining, but in a great way because I spend the whole class chasing them about and having a blast. The other four teachers on my team bitterly complain because it's essentially a class full of kids who attempt to outdo each other in their attempt to be the teacher's pet, and they annoy the snot out of the other teachers, but I love them dearly and give them the attention that they frankly deserve. So, to go from that to my toughest class takes a toll on my emotions and my stamina, and as a result I don't always have the patience and grace that I should have with them.

Several weeks ago, I lost it with the class on more than one occasion. I'm just tired of their ingrained sense of learned helplessness, complete lack of personal resolve to take on adversity, and a complete inability to take responsibility for anything. Most of my students are at least on the bandwagon for taking some responsibility for their actions, and are learning that their helplessness in some things are actually reversible, but that class refuses to budge.

As I was chewing on them for the above, I came to a completely despairing realization: I was chewing these kids out whilst on the inside I was perfectly calm. It was as though I was able to step back and see myself chewing on these kids whilst at the same time I was my perfectly calm and rational self. In fact, when one of the few good souls asked a question, I instantly flipped off the switch and answered them politely. Even though I said nothing that they could take as being hurtful (I always choose my words carefully with my students for obvious reasons), I was gutted because I was acting just like my mom--when I said I would never do that.

I just don't know what to do or how to feel other than disappointed with myself and sad. The dichotomy in education is that even though some students are truly lost causes, and you have to realize you won't reach them no matter what, you still have to deal with them on a daily basis. Sometimes I wish I could just ship those lost causes off to some place where either someone can touch them, or where circumstances force them to wake up and make something with their life. Unfortunately, I can't really do that, so I have to deal with reality, as I always do. I just hope that I can deal with reality without being my parents.

Until next time.

Have I Made a Difference?

2010-03-09T19:29:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, I mentioned the sheer volume of things that I have been doing in the previous couple of weeks, but there is one thing that I failed to mention, mainly the fact that I received the results of my final parishwide assessments that my students took last week. Here in St. Mary Parish, we give tests across the parish every six weeks to prepare them for the iLEAP tests in April. Everyone takes the same test on the same two days, and we can compare our individual scores to the other classes and schools across the parish.

Needless to say, my school is behind the parish average, and it showed at the beginning of the year with the first Parish Assessment. We scored sixteen points off the parish average, which was understandable, but disconcerting for someone like me who is not a reading teacher by trade. We have a consultant to help us improve our scores, and I felt like I'm in over my head. I fought with that over a long period of time this school year, even though there were some tenative steps that looked like we were bridging the gap, but assessment results seemed to be not quite showing it.

With this past assessment, however, I finally got the assessment data that I was looking for. The scores came in and my students as a whole scored at a 62% average. The rest of the parish? 70%. That's right, over the course of the school year my students have managed to cut the scores gap in half, down to eight points. As you can see in this chart I made (before all of the parish scores were in), the test scores show a remarkable jump even though the rest of the parish have flatlined.

Well look at that!

I ranted and raved about these scores to my students and my bosses, and I've really been pushing my kids that with the iLEAP tests coming up, if they continue this trend, they're going to go down in school history for doing something very special, much less the impact that this is going to have on their own lives and potential careers. It feels very strange to be appealing to the students on these terms, but it's worked so far, and here's to them actually pulling this off.

The strangest thing of all, of course, is the fact that I can see that my teaching has actually done something to help these students. I've always seen how I help students at the high end of the scale, and my honors class continues to grow by leaps and bounds as I'm used to seeing, but it's the growth in the average and even below average students that I can't believe that I'm seeing happen. I've always struggled with the fact that someone with a true talent for helping struggling reading students would be doing a far better job than I am this year, because they would have some fantasticly fun activities that would keep the kids' attention and enable them to learn, which would be in stark contrast to my endless tables that I have had the students fill out all school year long. For all I know, they could bomb the iLEAP and it all unravels, but for now I'm going to savour this. If you would have asked me in August if I thought this would happen, I have to say I wouldn't have thought so. It's good to be wrong for once.

Until next time.

Perhaps I Should Plan for Fun

2010-03-07T17:22:00.000-08:00

It's been a long two weeks since I last blogged, and as much as I really, really, really (Really!) wanted to make a couple of blog posts, time just hasn't opened up for me to blog. I've been really under the gun with all sorts of things coming from all sorts of directions all the time. Just a sampler of what I've been up to:

Interviewed my brother and a senior citizen, then wrote a 5-page paper for my Adolescent Psychology class
Had a formal observation from the School Board as a part of a school-wide walk-through
Gave our final Parishwide Assessment before the iLEAP standardized tests
Wrote a Unit Assessment Plan for my Assessment class
Taught a unit on mythology to classes full of disinterested students
Gave essay tests on said mythology unit
Became our school's pointman for our Promethean board installation
Completed a unit of my Educational Technology course
Wrote a model test for my Assessment class
Began History Bee practice for the St. Mary Parish History Bee in May
Finally (!!!) completed the installation of a wired FM modulator for my car

Yeah, my life is completely mad at the moment. We're headed for the stretch run of the school year, and I am really getting stressed out, and to be completely honest, I think I'm getting to the breaking point. This past week I did nothing after coming home from work/class but shower and collapse into my bed for ten-plus hours of sleep. I wake up the next day dead tired only to trudge through the day for a long period of time before I was really awake and running. Part of it was that I was trying to overcome a nasty head cold, but still, this past week felt like a giant red flag was raised for me to see and say "You know, I may just need to take a breather and catch my breath."

The problem is, how the heck am I supposed to do that?

This is one of those times where I can hear my mom standing behind me telling me to stop being dumb because I know how to have fun and enjoy myself, but right now everything I normally find to be fun and enjoyable involves me being at home alone. I really enjoy watching the English Premier League soccer, but it isn't as though I can put on my Arsenal shirt and scarf, hop in my car and drive to the local British-themed pub, order a non-alcoholic drink (I am a proper Evangelical, you know), and taunt Liverpool FC supporters for several hours. There's virtually zero interest in the game around here, and on the occasions I went to Lafayette and tried to get a TV screen at the sport-themed restaurants, I got laughed at. I will credit two of my colleagues, the affable Mr. Schmidt and Mrs. Smith, for dragging me out of my dungeon and letting me spend time with them and their respective families. It feels really weird to go to someone's place and be entertained because my family never did any of that growing up, and it is definitely a growing process for me.

Even as great as it is, I feel like I need to break out of a very deep rut I've found myself in. I'm at a point where I just can't find anything to blow off steam. I used to be very good at managing large amounts of stress, and just less the pressure diffuse over time, but I'm now at a point in my life where that just isn't acceptable. I need some stress-relieving activities that I can fit into life and I need get going on them. I'm kind of stumped. Any ideas?

Until next time.

Grand Theft Whiteboard

2010-02-23T18:16:00.000-08:00

OK, it's safe to come out now. An education-related post!

So I walked into class on Monday morning intending to have the usual lesson where I use my whiteboard like any other teacher. First period went fine, and at the end of the class three gentlemen from Maintenance came to me. We had met on Friday about rearranging my classroom in preparation for my Promethean board, and I told them to drop by on Monday so we could finalize what went where. I told them what I wanted and they said that they would take care of it. I then went to teaming. The result?

What's missing in this picture?

Yes, they removed my whiteboard. And that was it. The classroom was a disaster area when I came back to boot. Being one that relies on my classroom having everything in its normal position in order to function normally, this threw me into a tailspin. I only had a small whiteboard on another wall, but it was full of information that I already use every day. Since our team meeting ended late, I walked in just before the bell, and I was frantically trying to figure out a contingency no teacher ever thinks about, never mind deliberately plan for. As I was thinking up a Plan B, our wonderful consultant walks in. I almost plead with him to come and see me until after I have things settled down. His response? Just teach like I have normally planned.

I tried my best, but it was pretty rough because I almost began writing on the wall, which got everyone laughing. My class that hour was my honors class, so it went as well as it could. The next period was my worst class, which went very roughly for all concerned. During my planning period I received my observation report, which amusingly stated "Mr. Klein had a small matter of a whiteboard removed from his wall right before this class. Amazingly enough he coped well and best of all, managed to not write on the wall." I had my quick discussion with the consultant as I was rearranging the classroom in time for my afternoon classes. Going from a 16-foot whiteboard to a 6-foot whiteboard, even in a temporary circumstance (I guess I'm getting my Promethean board installed within the next three weeks), is a bit... awkward. When the projector is running, the entire white space is covered by the screen. Fun.

Downsizing, if you will

And in case you're wondering about the road sign, on a road trip a couple of weekends ago, I found a street that had the same name as our school. I looked around to see that the sign was actually pointing to no road at all. I touched it and it fell off the post. Sad that a poor forlorn sign was receiving no love, I gave it a new home.

You are Here. Literally.

Yes, there are five bullet holes in the sign. The best part? On the opposite side the sign reads "B. E. BOUDRAEX LN" Yes, the St. Mary Parish Police Jury can't even spell the name correctly on both sides of the sign. Rather fitting I must say.

Until next time.

Spinning 'Round like a Record

2010-02-19T04:14:00.000-08:00

I must say out of all of the weeks in my life, this past week has provided more wild swings in feelings in such a short amount of time than I've ever experienced. Has those swings been positive? Absolutely not. In many ways I wish I would never, ever (Ever!) experience the feelings I felt ever again. Having said that, the changes that have occurred as a result of this week have been equally as startling, and unlike my feelings I don't mind experiencing these changes.

As posts this week showed, I really went through a really rough patch that really had me doing some dumb things--especially doubting God. Do I wish I could take them back? Pretty much, but for the first time in my life I actually let myself get upset, and I was surprised by the speed in which I got over a lot of the situation. The last time I had such a bad thing happen to me, I kept everything internalized and spent a good two months in silent agony because I let no one know how much I hurt. So in the end I count it as a net positive, though in hindsight, if I'm ever in that situation again (I sure hope it never happens again!), God's going to have to help me not have such deep troughs.

The most astounding thing in all of this is the changes that's been happening in me. Yesterday at school I was talking to a teacher about what I've been going through, and she commented how much I've changed in this school year, and especially in the past two weeks. I was stunned when she said she noticed that something about me changed from last Friday to talking to me on Monday to talking to me on Thursday--and they were all for the better. I told her I felt the same way, because looking back on the past week I find that I've had several major changes in how I view the world around me and how I even think about a lot things. Even now, I'm in a really weird spot in that I know what's happened to me, but I just don't have the verbiage to express what's happened quite the way that I'd like. I find it frustrating that, in several areas of my life, I have a lot of problems in how to exactly articulate what I think and what I'm feeling about situations, which is probably a reason why I'm having to deal with this situation, as looking back I expressed how I felt about being in a couple of situations, and what I said really and truthfully had little to do with how I actually felt, and made me sound quite dumb.

I was a bit perturbed with myself as I was telling my friend this, because it seems that this affliction is especially hurting other areas of my life, but I kind of feel helpless because I don't know how to fix it. My friend just laughed and said something very insightful: maybe I'm not the problem. I've been the same sheltered and reserved person for so long that the world around me is only used to dealing with me in that fashion. However, with all of these changes, especially in such a rapid and fundamental fashion, the world is having to deal with a completely different me that it just doesn't know what to do. When I asked her about how the people who's met me recently might react, she told me to just be patient, because all they're seeing at the moment is someone who's figuring out how to wear a pretty new personality and mindset, and it won't take long for them to realize who the real me is: not the one that curls his lips because he said something that didn't sound right even to him, and then spends the next half hour articulating what he exactly meant. I can't wait for the day I don't have to do that, if for no other reason than I can finally waste my time blathering about other things that I actually like talking about, like German Battlecruisers.

Until next time.

Book Review- Hear no Evil by Matthew Paul Turner

2010-02-16T17:08:00.000-08:00

Back in December, I decided I had had enough with my life and decided to stop being married to my job and attempt to have a life. Has it been easy? Absolutely not. Do I have a life? Well... Am I a different person from when I started this? Absolutely. The reason? Well, there's a lot of reasons, but a big inspiration has been Christian author and humorist Matthew Paul Turner. I virtually never read Christian books because, like most "Christian" things, they're rather pants.

Turner's memoir of growing up entitled churched is about the opposite of pants one can get. It's quirky, funny, and above all, really opened my eyes to the fact that I'm not the only person on earth who feels like they don't quite fit in in evangelical churches. My beef has never been doctrinal in nature, but rather the culture. It feels a bit oppressive at times as well as anti-intellectual. Being a bit of a free-thinker and, well, well-read, it provides plenty of abrasive moments. Unlike Turner, I didn't leave my church, but I am a lot more free in both my theology and my outlook on life than I was before.

Enter Hear No Evil. Turner worked for the popular magazine CCM as editor for several years, so came in contact with a lot of Christian Music makers and saw the industry on the inside. As Turner points out Christian Music is chock-full of people trying to become famous whilst the whole time telling us they don't want to be famous. As he points out near the end of the book, if they're not telling us they're not out to be famous, they're telling us they're virgins or were virgins until they were married.

Like how I saw my upbringing come to life in a lot of ways in churched, Turner does the same with his relationship with music growing up. Unlike Turner, I never sang in church (Allegedly I sound like Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, but I don't believe that for a minute), wanted to win Star Search, or bought an Amy Grant cassette five times. I did learn how to operate a sound board in high school, and only owned a single cassette tape growing up: Weezer's Blue Album, which, considering our similar upbringings, was the far greater sin, especially since I never got rid of it and hung on for it in secret for eight years. Turner used his love of music to go to Belmont University in Nashville to get a degree in Music Business, only to return home and do nothing until he got his break at a coffee shop. From there he ended up back in Nashville, where he currently lives and writes.

If there is a flaw to this eminently funny book is that it's a little light on plot. If you've read churched, you already know he grew up in a restrictive if not outright oppressive household and church, and you know he ends up escaping it for a life of freedom in Christ. Here you get a glimpse of his days in Nashville at Belmont (The chapter "Bubble Boy" could have been written by me and only differed in minute details and the timeframe) and even a chapter on his days at CCM, but there's the feeling that there's plenty more material that would be equally funny that would make the same impact as the rest of the book's material, as well as driving the point home that Christian music is full of people--both good and bad, as well as doing a better job of explaining his spiritual journey to where he is now.

On a personal note, this flaw is more than compensated by his chapter "Wannabe." After graduating from Belmont, he moved back home to Maryland with the intention of only staying until he could get on with his life. That turned into a long ordeal that ended up with him at Jammin' Java where he finally got his break into music. On his way back to Virginia, he struggled with the fact that he felt like he had failed. He then said something very profound when he said

According to the apostle Paul, half the Christian faith was pretending not to be angry and bitter about God's decisions. Hiding discontent was one thing, and I could do that; making people believe that I was thrilled beyond all reason with the crappy circumstances God had given me was much more difficult. Still, the rest of the drive I begged God to help me be content.

There's so much truth in especially how we expect people who are given a bad position in life to just leap for joy that we're in the midst of a trial. I know Paul says for us to count it all joy, but there are times we just can't. The chapter reads so much like my own past and now present trials in tone not so much in deed, though I do admit in the past and even this past weekend doing exactly what he talked about near the end of the chapter how "all [he] seemed capable of doing was sitting around and making lists of things God had failed [him] on." It's not exactly my greatest moment, but I'm not perfect. I just hope I never do it again.

One last thing: my favourite line in the whole book? This dandy that tells more about being an evangelical than any other line could:

For a lot of Christians, their imaginations are liabilities, like the five senses and genitals. Growing up in a church that bordered on being a religious regime often stole my chances to experience God as a mystery, Ms. Lansing told us that God made people creative so we could retell his story in new ways. She said it was a part of our calling. "You'll understand it in time, " she said "Trust me. God will make it clear when he needs your imagination."

You know, if we stopped focusing on creating a homogeneous congregation and obsessing about sexual purity to the point that our kids hop in bed with each other in order to either (1) rebel or (2) find out what the fuss is all about, some folks might actually listen to what we say, because why would anyone want to join a group of people that give up our individuality and creativity to become a cookie cutter Christian, as well as feeling guilty of what you did in your past life that, to be perfectly honest, was something that Jesus would have died for just as readily for as the white lie you told your boss this morning.

Final Verdict: 4.5/5.0 stars

Buy Hear no Evil on Amazon

Until next time.

Why can't I Trust Him?

2010-02-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

For my more secular readers, I apologize in advance, because probably for the foreseeable future I'll probably be posting a lot more about my life and my faith than my classroom, and that's mainly because my life and my faith is pretty much punching me in my face on a minute-by-minute basis, and my classroom is currently in a spate of mundane cruise control in that nothing dumb they say is cute or remarkable any more. So, until then I need something to blog about. I wish my life wouldn't have seen the need to supersede this.

Anyway, as I had posted last week, I was waiting for a decision that was going to change the direction of my life. When it came down the pipe, I wasn't terribly shocked because I had cynically prepared for the bad news. I prepared for the inevitable conversation to negotiate how this was going to work out. I had prepared and had a plan that was going to work because it was one of those odd compromises in that neither side would leave unhappy because both sides would get what they wanted. That lasted about fifteen minutes until it became evident that what constituted a good outcome was two very different meanings to the same word, and the only person that would be giving anything up would be me--and it would have to be on their terms if I got anything I had been asking for. In the end, it was worst case scenario time, and despite fighting an often-desperate rear guard action, I conceded defeat and slumped off the phone to look at the fiery wreck that was now my life.

A couple of phone calls to some close friends to relay the news started me on the road to recovery because they convinced me that it wasn't as bad as I thought and that there was a way to save it in the end... if I just had patience and trusted God. As the weekend rolled on the number of people I had tell me about the story of Joseph and the necessity of trusting God led me to believe that I might be onto something and the game plan I had going into this wasn't the Nutri-Grain bar I ate at the Promethean training that Thursday afternoon at the Central Office, but rather I really did hear from God.

Going into Sunday morning at church, I was feeling a little better, even though even General Superintendent George O. Wood was even telling me to trust God from his customary spot in the Pentecostal Evangel. The sermon was boring and I quickly lost interest, leading me to do some tweeting, Facebooking, and even e-mailing my parents during the sermon. However, by the end of the sermon I was getting kicked in the stomach by the rabbit trail the pastor went on, reminding me blow-by-blow of the fact I'm in this situation, and the fact that I was lucky to even be in the situation because people like me don't get a lot of shots at success like I did, which made me feel even worse because it made me think that this was all my doing.

Just great. This fiery crash that I'm experiencing is all my fault. It figures.

Even as I type this, I'm in the melancholic dumps. The problems that would have been solved by a modest outcome are back worse than before, cynicism stalks me like a leopard its prey, and worst of all in all of this I can't keep my grip on the fact that I know how to get out of this and the knowledge that it's all going to end OK because I just can't trust God, no matter how hard I'm trying. As Margaret of Single and Sane pointed out in her comment on my post, I feel just like the father of the Demoniac in Mark 9 when he told Jesus how he believed, but really needed help because of his unbelief. I do believe God has what's best for me, but I can't keep a grip on that belief.

Right there lies the rub. Faith and trust have always been issues for me because I live in a world of discrete events and rational analysis, yet completely and totally believe in the spiritual and miraculous. When it comes down to brass tacks, I lean toward the latter because the rational side of me has seen and digested enough to give up trying to rationalize those things and just believe. The problem is getting down to the brass tacks, of course.

As I've stated before, I have a real problem with solving problems. I see problems, think them through, find the best solution, and execute said solution. Everyone slaps me on the back for a job well done, but now I'm in a position that I'm so good at solving problems that I'm in a situation where I'm dying to solve this problem is the best way possible, but I can't do it because (1) it involves someone not named Loren to get on board to make it really work, and (2) God is the only One who can solve this problem. Because of this tug-of-war between wanting to solve a problem and realizing that I can't solve the problem, I'm having a real problem with believing that God can do it, even though He's provided me with plenty of rational and logical information for me to place my trust in Him.

It all came to a head tonight as I was typing this, as I decided to fire up the playlist from Relient K's 2004 album Mmhmm because it was a real life ring for me when I was really feeling down and out around the time it came out. It really didn't take long until I was a blubbering wreck because the first song spat out was When I go Down, and the opening verse goes as follows:

I'll tell you flat out
it hurts so much to think of this
so from my thoughts I will exclude
this very thing that
I hate more than everything is
the way I'm powerless
to dictate my own moods

If that isn't a direct statement about my current situation, then I don't know if one could ever be created. By the end, I was reminded once again that perhaps the only way we can trust is if we're broken and smashed to the point where we have nothing left to do but trust:

When I go down
I lift my eyes up to You
I won't look very far
'cause You'll be there
with open arms
to lift me up again

I surely hope I've hit bottom. I'm ready to trust. It might not be a lot of trust, and it might not be a very strong trust, but it's all I've got, and if there's one thing my rational mind knows, God doesn't need much of anything to make things great. That's why He's in the mustard seed business.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go and compose myself (again).

Until next time.

Can We all just Read Along?

2010-02-10T17:51:00.000-08:00

Today was another crazy day at school. No fights today (I told my seventh period class that they could get their fight for the day out of the way just as class started, and half of the class jumped up. *facepalm*), but I did have a student curse me out when I told him he had to work on his assignment for the day. Ah well, can't have a day without writing an office referral.

I was reading my Twitter feed looking for some inspiration for today's post (I have a post in the works for tomorrow about my adventure this past weekend), and as usual Aaron Eyler rides to the rescue. Unlike posts which I either agree or disagree 100% with the blog post, this one has me a bit torn because I see and actually agree with both sides of the issue. In his article Reading: For School or Pleasure?, Eyler posits that it's counterproductive for students to read books for school that are inherently disconnected and disdain because of their irrelevance like your standard bog fare high school literature text. He rounds out the post by asking teachers to ensure that students read relevant and engaging works, and strangely enough, perhaps giving students a choice of what books to read for their assignments.

As a Reading teacher at a school where my critters pretty much refuse to read anything, I see the allure of the concept of just finding anything that will stick and run with that, but in my experience, the stuff my kids want to read is absolute pants. Our school does Accelerated Reading and we spend 15 minutes of every class in silent sustained reading, and most of my students don't even bother to bring in their books to read. To ensure they're reading, I grabbed a variety of discarded magazines from the library, and they all flock to Sports Illustrated and Ebony, but for some reason Business Week gets left alone. I would like to think that they're getting reading in, but considering the struggle I have in keeping them in their seats because they flip through an entire issue in a minute and attempt to get a new issue, I'm not that gullible.

As for those that bring their books to class, I guess I should be jumping for joy that a student that would otherise not read is reading the Twilight series from cover to cover, but it's Twilight for Pete's Sake! The rest of my slow students don't even read anything that reaches that level of literary sophistication. My honor students read popular young adult literature, but at least there's some quality there. I know that reading is a skill that requires practice, and the best way to practive is to practice doing something you'd enjoy, but what's the value of the practice if it isn't challenging, or is only for the purpose of practice, a single-purpose instrument that Alton Brown would hate oh-so-much.

I admit that I'm rather curmudgeonly when it comes to my concept of good literature, but my reasons are mainly because literature is a rather important method of transferring values and culture from one generation to the next. Maybe it's because it's my background in history, but I see too much value in the literature of the past for students to ignore because it's not "relevant." Yes, I hated reading Dickens when I took British Literature, but when I taught British Literature, he was the perfect vehicle to explain exactly what early Victorian life was like for the masses, and I used it liberally.

I think there's a middle ground on this issue, and I think my class may have the key to this. As I stated, I have a dedicated time each day for them to read books and magazines of their choice that gives them the practice they need through a medium that is "relevant" for them, but for the remainder of the class, I get to introduce them to literature that they in no way they would ever look at, much less appreciate. It's far too amusing to see at times the students become wrapped up in a story like O. Henry's A Retrieved Reformation where they made a connection to the character who's a criminal-gone-straight. In the end we all win; the kids read something they find interesting and I get to transfer some values from one generation to the next. At least I get to do that. Now if they only would get around to actually comprehending what they read. Ah well, one mountain at a time I guess.

Until next time.

Back in the Metaphysical Waiting Room

2010-02-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

I was looking to make another education-related post today, but right now I need to vent a little bit. Just to warn any of you readers out there: if you don't like evangelicals discussing their faith, then you had better stop right here and move on, because I'm going there.

Right now I'm facing a rather important decision that will be decided in the next several days. The impact of the decision will in all likelihood change the way my life is currently heading in a fundamental way. The bad news? I really don't say in this decision. The worst part is that I've been in the exact same place before in my life on two occasions. In each case they caused a tectonic shift in my life, and unfortunately, in one case I'm just recovering from the ramifications of that event.

It doesn't help my natives are absolutely off the reservation in terms of their behaviour and performance in their class. The class I referred to in yesterday's post was quiet for the most part until shortly before the bell rang when two more students decided to fight. I managed to stop it with some help from two of my students (I really need to reward those guys, especially since they've gone from two of my biggest cut-ups to two students I can rely to complete their work in the past month.). They're already on lockdown for their general behaviour, and I'm scratching my head as to what needs to happen next.

As most of you know, I am a deeply religious person, though I tend to not dwell on it too much. Where I work, there are plenty of people who go to church regularly, but really don't act on what they hear on a daily basis. I'm not trying to act holier-than-thou, but I take my faith seriously and go out of my way to make sure the life others see me live matches what I hear in church and read and pray about on my own. Of course, it doesn't always happen that way, as I found out today in a rather amusing circumstance.

I admit I'm a horrible person when it comes to giving the circumstances of my life over to God for Him to take care of. Being someone who is ridiculously intelligent, I have a very bad habit of being able to solve problems without outside help. As is the case for people like me, God loves nothing more than pulling my hands off of the steering wheel of my life in order to make me trust Him more. I was feeling rather morose in my planning period today, and a good friend of mine was trying to cheer me up through some (well-needed) tough love. She commented how she thinks it's amazing for being such a devout person, I really have a problem with giving things to God for Him to take care of. I could only laugh ashamedly and admit it's something I'm not very good at, and is probably the reason I'm facing this situation.

It's uncanny how this situation I face is similar to what I went through at the beginning of my college career almost a decade ago. I rolled through high school with a near-perfect GPA and ACT scores, and went to a really great college for what (I thought) was my dream major. Due to winning a prestigious competition I had all of my tuition and fees covered... until during the winter break the university informed me I owed them $3100 in fees that my financial aid didn't cover. There was no way I could pay it during the break apart from bank robbery or wire fraud, so I returned to school that January only to sit out the week until my account went into default and I would be sent home. I went back because when I was in high school God showed me that He would take care of my college finances and I wouldn't need to worry about them--and to not take out any loans. I was just deluded enough to go back to school confident that God would do what he said He would do.

That week was pure Hell for me as the university got off to its normal schedule and I was stuck with nowhere to go. I tried my best to put on a brave face, but most of my time was spent on my bed crying my eyes out wanting to know why this was happening to me and gripped in terror at the fact my life was about to crash and burn in the most spectacular way possible. My parents called that Saturday and told me to be ready to come back home on Monday, so I should spend that Sunday telling my church good bye. I went to church looking like death warmed over, and in Sunday School I was the focus of the lesson as my friends and the professor that was our teacher prayed that however things went I'd end up for the better. Unbeknownst to me, as our teacher was praying, God told him quite clearly that I wasn't going home and to watch what was going to happen.

During the service I was called up to the podium and the pastor wanted to pray a prayer of blessing over me. Someone from the crowd asked how much I owed, and I sheepishly gave the total. Over the next minute the church spontaneously whipped out their chequebooks and raised an offering to keep me in school. I didn't know what to do, so I stood there dumbfounded. After church when I called my parents, they refused to believe me until the pastor called to tell them what happened. They came up the next day not to bring me home, but to make sure I was ready to go for the Spring semester. The experience changed my life because I saw that God moved in a definite way in my life in a fashion that simply couldn't be explained by normal means. Sure you could explain it away by mass empathy, but why would 50 people give $100 a piece to a person they didn't even know existed earlier that morning?

A year later, with my financial aid secure, I prepared for the Spring semester. My advisor told me in no uncertain terms that he would not allow me to proceed with my academic plan because in doing so he would be aiding someone in running away from the plan God had for them. I looked at him puzzled, and in a fit of insanity I believed him, and signed the paperwork he'd prepared to change my major from Aerospace Engineering to History. What neither of us knew was that in the deep fine print of my financial aid, in doing so voided all of my financial aid offers, and left me with a hefty bill for things the aid was supposed to pay, but now didn't have to. Once again I spent the first week of January sitting in my dorm room clinging to the hope that God would ride in to the rescue once again, because He had done it already. Though I was scared to death by the concept of leaving school, I was confident He would provide yet again. After all, I was too smart and successful to have a college career crash and burn.

The money never came.

My parents came and picked up a shell-shocked young man and packed all of his belongings into their car to bring home. To add insult to injury, the university dismissed me, but in the dismissal letter they listed my reasons for dismissal as "academic." As I would find out later, this would give me fits as I tried to get back into college. The best part was that I had attended a Christian university that constantly trumpeted the integration of faith into their culture. That made the hurt all the worse. For being ostensibly Christian, the manner of my leaving was anything but.

Once I was at home, I sought a quick way back into college to get on with my life. Instead, it began a five year journey of inexplicable spiritual drought and loneliness. From 2002 to 2007, no matter how hard I prayed, how much I read my Bible, or how many church services I went to, God did not speak to me. I had shriveled up to the point that all I could say what that I had resigned myself to the fact that it was my lot in life--which was awful Calvinist for someone who was raised and matured on Assemblies of God theology. To be honest it sucked hard and I really only got through it by sheer intertia; I was too stubborn to call it quits on my faith because I had seen and experienced too much for me to think it was all a sham. It was the worst time of my life, and every day I live I put more distance between me and that time.

Of course, by 2008 I was teaching in Franklin and this blog was up and running, so suffice it to say I got through it. What happened was that the spontaneous side of me was buried in an avalanche of cynicism and pessimism. I had ossified into someone who was intensly aware of my differences, and protected myself from others by settling into an immensely boring life. By December I had had enough with my life.

Most evangelicals would stop me right here and say the answer to my problem would be to just get closer to God or any of the other zillions of cliches they give as advice. The problem is that my relationship with God was fine--not the best around, but reading my Bible or jumping up and down during the song service wouldn't solve the problem. What I needed was a practical solution. This past December, I got it in a really odd situation where once again I made a completely irrational decision and decided to let the Loren that ran about and did all of these amazingly fun things growing up for the simple reason that he was mind-bogglingly curious out. Since then my life has made a 180-degree change for the better. It's been an exhilirating ride that I wouldn't give up for the world--and that's why I'm in the situation I'm in now.

If things don't go my way all of the ground I've gained in the last two months go up in smoke. The cynicism that I thought I had gotten rid of for good is back banging on the door--and it's getting louder and louder as the days go on. No matter how much my mentors have talked with me and told me it's going to turn out OK, and I'm just being paranoid about nothing, all I think about is that the last time I really stepped out in faith for something was when I changed my major back in late 2001... only to get kicked out of school, sent home, and plunged into soul-sucking loneliness and tedium. I've only really recovered from that recently, and I'm terrified it's all going to come back, stronger than before.

I was in one of those troughs this evening as I began this post, when iTunes coughed up a song by Hillsong United that kicked me square in the stomach. I'm not usually one for cutting edge praise and worship due to how a lot of it feels cheap and vapid, but when the chorus of Salvation is Here began, it stood out to me in a way that I desperately needed to hear:

'Cause I know my God saved the day
And I know His word never fails
And I know my God made a way for me
Salvation is here

Salvation is here
Salvation is here and He lives in me
Salvation is here
Salvation that died just to set me free
Salvation is here
Salvation is here and He lives in me
Salvation is here

I know God's saved the day for me before, and He'll do it again because He's told me on several occasions in the past week He would continue what He's started because I'm finally living the life He's created for me to live. I felt (and still do) feel so wretched because for as much as I know how God takes care of me and has an awesome plan for my life, I still have the nerve to doubt Him and think that for some reason that because His hands are on the wheel right now and not mine, we're going to crash into a fiery wreck. I really wish I would stop being like that, but maybe that'll be something He'll work on in the future. One crisis at a time though. I just wish the receptionist would call my name and get this over with--either way.

Until next time.

May I have that Pencil, Please?

2010-02-08T19:21:00.001-08:00

Today was the aftermath of the Saints’ Bighugeginormous Game (Can’t use the real name; it’s trademarked!) victory at school, and it was rather predictable. There were absences everywhere for both the students and especially the faculty. With five teachers out, we didn’t have enough subs to fill in the gaps, so we had students on alternate schedule all over the place all day long. In several of my classes I only had enough seats for students because there were enough students absent to allow for them. It really did play havoc on my lesson plan, as I was attempting to introduce a project and get my critters into working pairs.

Seventh period, the class I currently loathe the most due to their incredible inability to keep their mouths shut and stay on task for more than about 45 seconds at a time, was really up and ready to go from the second they walked in. I couldn’t manage to reel them in no matter what I did. Adding to the fun was eight students from three different teachers on alternate schedule… with none of them having work to complete. I was plowing through the lesson as best as I could. They were split off into pairs and I was preparing to tell them about the project, when they assumed their typical state of inane chatter. Like any good teacher worth their salt, rather than yelling I just stood there silently and waited for them to be quiet since half of the room was talking.

As per Murphy’s Law, the problem kicked off on the quiet side of the classroom when two of my most quiet students are suddenly tossing desks and swinging away at each other. It was handbags at best, and I was in no mood to let it go on longer than necessary so I waded in and split them up. I set a student for help… only for them to come back empty-handed. I had them cooled down (thanks to another student) enough to sit down (One said “How about I read a magazine here?”) and I called the office. A staff member came in and took them away. The class tried to talk but I promptly ruined their day by canceling their project, instead giving them a quiz on the same material on Friday. In the debrief, I found out the reason for their fisticuffs: one student took the other’s pencil and refused to give it back as a prank. Yes, these two students willingly fought and are getting three days of in-school suspension because of a pencil. A pencil!

I have never understood the concept of physical fighting at school, or in life in general. I’m a big fan of ice hockey but I’ve never liked the concept of wanton violence that is ingrained in the sport. Perhaps it’s just because I’m a little old weakling, but the concept of getting in a fight just makes me scratch my head… and the concept of fighting over a pencil is even sillier. I guess it’s one of the things I’ll never get. Well, that, along with things like when asking an essay question about making a prediction for a story regarding a safecracker, a student tells me a story about a pimp, how students can be tardy when the class they’re going to is next door, how one can be fifteen and still be in the seventh grade, or any of the other crazy things that I see every day at school.

Not all is bad, however, as one of our teachers made it to the local newspaper in a great way. If you want to know about my man Mr. Schmidt, check out the link here.

Until next time.

Quick Thought--On College of Education Classes

2010-02-02T03:57:00.000-08:00

Apparently the iPhone app that promises on-the-go blogging capabilities didn't work, as I made three blog posts this weekend... and all of them have vanished into the ether. Hmpf.

On my way to my Testing and Assessment class (A class that will receive some publicity on this blog due to its sheer entertainment and the professor teaching it--and I mean that in a good way!), I passed by the "Inquiry and Discovery-based Learning" class, only to see all of the students in neat rows studiously taking notes as the professor lectured from the front of the class.

Just sayin'.

Technology and Engagement

2010-01-23T18:49:00.000-08:00

This week had an unfortunate hiatus for my readers here at Teaching on Mars, but for yours truly, the reasons for the hiatus are well worth it for me. My mind is swimming with all sorts of things in all sorts of directions, but with some semblance of normalcy beginning to resume for me, a quick blog post is in order.

My last post brought up my favourite educational technology blog Aaron Eyler's Synthesizing Education, and over the course of a good discussion on the role of rote memorization, I think I found that my opposition to what I saw as his thesis was more of debating over fine lines than major issues as well as the fact that I teach a group of students that is far from the norm. One of his posts this week was on the role of technology in student engagement, and I concur with his thesis 100%. To me, the crucial quote was as follows:

In no way do I advocate that we start arbitrarily shoving computers into classrooms without proper training and discussion, but I do find fault with the teachers who go all year without utilizing technology for multiple assignments. What we truly need to do is accelerate the discussion and provide professional development and training to these teachers, mandate usage in Professional Development Plans, and encourage them to take risks when being observed.

Looking at how teachers in general use technology, it feels like in most cases computers are arbitrarily shoved computers into classrooms without proper training and discussion, though not through the fault of technology facilitators. Then when there are observations made, teachers are assessed whether they use technology or not, without any sort of notation of the individual teacher's level of technology aptitude.

Eyler makes a great point that the tidal wave of technology that is coming into the classroom needs dedicated professional development to close the utilization gap that teachers have with technology. I know I'm nowhere near the norm in terms of teachers with technological know-how, but even among the "techie" teachers and average teachers, there's still a huge gap. There needs to be dedicated, and let me be honest, mandatory professional development to bridge this gap with some semblance of assessment of teachers to make sure it's sticking. I of course know that this is asking for nothing but bureaucratic trouble, but perhaps there's a way to keep the paperwork to a minimum.

The other thing he notes is to encourage teachers to take risks with technology when being observed. Our observation sheets only note if we're using technology, and the technology threshold is ridiculously low, in that overhead projectors are considered technology. So, when it's time to be observed, I could either make a fancy virtual flipchart on my Promethean board that includes the student using the ActivVote handhelds, and this is considered just as much of a use of technology as a teacher using markers on an overhead. It makes no sense and is frankly unfair to me in that I put so much work into integrating technology. I have no impetus to take risks when being observed, so why should I? Of course, I should for the students, but it's a weird feeling to see my observation sheet with just technology used checked when I used it to engage my students when I could have used technology in a passive fashion and gotten the same comment. Like most things, it isn't fair, but perhaps it's something we should look at.

Until later.

We've created "...a Generation of Jay Leno Stooges"

2010-01-18T15:39:00.000-08:00

I like reading Aaron Eyler's Synthesizing Education blog. He does a great job of discussing the interaction of education and technology in a way that isn't basic like a lot of education blogs, but keeps its feet on the ground so it doesn't become a wacky futurist blog. However, one of today's entries hit my nerve by implicating that rote memorization isn't needed these days because the amount of knowledge being created makes a lot of existing knowledge obsolete. I'm a ~~big~~ ~~huge~~ massive believer in the theories of E D. Hirsch that believes that state that a core area of knowledge must be passed on from generation to generation to ensure the continuance of free and egalitarian societies. Simply put, knowledge makes people free, and a culture that has a constant core of knowledge that spans generations engenders longevity and a concrete legacy. You may not believe his ideas about how it applies to society, but his agreement with cognitive scientists that a vital aspect of cognitive growth is memorization at young ages is something that most folks with common sense and experience with learning a foreign language as a child and as an adult (I took French in elementary school, and I decades later I can still read a French book without a lot of problems. I took Spanish in college and don't remember a lick) can attest to. Eyler's plea for us to ditch knowledge because we can look it up on Google peeved me to no end. As a result, yours truly shot back after a fantastic response that likened today's knowledge-less students as "a generation of Jay Leno stooges":

School isn’t just a centre created to produce workers–rather it is a centre of knowledge transmission for a society from one generation to another. In the quest to ensure our students adapt to the rapidly-changing world, we’ve deemed the recall of knowledge as irrelevant and somehow beneath us as educators that we have created a generation of adults who have zero capability to remember anything. By ignoring the research from cognitive scientists that persistently show that children’s brains are a fertile ground for permanent storage of knowledge if they memorize them between the ages of 6-11, we leave our students without the cognitive ability to store and retain knowledge after that age since the brain doesn’t know how to do it.

I teach at a school that is borderline failing. Most of the things discussed on this blog are but a gleam in my eye because I have more pressing needs like the fact that 80% of my seventh grade reading students read below a sixth grade level at over 50% through the school year. What my students need is not Socratic circles, questioning the author’s purpose, or any of the other literacy strategies my state’s DoE require me to teach because these kids can’t read with comprehension. Period. It makes no sense that I have to repeat concepts 20+ times for them to have the slightest bit of comprehension. It also makes no sense that they get the same questions incorrect on every single quiz I give when I leave the same questions in the exact same spots on said quizzes.

Whilst you may be onto something about the idea that every child needs to know about the siting of Grant’s guns during the siege of Vicksburg, by ignoring or marginalizing rote memorization, you have undermined the entire concept of a hierarchy of thinking by ignoring the foundation. How can someone evaluate something when they have no knowledge to base their opinions on? How can you synthesize new information when there is no prior information to use as a reference point?

By continuing this line of thinking, the dissemination of knowledge from generation to generation is lessening by the year, and before long we will have an entire underclass of people of all ethnicities and creeds bound together by the fact that they know nothing of substance. If that’s been the unconscious goal of education leaders to create such a stratified society consisting of knows and know-nots, then they can sit back and pat each other on the back; they’ve done their job.

Yeah, I went there. My professor of Social Studies Methods who's a massive fan of Howard Zinn (and Bruce Springsteen!) would be proud of my shot at creating good workers, but the rally cry for memorizing facts probably irks him. It's OK. When they're all lost and in dire need of directions and I pop in and save them due to all of the geography knowledge I had to memorize, they'll thank me later.

Skipping down the Hall

2010-01-16T09:16:00.000-08:00

Friday was an interesting day. It started off innocently enough when I gave my quiz to my first period class, and when they finished I read to them an excerpt from Churched by Matthew Paul Taylor. I had been reading it during out (allegedly) silent reading time, and laughed the entire time. In the next week or so I'll post a review of the book. After our team meeting our principal looked rather concerned and told us to go to our classes. When the bell rang students came in from PE, but no one else. We were told to stay in our classrooms and lock the doors. My honors class is third period and I only had half of them, so I was stuck without a Plan B.

Like the students, I was without a clue as to what was going on since there was no mention of our crisis plan, but I decided to just let the students do whatever they wanted provided they didn't get too loud. After a while of chit chat I read them two chapters of Churched, we discussed the effects of the earthquake in Haiti, why Haiti has earthquakes, looked at satellite footage of the damage in Port-au-Prince, hung signs up on my ceiling, and played charades. After about an hour of this I peeked out the door to see police officers, Central Office employees, and our administration searching students. Apparently, we were in the process of a random search day. Hooray! Some of my students freaked out about the K-9 dogs, but I sufficiently calmed them down enough for them to not break down in tears at the thought of it.

We were in the midst of our Charades game when there was a knock on the door. The principal couldn't stay serious because she had been watching me give the clues on top of my desk. When I told her and the group of very serious individuals what we were doing, they all laughed. We went into the hall and the students were wanded with metal detectors. The dog and a couple of deputies went in and searched the class. When they came out, the principal and the officer in charge complimented us on the fact that no contraband was found, and this was the first class for that to happen. I beamed with pride because I go out of my way to give good attention and love to my honors students. Oftentimes our school's issues mean the kids with problems get all the attention, and I believe that high achievers deserve to be doted on also.

After 150 minutes of imprisonment, we were finally freed. The search turned up no drugs, but enough cell phones (One student had three [!!!] cell phones) and mp3 players to stock an electronics store. For the rest of the day the students were in full zoo mode. I had to take one out of the class and tell him to calm down because he was so upset his iPod was taken from him. To his credit, that talk was what he needed because he was back to normal after that. When the bell rang to end the day, I was thankful the critters were out of my sight. Phew!

As I sat down to check my e-mail, I had an e-mail in my Inbox entitled "Offer of Equipment and Trainng." From the head of the Technology department. I opened it and found out I was one of two teachers from my school chosen to receive a Promethean interactive whiteboard for my classroom, as well as comprehensive training. I was floored. In one of our computer labs is a small board that is never used, and I had been asking for it so it could get used. Now I was picked to get a 95-inch board just for me!

Actual Promethean Board slightly larger than pictured

I've played with Promethean boards in the past and found them to be an exceptionally neat toy to use in the class because of its sheer variety of interactivity options. My brain's already cooking up ideas to put it to use as soon as I get it. But before I got too ahead of myself, I replied to say I wanted it. It went as follows:

Hi! In case you haven't heard the yelling and screaming from the west just yet, I'm just replying to you that I'll gladly accept the offer to receive a Promethean board. In fact, I'll be here on Saturday to open the doors to let them install it for me by Tuesday. Scratch that, I'll pick it up and install it myself tonight. Can you tell I'm excited? Cheers!

I went skipping down the hall like a student and everyone was just staring at me. When I told them what I was getting, I got a couple of odd stares, but a lot of congratulations from my colleagues. After that I was shooting the breeze with Mr. Schmidt, our Louisiana History teacher, we were laughing about who was the geekiest teacher here. He's a big music and history geek, but when I showed up, I kind of left him in the dust.Today was his birthday, and I knew of nothing else to give a fellow geek for their birthday a birthday card from the Communist Party.

Happy Birthday from the Communist Party, Comrade!

The three day weekend is going to be great, but I can't wait for my Promethean board!

Facepalm

2010-01-13T15:37:00.000-08:00

As a teacher, I'm faced daily with the full spectrum of humanity. It's a weird feeling to, within a two hour span, see students whose futures vary from the sky being the limit to being fitted out with prison jumpers. I'm still uncomfortable thinking about the latter, but I guess I'll get used to it. One thing I have grown surprisingly used to is how ~~stupid~~ ~~dumb~~ clueless my students can be. I used to get upset when a student would give a startlingly incompetent answer to a question, but after a week of heartburn, I decided to laugh instead. After discovering some of them thought I was laughing at them (Well, I was, but it was more toward their answers.), I started facepalming myself, or, if it was staggeringly incompetent, just beat my head against the whiteboard. It allowed me to make fun of the student in a non-invasive way and make some people laugh at the same time. Everyone wins that way.

Today gave me a hat trick of facepalms and heads-against-the-whiteboards.

I was teaching on connotations and denotations of words, and the activity involved sorting words and phrases into columns for denotations, positive, and negative connotations. During first period I asked for a volunteer and one of my students, who, sadly, is playing without an entire suit in his deck (But tries oh so hard!), volunteered. He got stuck on what to put where, so I fake-whispered a hint that the denotation was the one with more than one word. He looked at me, the light bulb in his head flicked on, and he excitedly shouted... a one-word answer.

*facepalm*

The whole class was stunned until my paraprofessional started laughing and we all had a great laugh. I had to explain to him between chuckles what I was hinting at him. When he realized the error of his ways, he laughed to himself and said that was pretty dumb of him.

During fifth period I was writing office referrals for a trio in my fourth period class that is in the midst of waging an insurgency against my authority and my desire to teach them. I laugh at their puny efforts and keep on writing referrals with hopes they can hit the magic number of 12 referrals so they can be shipped off to Alternative School so I can teach my class instead of having to deal with students with zero self control. Anyway, I was listening to Fighting Talk (Essentially what Around the Horn on ESPN hopes to become one day) when there was a knock at the door. My math teacher was there with a giggling student. They asked me how to spell the student's last name, and I automatically spelled it out N-E-L-S-O-N. They both started laughing and told me how a student in his group spelled it N-L-E-S-O-N. My facepalm reflex kicked in and I joined in the laughter.

During my last class of the day I had a replay of the first incident, except my little genius this time guessed incorrectly twice this time. The first instance got a facepalm, but the second time had me beating my head against the whiteboard. How you could miss it twice was beyond me, but what can you do other than laugh? Get angry? Cry? To me there's no other option but to laugh. If I didn't I'd probably go mad otherwise.

I sometimes wonder if God looks down on us and facepalms when we screw up. I'd like to think so, because God knows I've done enough to make him facepalm more than a couple of times. Yet when I screw up, He's always there to pick me up, dust me off, and send me on my way. Maybe one day I can be like that for my students. Until then, I'll just beat my head against the whiteboard.

Being Tired means You're not doing a Good Job

2010-01-11T17:30:00.000-08:00

One of my first memories as a teacher was reading Harry Wong's The First Days of School. I don't have my copy handy, but I distinctly remember a passage that he discusses in his video series about teacher fatigue. To sum it up, Wong stated that a properly-run classroom had the teacher jumping and skipping home full of energy; not the other way around like most classrooms, where teachers leave exhausted. I asked my first principal why if this was the case why I went home tired on the days I had the students do all of the work in class that day. As with most things, my principal didn't have a suitable answer and instead blamed me for all of my problems.

I was thinking about this conundrum today as I woke up from my daily nap that I take upon returning home from work. I come home completely wiped out every day no matter what I do. For a time I thought that perhaps Harry Wong was correct and because I do most of the work in my class I'm the only one who leaves tired. I tried doing some classes where I gave the students some autonomy and I still ended up tired. I was laying in my bed one night thinking about this problem and came up with the answer--these kids are so starved for love and attention they suck us dry every day.

It all clicked for me because at my old school I skipped out the door on most days because I had enjoyed it so much. Of course, I didn't do that every day, as I trudged out on days my boss decided to tell me everything I did wrong or tell me I disciplined a kid incorrectly for reasons only known to her. Here in the public schools I was leaving tired no matter how well the day went because I was teaching classes full of kids who were absolutely parched and needed someone to approve them, tell them they were doing a good job, or most importantly, that someone believed in them and really believed they could make something out of their life. I then thought about how I was able to do it day after day, and I could only come up with that I do it only by the grace of God. Apart from that I was completely out of ideas. That isn't to say I don't need encouragement from others, because days I get an attaboy really give me a lift.

Fast forward to yesterday, and I saw one of my former colleagues was really struggling with teaching. I felt really bad for her because she's a fantastic teacher and always thought she was super cool... even though her husband was an LSU fan. I ended up messaging her and over the course of the conversation we discussed being a teacher that expects excellence from our students and how sometimes we're the only ones who do that for them. By the end it was apparent she was feeling better, and I really felt great about how my exhausting job could be an encouragement for a fellow teacher. So Mrs. Richard, if you're reading this, keep on keeping on, and remember, people who dumb things and can't believe they got caught don't just appear, they're just students who do dumb things and can't believe they got caught that just grew up.

ShareFair Post-Mortem

2010-01-09T17:08:00.000-08:00

This past Tuesday I attended the St. Mary Parish Technology ShareFair, and it was the first time I was able to be a presenter. As I posted last year, our parish's technology department puts on this fair as an opportunity to learn about new technology and how to use it in the classroom. At the end of ShareFair last year, I told a member of the staff that I wanted to be a presenter at the next fair, and they said sure. Fast forward a year later, and since I was ~~volunteered~~ appointed school webmaster, I was asked to present anyway. With gusto I threw together a fairly decent presentation on Web 2.0 that explained the concept, and loaded it full of websites to use.

My first session only had a couple of people attending it, mostly from my school, and they were a great audience for me to practice on. One of my fellow teachers told me afterward that her head was spinning when it was done, but found several websites she was going to look at later. My second session blew my mind in that I suddenly had twenty people in the classroom--a full house! By the time it was over their heads were spinning also, but there were also questions being asked all across the room and there ended up being a great discussion on giving students assignments online.

Looking back, I probably still managed to go over the heads of a lot of the teachers attending, but I think I was able to balance that with the sheer number of websites I gave on the handouts I had prepared. After presenting at a professional development day last year, I found that no matter how simple I tried to make it, it flew over their heads. What they did respond to was the three websites I gave to them. This time, I took that into account, but I think I went with too many websites. Next time, I think I'll go with fewer websites.

As for the next time, I've got a session up for approval with the Louisiana Middle School Association for their annual conference on using Geographic Information Systems across the curriculum. Haven't heard from them yet, but I'm hoping for the best.

When Is An 80 an 80?

2010-01-09T15:26:00.001-08:00

Aaron Eyler writes a blog on technology in education entitled Synthesizing Education, and posted an interesting blog entitled When Is An “80″ Not An “80″?: Grades in Schools. At the end, Eyler states

I understand that the primary focus on grading is parental, community, and higher-education pressure, but we need to make movement in finding more effective ways to analyze students internally and externally. In other words, an “80″ in my district as a final grade should be the same as an “80″ in yours. This is a daunting (maybe impossible) task, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore it.

It's a laudable goal, but frankly, he's living on a completely different planet than where I teach. Back when I taught at Bethel, I taught seventh graders and was incredibly tough on them when it came to grading reading and writing. Parents complained at first, but by the end of the year the students adapted and their grades improved despite me sticking to my assessing guns. Fast forward to this school year: same grade, same subject, but radically different students. I gave my first graded assignment of the year and graded the same way I normally do. Their grades? 80% failure rate.

I initially wanted to be obstinate and make my students rise to meet the standard, but frankly it's an impossible task. The students I teach come from a completely different educational background and as a result, the metric I used to assess these students was worthless; there was no way my principal or my program manager would accept a failure rate that high. I ended up changing my assessment methods to meet their needs as well a provide a hurdle high enough that the students would have to improve to truly succeed. Is it working? Well, I do have a perfect bell curve for my grades so I think it's safe to assume my grading method works with these students just fine.

In the end, there is only one way to ensure that an 80% is an 80% across the board, and that is to use standardized assessments, which is what we do with our yearly standardized testing. In other words, the only way we could work to achieve Eyler's goal would be to make every single assessment we give to our students in every single school a standardized assessment. Of course, this is completely impossible, so I'm not sweating it too much.

New Challenges, New Goals, New Year

2010-01-04T15:53:00.001-08:00

So the second half of the school year beckons in a couple of days' time, and I'm bracing myself for it. Looking at my students, I've seen some semblance of academic growth on their part but I still shudder in fear at the thought of them taking the iLEAP in April. Sure, I know a lot of it is out of my hands and chances are they'll do just fine. I assume that this is how parents think when they look at their little offspring, but considering I'm nowhere near being a parent, I'll just assume that.

Regardless, 2010 looks to be a year where I get to consolidate my career as a teacher and really begin moving forward. Apart from any unforeseen circumstances, it will be a great year for be being a teacher. Here's my goals for 2010:

(1) Finish off my Teaching Certificate

Yes, I'm one of those pesky Alternate Certification folks, and I have twelve class hours to go. Six hours get knocked out this spring in the form of Adolescent Psychology and Testing and Assessment, and the Summer will see me kill off the two literacy classes. By this time I will have finished the necessary time served to get an exemption from the state to bypass the internship/student teaching requirement. No more looking behind my shoulder, tenure beckons!

(2) Start up that Educational Technology Add-on

OK, so this one is a bit of a gimme, but I'm enrolled in the state's EIT course on technology integration due to me being a Web Administrator. I was apparently lucky to get in, but after looking at the coursework it looks to be some easy fun in terms of looking at technology in the classroom and how to use it. The class I'm enrolled in is the one that is given the least, so completing the other two whouldn't be hard, and when I am done with it, I get an add-on to my certificate in Educational Technology, along with 135 CLUs Yipee!

(3) Start my Master's Degree

This one is dependent on me finishing my Alternate Certification classes, but if everything finishes on schedule, I should be starting on my M. Ed. in Gifted Education this Fall. Considering at time I have an almost fanatical devotion to gifted kids, this was a no-brainer.

(4) Teach Social Studies (Finally!)

I probably don't have a lot of control in this, but I'm tired of teaching ELA. You would have thought those perfect Praxis scores would have impressed someone by now...

I could go on and on, but I won't now, because Share Fair is tomorrow and I'm presenting on Web 2.0. I'll post the recap tomorrow. Until then.

LaCUE Post-Mortem

2009-12-15T18:15:00.000-08:00

Go figure, I decide to fire up the blog then have to go into a two-week hibernation due to professional and academic commitments. That's life for you.Two weeks ago I Louisiana Association of Computer-Using Educators (LaCUE)conference in Baton Rouge. Being the Webmaster at BEBMS, I got the inside track on attending, albeit at the last minute. When I got there, I had quite the familiar feeling in that I knew absolutely no one there. I peeked in, registered, then promptly beat a retreat back to the motel room over in Port Allen where I planned my session-attending strategies for the next day.

I attended the keynote session where two chaps who work for Industrial Light and Magic and ostensibly it was about education but it felt a bit more like two geeks showing off what they did for a living with a nod to how they got started due to a teacher. Not exactly complaining about it, but that's how I felt.

The first session I penciled in was the session on Wikis in the Classroom, which is something I have tried with some degree of success, but was chomping at the bit to take it to the next level in that virtually all free Wikis out there aren't exactly built on the same backbone on as the MediaWiki engine that runs Wikipedia. After all, why teach kids how to use a Wiki without showing them how the real Wiki is done? In the end, I found myself bored to tears because the teachers around me were coming to grips with having to enter an e-mail address to create an account. I asked the assistant for the session if the presenter was going any deeper into Wikis than he was going. The assistant said no and looked at me strangely in that I found the session lacking.

After this I attended a session on Podcasting done by folks from the state's TLTC (Teaching, Learning, and Technology Centers). It was well done, but I've already had student create podcasts using those tools and ended up helping teachers around me to get their podcasts off the ground. Once that was done I attended a session called "Tricking Teachers into becoming Techie" by a college professor from Nicholls St. I was sitting in the back and got a jump on the activity only to find out that tricking teachers into becoming techies was to make another website with links and get them to use them. In my experience, that's about the best way to drive teachers running and screaming away from using technology, but I don't know much about teaching, so my opinion is null and void. After this I met up with someone from the Central Office who presented a session and we chatted it up about what I had experienced so far and how I saw I really needed to be a presenter next year (More on that later) because I have that level of technical knowledge.

Friday was a rather different proposition. I eschewed yet another "Ooh! Google!" session to pop in on a session on GIS in the classroom, another of my hobbies. Nothing I learned was new, but the presenters were fantastic and it was something real and tangible to use in the classroom that was off the beaten technological path. Afterward I talked the poor presenters' heads off about how impressed I was with the session as well as how I too use GIS in my classroom, even if it consists of just showing locations in ArcGIS Explorer so the students could get a feel for the setting their stories took place in.

After that I took two sessions back to back that had me laughing (Making students create a music video where they sing "We didn't Start the Fire" in Karaoke with the words changed to include modern history events) and a valedictory session that sent me on my way with a head full of ideas (More on that in a bit). All in all, it was a smashing success.

What I learned from LaCUE

(1) Teachers aren't as Techie as they think they are

Sorry. Hate to break it to you, but just because you know about Google Docs does not make you Techie in the real scheme of things. Kids these days are fully integrated into the Web 2.0 lifestyle (Collaboration, Social Networking, being Online everywhere) and the tools that are being touted as the greatest new thing are in fact a couple of years old. If you were a real techie, you'd be on the EtherPad bandwagon in order for your students to work on documents in real-time. If we're going to get serious about being really techie teachers, we need to get out of the box and make a serious effort in using tools that the students will feel at home using, not just a program that has features that we're comfortable with but is in a new package.

(2) I really am at the far end of the bell curve tech-wise

Sitting in the Wiki session I got the feeling that I had lapped the knowledge being given. I tried all of the free Wiki options online and found them wanting. I've been playing with a build of the actual MediaWiki server package on my home server with the intent of trying it in my classroom. Considering Wikipedia is the gold standard for Wikis online, I'm of the opinion that if we want to teach our students how to use Wikis, we should get them into the swing of using the actual Wiki markup language, not an odd hybrid of BBCode and HTML.

Regardless, my views on technology in the classroom and what can/should be used is far beyond that of your average teacher. Is this surprising? Of course not. What does it mean for me? I need to just get used to sharing what I know to other teachers. Speaking of which...

(3) It's time for me to stop griping and start sharing

The biggest thing I learned from LaCUE is that I should stop whinging about the lack of tech knowledge of my peers (Like I did during LaCUE on my Twitter feed!)and do something about it. As the school webmaster I'm professionally (and contractually!) obligated to assist in professional development of my peers. I'm already doing that in a way by presenting at our parish's ShareFair in January (Web 2.0! Let's Share!), but I need to get to work at the grass roots level.

The last session I went to was put on by the Plaquemines Parish School Board and discussed their Tech Cafe concept they use to do technology-based professional development. Rather than boring teachers with websites, long-winded blogs (Like this one!), and useless teaming meetings, the Tech Cafe concept has the in-school facilitators take a broad focus from the Central Office (Like using Excel better) and create a 30 minute session that shows teachers how to do one thing in the program and as "homework" they integrate it into a lesson and reflect on how it went. Repeat this over the school year with the whole coffee shop theme and you have a rousing success with teachers getting something tangible out of technical professional development that isn't a major drain of their free time (30 minutes every two weeks) and is on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. We're going to try it late this school year to see how it works, and if it goes like how I think it would, I could see it adopted across the district, which would be fantastic.

A New Post a Year later? Why not?

2009-12-03T19:30:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start the blog back up after a while, and for an opening shot, here's something I wrote as a Facebook note. Enjoy!

Today wasn't exactly a banner day in my life. It won't go down as one of those horrible days you remember for years on end, but today was a case where the two buttons that I can't stand being pushed were pushed and pushed hard. It took all of my constitution in one case to not bite a student's head off, but thankfully I stopped before going over the edge.

It is perhaps my biggest problem as a school teacher at a struggling school in a community that thinks someone who's mediocre is showing off by being uppity is the fact that I really have a short fuse when it comes to stupidity. I can put up with innocent ignorance, and even people who just don't get it despite their best efforts. What I can not stand are people who have the mental capacity to step up and be... normal, yet completely and utterly refuse to be competent and, in fact, go out of their way to be incompetent.

Rather than recite the litany of incidents today, I'd just point to the fact that about ten seconds after reminding my students for the third time in a two-minute span that when they come into my classroom they are to sit down and do their work, a student got up and started talking to a student across the class. When I informed them they would be receiving a minor infraction slip for being out of their seat and talking out of turn, they looked at me with a deer-in-the-headlights look.

I'm beginning to debate whether my students have figured this out and are proceeding to mash this button with glee. My cynical side says this is 100% true, but in light of how incompetent some of my students act at times, I think I would be giving them too much credit if I thought they were cunning enough to act dumb and get away with it, natch.

The other thing that really mashed my button was today's assembly, which was a giant facepalm for me. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I was raised in an Assemblies of God church, attended a (nominally) Christian school and later graduated from a (very) Christian high school, went to an evangelical Christian university for two years, and am a full voting member in an Assemblies of God church (Not to mention my mom's a licensed minister in the Assemblies!). I generally approve of the concept of church groups coming into schools and giving students a pep talk about making good choices in their life, and making the equivalent of the wrestler's advice to kids to listen to their parents, say their prayers, and take their vitamins.

So with that said, upon realising that today's assembly would be one of those, and it would be hosted by folks from the church I used to attend, I thought it would be sporting of me to toss aside my cynical nature and see how this thing would play out, since it couldn't be any worse than the semester of chapel services in high school about how premarital sex was bad, evil, etc. ... only to have our school's first pregnancy near the end of the semester. It wasn't that bad in light of that, but the same things that get stuck in my crawl when I deal with youth group culture stuck themselves in my crawl.

It wasn't the fact that the speaker said that Ernest Hemmingway wrote Invictus (Hemmingway was too manly to admit to weakness... which is why he blew his brains out!), or insinuated that Nelson Mandela got out of prison, looked around, then decided to run for president of South Africa (Ignoring that whole Apartheid thing, or the fact that he was the physical and spiritual leader of the popular resistance against the Apartheid government, but who's keeping score... other than the Social Studies teacher and the native-born South African teacher sitting next to me?), but rather the contradictory message that they sent.

The thrust of the message was that Pop Culture sends the wrong message about what is cool and what the measure success is in comparison to what being "cool" and "success" really is. In all fairness to my students, I seriously doubt any of them caught onto it, but why on earth would I listen to someone telling me to ignore pop culture when they're dressed in the latest style with the coolest glasses and the hippest haircut, and their folks in tow look like rejects from a Panic at the Disco! music video?

I may be a bit biased because I've never bought into pop culture, almost never comb my hair, and think wearing a sweater with a collared shirt underneath is edgy, but I think this is a huge problem in modern student ministries--youth leaders, in an attempt to reach our young people, go out of their way to adopt elements of the same culture they say is something you should ignore for a higher cause.

Of course, the clothes people wear and their interests aren't what makes a person (The Bible's fairly clear about that) and all that, but common sense has to come into play at some point in time and we have to look at the nonverbal things we pass onto the teenagers deal with and see if they are contradicting the words we are telling them. I'm sure someone whom I've tagged will tell me how wrong I am and how I just don't get it because I'm a sheltered curmudgeon who thinks soccer really is better than armoured catch, but I just can't buy the concept that I should be sold out for Jesus and to toss aside the things of the secular world like you when you're busy listening playing with your iPod, wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch shirt, and otherwise going out of your way to buy, wear, listen to, and watch what Pop Culture is telling you to buy, wear, listen to, and watch.

Don't know if I'm just being old and bitter, or if I'm onto something. Chances are it's just the former.

There are no Legos in Franklin

2008-11-09T15:08:00.000-08:00

Like all good nerds, I have a rather healthy affinity for Legos. They provided me with hour upon hour of entertainment and enjoyment, doing a lot to bring the little aerospace engineer out in me. There is something unique about a pile of Lego bricks that can bring almost anyone to a standstill. I remember being in Germany at an office building and in the waiting room there was a bowl of Lego bricks. The temptation proved to be too much and I was soon digging in working on a bridge. I was rather perturbed when the receptionist told me that it was time for my appointment; I mean, didn't she see my bridge wouldn't be complete without a car to cross it?

Lego and MD Escher? Nerd Nirvana!

The company itself is one that I truly like. The magazine Fast Company wrote an article on the company back in 2001 that remains one of my all time favourite magazine articles. In discussing the Danish company's trouble with coming to grips with the New Economy, the author offers wonderful insights regarding what makes Lego Lego. To me, the money quote which has stuck with me for almost seven years now is the following:

The only thing more vivid for Lego than the bricks and the history are what are known universally within the company as "Lego values." Not just the importance of free-form play. No Lego-designed toys are allowed to portray weapons from the 20th century ... Long before the invention of software, Lego made all of its toys backward compatible. Bricks produced in 2001 work seamlessly with bricks from 1971. And every toy that Lego offers -- even the simplest ones, given away with McDonald's Happy Meals -- requires construction, the touch of a child.

There's so much in there for me as a teacher to read into. Especially in my writing class, free-form thinking and the personal touch are both things that I am striving to do. Don't tell anyone, but I have a backup plan for days when my students are showing a lack of creativity. I'll just dump a bucket of bricks on the floor and tell them to have at it. If I have to I'll lead the way. It isn't as though they're too old to play with Legos. Heck, corporations play good money to let their employees play with Legos...

But enough about the wonder of Legos and their role in the education process; this past week I finally got around to unpacking some of my things that have been sitting in boxes since I moved over here in August. Among them are my Star Wars Lego set that I bought and built when I was in high school. Now, don't get any funny ideas about me being some sort of antisocial Star Wars nerd that can quote the movie or anything; my collection of Star Wars Lego sets is actually a result of a local K-Mart shutting down during the 2000-2002 time frame and me having plenty of disposable income. As a result I have a nice stash of Lego sets that I had on a shelf in my room doing nothing but collecting dust. Unfortunately there are no shelves here in this house, so in the boxes they sat.

But on Wednesday I was digging for something when I found my Lego sets. In a fit of sympathy I grabbed a can of canned air and gave them all a good dusting. In the course of doing so I had a bit of memory lane-itis. I suddenly had the compulsion to build a Lego set for no apparent reason. I think subconsciously that I was looking for a way to reignite my creativity because in the previous week I really felt as thought my creativity had been tapped out. I was working on a lesson plan and sat at the sheet of paper for 45 minutes without a single spark to go on. I was really in a funk after my students freaked out over a question on one of my quizzes that was specifically designed to stretch their critical thinking skills. I needed something to kickstart my creativity--and fast.

So I headed down to our wonderful Walmart and went a-searching for a Lego set. Nothing too big, but definitely something Star Wars-related as I had been watching the Clone Wars episodes on Friday evenings and some of the designs had intrigued the engineer in me. So I got through the claustrophobic spaces until I got to the toy department. I stated wandering through the aisles looking for the Legos. Surely they were here somewhere. I searched high and low until I came to the ghastly conclusion: they had no Lego sets on the shelves!

This was positively un-American (Well, really un-Danish, considering Lego's Danish roots, but for once I won't let facts get in the way of a good panic attack.) and really a commentary on how I feel this place is out of touch with the rest of the world at times. I've commented several times about how this Walmart has nothing, up to and including a lack of office supplies, but something as ubiquitous as Legos just stuns me. It wasn't as though there was empty shelves where one would say "Eh, we're all sold out!" as an excuse for this. There was literally no shelf space for the products at all. I'm just dumbfounded that the store wouldn't have any space for the essential children's toy. I mean, what's next, no computer games of note in the electronics department? Oh wait...

Until next time. Hopefully I'll have a shelf with my Lego sets proudly displaying my nerdiness by then.

Road Trip!

2008-10-06T17:09:00.000-07:00

When asked by people if he was ever lost in the virgin wilderness of the United States, frontiersman Daniel Boone always replied "I was never lost, but on a couple of occasions I was a mite confused for several days." I like to think I'm a bit like that. If I'm ever plopped in the woods with a map and compass, I can get my way out with ease. Need to get to Eagle Rock, Missouri from Gueydan and don't want to take the Interstate highways as little as possible? I'm your man. Driving in a city like Houston, Dallas, Memphis, or Hamburg, Germany? I can stumble around pretty confidently until I get a feel for the town enough to pretend like I'm a local.

What gives me the heebie-jeebies are smaller cities. I've been slightly more than "a mite confused" in places like Mobile, Shreveport, and most embarrassingly Gelsenkirchen, Germany (Think of a city slightly smaller than Shreveport) when I was there for the 2006 World Cup. I had a fellow reporter with me heading for the Portugal-Mexico match (I got my blogging debut reporting on the World Cup from a US perspective for a German newspaper), and I assured the reporter, a native German from Munich that I could get us the 18 miles from the Essen airport to the Veltins-Arena for the match. An hour later we still weren't there as we took the scenic route there. Of course, I guess it isn't too much of a thing to blush about considering I'm not a native, but all I had to do was stay on the Autobahn and take a single exit. Yikes.

So when I was advised by several people to go to Houma to get away from here this past Saturday, it wasn't without a bit of anxiety. On the surface, the place seems straight-forward, and people wondered why I was so anxious about it. "You can't get lost!" they would assure me. I tried to explain my problems with modest-sized towns, but they didn't listen. Now don't get me wrong. I wasn't afraid to go. I was positively buzzed about the concept of heading out to somewhere new, especially without my parents being in on it. My parents are pretty protective of their little wunderkind, so this was a chance for me to escape and do something grown-up for a change. I studied maps and readied my GPS and laptop. I wasn't going to get lost. I was going to prove myself wrong.

So I hopped into my car and headed out. The first thing for me to confront was my fear of high bridges. Though I had worked in Southeast Louisiana on several sites, I had always either flown in via helicopter or went around through New Orleans, so I had completely forgotten about the Atchafalaya River Bridge in Morgan City. Now bridges and I have an odd relationship. I love the design of bridges and their aesthetic qualities, but I absolutely loathe crossing them. I usually sit there quietly intensely focused on the road ahead of me, which makes for fun when I'm riding with people, as they try to get me to look at the sights from the top of the bridge. When I drive, I tend to be clever and just get across it as fast as I can on the inside lane. One of these days I'm going to be pulled over for speeding and I'm going to have to explain that I don't like bridges to an incredulous police officer.

Pretty...but I don't like crossing it.

So after surviving the bridge, I zipped down the fairly-empty highway until I got outside Houma. I took the exit like I was told and followed the winding road until I got to the traffic light I was told to turn at. I followed the directions until I found civilization. At the traffic light everything suddenly seemed unfamiliar compared to what I remember how it was described, so I decided to take the safe route and go straight into the mall. What could go wrong from there?

So I went into the mall and begin to wander about, looking to spend some cash, since this was why I was here after all. Too bad everywhere I went there was nothing for me to buy. No nifty ties, no new running shoes, no computer games (I've preordered them all), and definitely no sports apparel I would purchase (Me? Buy LSU gear? I'd just as soon throw the money in the trash!), much less soccer gear, and no movies either (I was searching for the complete set of Horatio Hornblower movies shown on A&E over the years to no avail, but I did find it on Amazon for $33. I win!). Undeterred, I decided to find the rest of the Houma shopping experience to get myself a new pair of running shoes at Academy. That's when the fun began.

I got onto the boulevard and headed north, assuming this was the way to go, but after a couple of miles and seeing nothing but building after building in an early stage of urban decay, I figured something was amiss. I turned around and headed south down the boulevard. I passed the mall up and once again something was wrong. I turned around and passed the mall again, turning on what seemed to be a new boulevard. That proved to be a bad idea, and I was soon winding my way blindly through a series of subdivisions until I spilled back onto the boulevard. I was quite frustrated at this time because I truly was a mite confused at this stage. Everything was supposedly on a single road, yet I couldn't find it. In my exasperation at a traffic light I decided to follow the traffic and alas! There it was!

I was taking the scenic route, honest!

I was so giddy to have stumbled upon the shopping centres I almost got ~~lost~~ a mite confused again trying to turn left. I managed to get that out of the way and the rest was history. I wandered about in a lot of storing seeing nothing in particular, apart from Academy where I did buy a new pair of running shoes, albeit not the ones I was looking for because no one could be bothered to help me out. That perturbed me to no end; though my perturbation was short-lived as I was sitting down to eat lunch when someone tapped my shoulder. I turned to see a little girl wearing a soccer kit smiling at me in an extremely nervous manner, as though she had spent some time working up enough courage just to tap my shoulder.

"Do you like soccer?"

"Uh... Yes! Yes I do." I said a bit shocked.

"Cool. I do too! I had to ask because I saw you wearing a soccer jersey like I am!"

I looked down and remembered I had indeed dressed up to go to town, if you will. I was sporting my PSV Endhoven shirt I had picked up the last time I was in Holland.

Hup de Boern! (Up the Farmers! [The nickname PSV supporters call themselves])

"Why yes I am. I assume you play soccer?" I had to ask.

"Yes! I love soccer! I play it on Saturday mornings and afternoons, and I watch it at night! I love watching David Beckham and the LA Galaxy! They're my favorite!"

I didn't have the heart to tell her that the Galaxy were rather pants and that she should support a proper MLS side like the Houston Dynamo. I mean, she had to be ten at the oldest!

By then her mom chimed in and apologized for her daughter interrupting my lunch. She told me her daughter absolutely loves soccer and had been staring at me since I walked into the restaurant, specifically because I was wearing a soccer jersey. Apparently not too many guys wear soccer jerseys around there, so this was something she had to find out about. I waved aside any protestations and told them how I grew up watching soccer from Europe and had even been to several big club matches in Europe, and most recently been at the World Cup in 2006 writing for a newspaper.

They left soon after, but I was extremely pleased by the situation, as all too often supporters of European soccer sneer at women's soccer. As I stated on a message board this evening, I was extremely happy for this little exchange because it's what soccer really is all about here in the States. It doesn't belong solely to the expats and immigrants, or the cool hipsters that pack the pubs in New York because the Barclays Premier League is the latest fad, nor does it belong solely to the suburban soccer moms who see it as play time for their kids. It belongs to all of us, and it's something we should be excited to find common ground with wherever we go, not something to dismiss with snide comments just because it doesn't fit within our narrow definition of what we think the game is and should be.

The happiness was unfortunately short-lived for as I was walking around Target doing some people-watching I became quite depressed. Why you ask? Simple. Everyone was walking around with their families, friends, and/or people of romantic interest, yet I was walking around alone. As usual, my emotions can't let me be for long, and I quickly became morose at the concept that I would soon be heading back to Franklin to an empty house with nothing to do. There would be no friends calling to hang out, no one to ask how my day was, and especially no one to ask me about things I like for once.

I was disgusted by this turn of events, and the whole way home I wondered why those feelings would come up suddenly. Was I jealous of these people? Probably so. But that didn't mean I had to toss aside the enjoyment I had getting out of the house and doing something new for a change. Something has to give when it comes to me dealing with loneliness. I'm not sure if I can handle this much longer. I think I'll expound on this some more, but not for now.

Mars is a Third World Country

2008-09-22T19:10:00.000-07:00

From the beginning of this blog I've wanted to have a positive outlook in my blog posts. People write blogs all the time where all they do is whinge and complain about things, and I didn't want to do that. That isn't to say that I didn't want to say anything negative--because to look at life with rose-coloured glasses is just as bad as always whinging--but when possible I wanted to take a view that things could and would get better. In other words, always look on the bright side of life.

Unfortunately, this is something I can't just gloss over.

The whole punch line regarding this blog is the fact that Franklin is very different from the environment that I grew up in, which is odd considering I grew up in pretty small towns. As amusing as it is at times, it's also extremely frustrating. If you remember back in my Hurricane Gustav Lessons Learned post, I was pretty blunt in my criticism of the town of Franklin's communication skills regarding the post-Gustav situation. Unfortunately, they haven't been reading my blog, so they haven't learned their lesson.

Since I got back from Gustav, I've noticed the water tasted funnier than unusual. Now after my first drink of Franklin's water I went to Walmart and picked up a water filter pitcher and have enjoyed crisp and clean drinking and cooking water ever since. However this time the taste, which was quite saline in nature, was seeping through the filter. "It couldn't have been from the storm surge..." I pondered since, after all, there was no storm surge because we were on the western side of the storm when Gustav made landfall. Then came Ike, and the water was simply salty. Not quite sea water-tasting, but it was apparent that the town's water source was contaminated by salt water. Did I get any news regarding this? Of course not. I did get a letter telling me that they found chloroforms in water samples. According to the letter they were found twice. But since they didn't find it in the third test, everything was A-OK. Gee, so comforting.

At school we received several cases of drinking water to hand out to the students if they were thirsty rather than use the water fountains. I thought that was nice and all, but what about us? Was the town going to let us know what was going on? A letter? An announcement on the news? The Newspaper? As I pondered this as the days went by, I went back to my parents and gathered 50 gallons of water from their water well that was not inundated by salt water for me to use. I guess I was one of the lucky ones.

On a whim, I decided to look at the website of the local paper, the Franklin Banner-Tribune and lo and behold, a news story about the water quality issues. Apparently water is available for me to get for drinking purposes. I wonder how long it would have taken for the town to let me know? Heck, I bet there's people here in town who still don't know they can get fresh water from a distribution site. Sucks to be them is what I guess the town's opinion on the matter seems to be.

This lack of communication by the government and the resultant acceptance of mediocrity by the citizenry infuriates me to no end. Like I've stated on several occasions, I didn't grow up in a big city, but the expectations I have of my local government as well as my view on progress and success is such that this sort of behaviour is simply unacceptable. Because of the storms and buying a new car, I haven't had a chance to get out and ride about and get a feel for St. Mary Parish, so I wasn't sure if this was a Franklin thing or a St. Mary Parish thing.

Today I was at the Six Traits of Writing seminar at the School Board office (I had an absolutely stupendous time, reinforcing what I've known about the six [plus one] traits of writing as well as some fun writing exercises. Kudos to the folks who put it on!) and during lunch I started up a conversation with a teacher who was at Project STAY with me. It started with me discussing where I was from and quickly turned to the culture of St. Mary Parish, as she was born and raised here. I described to her what I stated above and she quickly let me know that my fears of the parish being mired in complacency with inefficiency if not outright ineptitude in some cases being the norm. She was quick to point out that some places they pride themselves that, according to her "their ineptness is much more efficient that other places around here." It made me laugh and whimper at once.

Great. It's not just a Franklin problem. It was reassuring to find someone who was born and raised here that's in my age bracket that lives here with the same views on how things should be done (If you're reading this Dr. Chet, typing that phrase made me think of Lenin's pamphlet "What is to be Done?" which we talked about all the time in the 20th Century Russia class. Even though you're a freakin' Commie, I still love you and your Hawai'ian shirts Dr. Chet!) but the fear is that the majority of folks here don't think this way, and since they're the majority, we're stuck with the same people running the government. Le sigh.

I didn't need to go any further for an example than the report from the monthly council meeting where an engineer scoffed about the concept of putting floodgates to shut the Franklin Canal in times of tidal flooding as not a good option because "We'll have the same protection we have now, and that is 6 feet. The levees that surround our community are about a 6-foot elevation. We had a 7-foot tidal surge." I suppose limiting the storm surge to only a foot of water coming into the town rather than allow a seven foot surge pour through a fifty-feet wide gap in the levee system right into the centre of town would be a good idea to him. No need to change if the untenable situation requires innovative solutions it seems. And based on the rest of the report, no one argued with him either. Hmpf.

This situation isn't just exclusive to here, as it's endemic across Louisiana all the way up to the State Capitol building. Governor Jindal and Co. seem to be trying their best to change things, but to expound on an idea presented by my geography professors, essentially Louisiana is stuck being a Third World Country for the most part.

Now I can hear the screams from here already. "But we're in America! We have all the perks of the Western World! There's no way we can be Third World!" But think about this; if we were to take Louisiana's location on the map out of the equation and look at the basics, the similarities are all too clear. A state with depressed per capita incomes and education levels compared to normal, a single primate city, a single major state university with a disproportionate amount of the state education budget that uses political influence to keep its financial and educational status secure, endemic political corruption veering in isolated cases to outright kleptocracy, and an economy that is centred on the extraction of natural resources and agriculture. It isn't Guinea-Bissau we're talking about, but unfortunately Louisiana.

This is rather depressing really, and I know there isn't much I by myself can do about it, especially since the best and brightest usually figure this out in a hurry and leave in equally hurried fashion, leaving us here to fight it out with the mediocre-lovers, but unlike others, I'm a teacher, and I can impact so many more than a normal person because I can show my students that the status quo isn't acceptable and it's OK to demand more than what's expected. Can I create an army of reformers? Who knows. I have the attention of four students so far, so that's a start.

The Hurricane Ike LiveBlog, Part 3

2008-09-13T06:51:00.001-07:00

The Hurricane Ike LiveBlog, Part 2

2008-09-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

Q: What happens when you stick a teacher with penchants for amateur weather forecasting and writing in his house with nothing to do as a tropical system attempts to make landfall in the area?

A: This LiveBlog, of course. *groans from the audience*

Yes, yours truly will be LiveBlogging Hurricane Ike over the course of today, giving you information, analysis, and really anything that pops up in my mind as Hurricane Ike takes aim at the Upper Texas Coast. Yours truly is sitting comfortably in Teaching on Mars HQ (Read: The back bedroom/office of my house) here in the middle of Franklin. Check back in throughout the day to see the posts updated with new information.

Important Links to keep an eye on this weekend:

KATC TV3
Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness
National Weather Service- Lake Charles Office
National Hurricane Center

1725: The National Weather Service has just issued a Tornado Warning for western St. Mary, Iberia, and southeastern Lafayette Parishes. The text went as follows:

* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
NORTHWESTERN IBERIA PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
THIS INCLUDES...NEW IBERIA...JEANERETTE...
EXTREME SOUTHEASTERN LAFAYETTE PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
WEST CENTRAL ST. MARTIN PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
THIS INCLUDES ST. MARTINVILLE...
WESTERN ST. MARY PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
THIS INCLUDES...FRANKLIN...BURNS POINT...
EXTREME NORTHEASTERN VERMILION PARISH IN SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA...

* UNTIL 545 PM CDT

* AT 510 PM CDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM CAPABLE OF PRODUCING A TORNADO 9 MILES EAST OF
BURNS POINT...MOVING NORTHWEST AT 69 MPH.

* THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR...
FRANKLIN BY 525 PM CDT...
BALDWIN AND 6 MILES SOUTHWEST OF CHARENTON BY 530 PM CDT...
JEANERETTE BY 535 PM CDT...
NEW IBERIA AND LYDIA BY 540 PM CDT...
7 MILES SOUTH OF ST. MARTINVILLE BY 545 PM CDT...

Rather than be a sensible person and go to a secure room with no windows, I went to my front door and peeked out. I didn't see anything and upon getting back to my computer I saw the squall was passing on the South end of town. Thankfully no visible tornado, but this is the beginning of a rather large rain band that stretches the length of the coastline all the way down past Point au Fer Island in southwest Terrebonne Parish and into the Gulf of Mexico. The squall is moving to the northwest at 69 mph, so if anything can be positive to come out of it, it'll be over quickly.

Weather Conditions: Winds from the southeast at around 32 mph, gusting up to 48 mph. Precipitation in the form of squally showers.

1800: I have to give it to my cable network. They break in on any channel you're watching and put it on the Weather Channel, sound an annoying siren sound effect, and announce that there's a Tornado Warning. Since I'm here at my PC, I just hop over to the National Weather Service tab that I have open in Firefox to see what's up. Half of the time the warning they're announcing for us doesn't even involve Franklin, but it's nice to know that they care. The following warning just popped up:

* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
NORTHWESTERN IBERIA PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
THIS INCLUDES...NEW IBERIA...JEANERETTE...
EXTREME SOUTHEASTERN LAFAYETTE PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
WEST CENTRAL ST. MARTIN PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
THIS INCLUDES ST. MARTINVILLE...
NORTHWESTERN ST. MARY PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
THIS INCLUDES FRANKLIN...
EXTREME NORTHEASTERN VERMILION PARISH IN SOUTHWEST LOUISIANA...

* UNTIL 615 PM CDT

* AT 544 PM CDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM CAPABLE OF PRODUCING A TORNADO NEAR
JEANERETTE...MOVING NORTHWEST AT 63 MPH.

That was an interesting warning , putting us in Franklin at the tail end of the Warning quadrilateral when the cell was ten miles to the northeast of us. I'm not complaining though. Better safe than sorry.

Weather Conditions: Winds from the southeast at around 32 mph, gusting up to 41 mph. Precipitation in the form of squally showers varying in intensity.

1805: Another ten minute stretch, another Tornado Warning:

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN LAKE CHARLES HAS ISSUED A

* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
NORTHEASTERN IBERIA PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
SOUTHEASTERN ST. MARTIN PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
THIS INCLUDES STEPHENSVILLE...
ST. MARY PARISH IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA...
THIS INCLUDES...PATTERSON...MORGAN CITY...BERWICK...BAYOU VISTA...

* UNTIL 630 PM CDT

* AT 549 PM CDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED
SEVERAL POSSIBLE TORNADOES ACROSS ST. MARY AND LOWER ST. MARTIN
PARISHES...WITH THE BEST INDICATION JUST NORTH OF PATTERSON. ALL
WERE MOVING NORTHWEST AT 50 MPH.

* THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR...
RURAL NORTHEASTERN IBERIA PARISH AT 610 PM CDT
RURAL NORTHERN ST. MARY PARISH AT 610 PM CDT
RURAL CENTRAL ST. MARTIN PARISH AT 610 PM CDT
RURAL NORTHERN IBERIA PARISH AT 620 PM CDT

Weather Conditions: Winds from the southeast at around 35 mph, gusting up to 41 mph. Precipitation in the form of squally showers varying in intensity.

1925: The squall line that produced the tornado warnings during the past hour continues, but now it's shifted a bit to the north, with most of the squalls over the Atchafalaya Basin. This leaves us in Franklin in a bit of a gap between the squalls that form the body of Ike and this big rain band. The winds continue to blow, but the rain has stopped for the time being. Here's the weather situation based on the NWS radar out of Lake Charles (I'm in the southeast corner in Franklin):

Weather Conditions: Winds from the southeast at around 35 mph, gusting up to 41 mph. Precipitation in the form of squally showers, but they have slacked off in the last 15 minutes.

2020: I've been peeking around for any news on the Cypriot freighter that was stranded between Port Arthur and Galveston that was going to have to ride out Ike at sea, and I was able to find an update: According to the Houston Chronicle, the ship, the Antalina, was still afloat this afternoon, and the US Coast Guard actually attempted a rescue, but had to turn back due to deteriorating conditions, stated in the article to be 20 ft seas, 90 mph winds, and visibility down to 0.5 miles. Yikes.

This of course is a rather unfortunate situation, but the question comes up about whether these guys actually watched the weather before setting out. Nowadays getting caught at sea in a hurricane can virtually always be blamed on human error based on the amount of weather information that's at a ship captain's fingertips.

This wasn't always the case, as was evidenced by the US Navy's run in with a Typhoon in the Philippines Sea in December 1944. By all indications Typhoon Cobra had maximum sustained winds of 145 mph and tore through Admiral Bull Halsey's Carrier Task Force. Three destroyers, the USS Spence, Hull, and Monaghan were sunk, and the light aircraft carrier USS Monterey had to fight several fires caused by aircraft coming loose and crashing in the hangars due to the wave action. These fires were put our through sheer determination led by several of the junior officers, including the future President of the United States Gerald Ford.

This wasn't the US Navy's only run-in with hurricanes. In fact, the US Navy has had its ships dealing with hurricanes almost from the beginning. A great website recapping these accounts is the FAQ page at the Naval Historical Center's website. Among other works of literature worth checking out if this has piqued your interest would be The Thirteen-gun Salute, a magnificent work in the Aubrey-Maturin series written by Patrick O'Brian, Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, the final book in the Horatio Hornblower saga by CS Forester, and if you're in the mood for some dense but engaging nonfiction, I can heartily recommend Stephen Taylor's Storm and Conquest: The Clash of Empires in the Eastern Seas, 1809 (Review of the Paperback edition released a year ago in the UK). I listened to the audiobook edition of the book, and Taylor's account of the cyclones that struck the East India Fleet were perhaps the most chillingly dramatic prose I have ever read or listened to. Fantastic stuff, but not for everyone.

Weather Conditions: Winds from the east-southeast at around 35 mph, gusting up to 45 mph. Precipitation in the form of squally showers, which have just started back up. A cell that just raced by Franklin began to rotate, and as a result the National Weather Service released a Tornado Warning for it.

2100: The National Weather Service in Lake Charles has had a blog up and running for Hurricane Ike all day it seems, but too bad they only decided to advertise it in the past 30 minutes. Check it out by following this link. In addition, if you're in the mood to catch the reports of storm damage, storm surge, tornadoes, and all of the other fun stuff that accompanies a hurricane, the National Weather Service also has their Storm Report text reports up and running too. Just follow the link. As of this moment, the latest report is of hurricane-force wind gusts at the NOS tide station in Cameron. Yikes.

Weather Conditions: Winds from the east-southeast still around 35 mph, still gusting up to 45 mph on occasion. Precipitation in the form of squally showers, which have just slacked off.

2130: I decided to pass along some of my information about the winds to the National Weather Service. It was rather surreal to call the NWS office at 9:15PM and get the automated attendant. Even stranger was to dial the forecaster's extension and someone actually pick up the phone. A nice conversation ensued and I passed along the information about the 48 mph gust we had here in town I mentioned in the 1725 report. I asked him about the storm surge forecast for here and he said that they're expecting an 8ft storm surge at the coast, and possibly expect some backwater flooding from the Teche in portions of town because of the intrustion of the storm surge. That's what I figured, so that makes me feel a lot better.

One quick link: I was looking for contact information on the NWS Lake Charles website and I found a cool, if sombering link. Here is the radar imagery of the debris plume from the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia back in 2003.

Weather Conditions: Winds from the east-southeast around 35 mph, gusting up to 40 mph on occasion. Precipitation in the form of squally showers, slacked off about 20 minutes ago.

2200: Last entry for the evening. The 2200 advisory is out for Ike, and the motion and speed remains the same, but the wind speed has changed: Ike now has maximum sustained winds at 110 mph, the same speed that Gustav's winds made at landfall twelve days ago. The coordinates put Ike 54 miles southeast of Galveston Island, and if Ike continues on this path, landfall will be on Galveston Island approximately 6 miles northeast of St. Luis Pass.

As for here in Franklin, we still aren't seeing a lot of rain as compared to what Lafayette and New Iberia are seeing, but the body of Ike has passed to the west enough that we are now between two feeder bands rather than a feeder band and the storm itself. This trend from the long range radars looks like it might continue for a while, so we may be spared heavy rainfall until at least tomorrow. Unfortunately, crunch time is on the horizon for us here in Franklin as the wind is about to switch to the South, and with it the storm surge. High tide is expected just after midnight, so we'll see what happens.

Weather Conditions: Winds from the south-southeast around 40 mph, gusting up to 45 mph on occasion. Precipitation in the form of squally showers, one of which just blew through as I was typing this update.

The Hurricane Ike LiveBlog, Part 1

2008-09-12T06:23:00.001-07:00

Fun and Frivolity? Well, not Really

2008-09-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

OK, so I said I was going to inject some fun and frivolity into this here blog last night, but alas, it just wasn't to be. That's not to say that I haven't been the recipient of good news. On the other hand, my long personal nightmare has ended with the purchase of a new car!

You see, once upon a time there was a young teacher named Loren who had a car that belonged to his great-grandmother. Now this wasn't any car driven by an octogenarian. No sir. It was a Ford Escort ZX2. Yeah, that's right, a compact car with a Zetec 4-cylinder dual overhead cam engine. Perfect for the kind of lady who shuffled about with a walker and hadn't had a driver's license since Ronald Reagan's first term (Something we found out after a bit of investigation).

My first car (Well, the same make/model/color, at least)

Anywho, after the odometer hit 120,000, the engine began showing signs of its impending doom, so I went to the car salesman my family deals with at Service Chevrolet in Lafayette and came home with a 2004 Ford Taurus with only 27,000 miles... on my 24th birthday of all days!

My Taurus, on the afternoon that I bought it.

It was the perfectly boring car for what I considered to be a perfectly boring person. After all, I'm by most accounts a person without much of a sense of style. I eschew T-Shirts with not-very-vaguely suggestive slogans for $35 at the cookie-cutter "stylish" store at the mall for an Arsenal or Houston Dynamo T-shirt. Rico Suave I am not.

Regardless, the Taurus proved to be a pretty reliable car. It took me to work and back home, and back to work and back home, and back to wor... OK, you get the picture. It also took me on my little adventures, ranging from Houston for Dynamo matches, to New Orleans on several occasions when I did work for the Corps of Engineers, to Memphis (twice) for my brother, to southern Missouri for a conference. All this time I was piling on miles for a car that was plummeting in value since Ford decided to discontinue it. It was even hit in August 2007 by someone who drove into our yard, doing $2500 worth of body damage to the passenger side of the car. It was fixed with no problems and was back to the daily commute just like normal. Then the wheels fell off (no pun intended) one February 2008 morning.

I had just passed 80,000 miles when I was on my way to work to meet my dad at his office. I stopped at the 4-way stop where LA 343 crosses LA 342. I stopped at the stop sign, and in the middle of the intersection the RPMs shot up and the car stopped pulling. I coasted to a stop and contacted my dad. We pulled it to an empty lot and a tow truck picked it up. The car dealership gave me the bad news: The transmission simply broke. No warning. No stress. Just the drive train shearing off where it met the transmission. $3400 later I was back in business, albeit with a worthless car. It got more worthless in May when I had to plonk down $800 to replace an air conditioning system that once again died without any sort of warning. Over and over my mom reminded me how I should have never bought a Ford, despite being wowed by the Taurus when I bought it.

So by the beginning of June I was in the hunt for a new car. Despite the high gas prices I was in the market for a small SUV. If I was to get a new car it would need more payload than the Taurus, which was becoming a pain when I had to transport stuff to go camping or I need to bring stuff. Nothing really piqued my interest as far as SUVs went so I started peeking around at all-wheel drive station wagons like the Subaru Outback or even a Volvo XC70. My ~~weird~~ different tastes proved to make my search for one of these cars extremely difficult, since the closest I could find a used one was in Houston, and who was going to drive 200 miles for a used station wagon, much less when the car you wanted to trade in was essentially worthless?

After much fruitless searching I decided to visit my family's car salesman at Service again in July, and fell in love with a 2007 Chevy Equinox with only 12,000 miles. Before I knew it I was talking to the loan officer at the dealership who unfortunately could only offer me a $400/month note over 72 months. Something that I couldn't afford, even on as massive of a salary as new teacher gets *chortle*. I slumped out of the dealership that afternoon wondering if I would ever be able to get rid of this car that was quickly becoming a millstone around my neck. But at least I knew if I couldn't get a station wagon, a crossover wouldn't be out of the question.

So for the next six weeks I kept my eyes open for deals and kicked plenty of tires around dealerships in the Acadiana area. The end result of all of these was the same: I walked away disgusted after either not finding anything I wanted or the blood-sucking car salesmen (and -woman, whom I met at Musson-Patout in New Iberia that was simply incapable of driving a golf cart, much less provide a hassle-free car buying experience.) would drive me away. It came to a crescendo on Wednesday when Hampton Toyota showed a commercial advertising 2007 Mitsubishi Outlanders for $179 a month. Of course, the post-Hurricane crawls hid the fine print, but it piqued my interest enough to go take another look.

Only $179 a month!

When my mom and I got there, we looked around the used car lot to no avail until a salesman came running up trying to drum up a sale. The poor fellow gave me a sad tale about how he lived across the street in the trailer park that still had no power, but the gracious boss was letting him shower in his office at the showroom. He stumbled through my questions about the Toyota Highlander and Honda Element I was looking at until I told him I wanted to see the Outlanders. I was impressed by the car's features but (once again) I was only looking for a price. As we walked into the showroom he gleefully told me how they are stretching out car loans for seven or even eight years. That flew up enough flags to grace the front of the United Nations, but I said nothing. He complied with my request of a price quote and gave me a monthly note of $439/month for a 5 year note. I pressed why I wasn't being offered the $179/month note offered on TV, and he couldn't give me an answer. In typical German style I calmly told him good day and ripped up his business card, dropping it in the wastebasket at the door in front of everyone.

I was supremely disgusted with the whole process of buying a car, but on Friday morning my mom told me that we should stop by Service Chevrolet to see if there were any SUVs that would pique my interest. I sheepishly agreed and we went back to Lafayette. When we got there there was nothing as usual, but in the back of the lot there was a Chevy Equinox sitting there. I hopped out of the car to see the price (Service Chevrolet is one of those strange dealerships that actually puts the cost of a car on the window!), but unfortunately there was no price. A salesman asked if he could help me and I told him I was interested in seeing the price of the Equinox, but before he went into the office I told him who was our salesman. Well, our salesman was standing right there and he was happy to see me again. We chatted about me teaching until I reminded him I need the price of the Equinox. He went in and came right back out with the keys to the car, telling me it was a 2005 model with 23,000 miles. The list price was $15,000 but he could get me in it for $12,500. I blinked twice when he told me that. He offered to get me a loan quote whilst I took it for a spin. My mom and I hopped in and were shocked to see how clean it was, much less the fact that it had leather seats! Leather! Seats! Leather!

I remembered how I fell in love with the Equinox back in July and decided right then and there to go home with it. I drove it around Lafayette for about 20 minutes or so before I returned to Service. The loan officer smiled when he offered me a pretty good rate and monthly note, along with an extremely favourable trade-in for my Taurus, now with almost 99,000 miles. He couldn't get the papers on the desk fast enough for me to sign, and two hours after I pulled onto the lot, I was driving off with a new car with ridiculously low mileage, more room to tote stuff around and leather seats!

My new car (Yes, it's raining when I took the picture)

Once again, my family's salesman and Service Chevrolet come through in the clutch with a great deal to put me in a car. I couldn't be happier.

See you tomorrow.

Hurricane Gustav: My Lessons Learned

2008-09-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure everyone on this end of Acadiana is already way-past-tired of Hurricane Gustav coverage, much less bracing for the possibility of Hurricane Ike, but I just can't resist one last post about Gustav. Any good professional will tell you that a good professional (Hmm... circular argument!) will debrief after a major operation to find out what went right...and what went wrong. So without further ado, some points about surviving the (latest) tropical system.

(1) Communication from the government was fantastic! Well, almost...

Unlike the farce that was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana finally got themselves into some semblance of order in terms of information dissemination. Governor Bobby Jindal's daily press conferences were incredibly long-winded and seemed almost off-the-cuff on a couple of occasions, but they were rich in concrete information. Compared to the "Oh gee, I'm so bad off! Look at my sad face!" that was the typical press conference by my duck-hunting buddy, El Jefe gets kudos from me.

Who doesn't get kudos from me is St. Mary parish in general and the city of Franklin in particular. It was quite discomforting to see parish-after-parishs' OHSEPs report on their respective infrastructures on the news, only to hear nothing about where I live. I'll give the parish government and OHSEP a pass to a limited extent that the parish was smacked pretty hard by the storm, so an immediate report would be difficult to get out. It is, however, completely unacceptable to hear no news from media outlets almost 96 hours after Gustav's landfall about when I could return to my home. The sad truth is that I only found out when I could return home from my principal, who told me it had been OK since early on Wednesday. If I was waiting for an all clear from my city government to be broadcast on local media, I'd still be stuck at my parents' home. During states of emergency, communication of facts to the general population is paramount to mitigate damage and hasten recovery, and the city of Franklin did very little of that.

(2) I need to work on my evacuation skills.

I must admit that I generally don't heed mandatory evacuation orders. Part of this is because my parents generally don't heed them, and being their child meant I had to follow their lead. This all changed back in 2005 when I was volunteered by my grandmother to work for our town's OHSEP. This of course threw me into the maelstrom that was Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and gave me some experiences that I wouldn't have experienced otherwise. This of course meant that when storms were contemplating which section of the Gulf of Mexico to maraud, I had to stay put. It never got too bad (The worst we got with Rita was 90 mph+ sustained winds) and I never lost anything from a storm, so I guess it was all OK. This time I decided to bail since I was planning on spending Labor Day weekend with my parents, and Gustav was headed for southeast instead of southwest Louisiana. I thought I had packed only my essential/irreplaceable stuff, but that left my car completely full. At least I had my essential things (Identification, lease, school data, etc.), but I still brought too much fluff with me.

I think it would be a wise investment for me to get some heavy-duty storage containers (Some oilfield-surplus storage boxes would suffice) and just pack stuff in them. They're sturdy enough to withstand heavy-duty winds, watertight, and heavy enough to not float away in a worst-case scenario of a large storm surge. Though with that said I just don't have the space at my current location to store them. So I guess for the rest of this hurricane season I'll stick to tossing stuff in my car.

(3) I need to bite the bullet and get my amateur radio license.

Yeah, so my nerd quotient would hit the ionosphere, but getting my technician's license along with a good dual-band 2-meter/10 cm set has been a goal of mine for quite a while. In case you don't know, Ham Radio operators provide invaluable communication services during times of emergency through ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service). I met a couple of local ARES folks after Hurricane Katrina and I was so impressed with the work they were capable of doing I told myself I would bite the bullet and become a Ham operator myself. Hurricane Rita threw a spanner in the works for diving right in, and it's been three years and now two (possibly three by this time next week) hurricanes and I'm still not there. It'll take some cash to get going, but at least I'll be of some use in times of emergency to someone.

(4) I need to get back into the OHSEP volunteer business.

If volunteering for Gueydan's OHSEP taught me one thing, it was that being in the thick of things in a time of emergency is far better than sitting in a house with nothing to do but watch the newscasters go over the same six bits of information for days at at time. So I'm in a new town with slightly bigger ambitions than our setup (It was the mayor, the police chief, the fire chief, and myself sitting in the basement of the city hall with a couple of TVs, two office PCs and my laptop, and two telephones), but it's a chance to do something really important in times of real need. I've considered going ahead and diving in, but it seems Hurricane Ike wants me to wait until after he passes. Oh well, who am I to argue with a tropical cyclone?

One last thing, in my LiveBlog of Gustav I hinted at a quick and dirty summary of Gustav based on my experiences with riding out tropical systems in the past. Well, I was at my grandmother's old house on Wednesday washing clothes and I got tired of playing Hearts and Freecell on my laptop, so I put my laptop to good use. If you're in the mood for some boring weather talk, you can check out my Quick and Dirty Summary of Hurricane Gustav based on my personal observations. If anything, if you're not interested in papers talking about the weather, it's dry enough to put an insomniac to sleep.

Check back in tomorrow for hopefully some fun and frivolity!

The Hurricane Gustav LiveBlog, Part 3

2008-09-07T16:15:00.001-07:00

Yeah, it seems odd to post a LiveBlog nearly a week after the event happened, but that's what happens when you're blogging on a six-column columnar pad instead of a computer. So with that said, here's Part 3 of my Hurricane Gustav LiveBlog.

Part 3: 01 September 2008, 1605-2200 CDT

1605: Power just went out. :^( No need to fear, as Eric powered up his generator, which puts everything back to normal in the house save the central air conditioning unit. With the current conditions and the build quality of the house (No movement or air seepage at all), we should be quite fine. Now if we could get our power back early this time. (Note: We got power back at 1224 on Tuesday 2 September, 19 hours and 19 minutes later, or if you’re obtuse like me, 1159 minutes.) My times without power for the past couple of major storms was seven days for Rita (2005), seven days for Lili (2002), and twenty days for Andrew (1992), though Andrew was a special case as Andrew decided to drop a tree on my room, destroying everything I had, and more importantly for what I’m discussing, the electrical panel for the house.

1609: Though Eric just got the generator up and running, I’m taking no chances with my information flow, so I fired up the dynamo-powered radio again. On the radio, I found KATC simulcasting and Rob Perillo says the 1600 advisory puts Gustav 10 miles to the north of the KATC studios. The worst rainfall seems to be currently in St. Landry parish with an area north of Krotz Springs with eight inches of rain and climbing fast. Winds still in the 60 mph range from the West (270°).

1655: Some strange cell phone number is calling my mom. Despite Eric’s protestations, it isn’t me, since I’m still in the 337 area code down in Franklin! The number is a 985 number (Southeastern Louisiana outside of the New Orleans immediate metro area), so I went to work Google-ing the number and at the end of my free searches, I found it to be a cell number from the Thibodaux area. No clue who it is. (Edit: We actually decided to call it and found out it’s a friend of the family that actually just moved from Thibodaux to Abbeville. Thankfully God keeps His eye on His own, eh?)

1715: From the “From Your Lips to God’s Ears” Department: Eric was complaining how it’s generally useless to call SLEMCO to report power outages since the local office in Kaplan doesn’t answer their phones. Immediately after he said this KATC reports that SLEMCO’s power outage report hotline is down. Winds seem to be beginning to abate slightly, as well as change directions. The wind is about 55 mph from the west-southwest (248ish°), and yes, it’s still raining.

1720: First local fatality to pass along. A 27 year-old man is killed when a tree fell on his house. According to KATC’s on-site reporter, the tree was “ten feet wide” and fell directly where the man was sitting, killing him instantly. His home seems to be off the Evangeline Thruway near the I-10/I-49 interchange near Sts. Leo-Seton School.

1730: Levee breach! According to a simulcast on KATC of New Orleans’ WGNO TV 26, the Plaquemines Parish-owned Braithwaite levee has had a partial breach. The footage shows crews working to stop the leak with sandbags by the backhoe-full.

1735: Rob Perillo estimates that 14+ inches of rain has fallen in an area north of Port Barre and east of Washington in St. Landry parish, with the total only to climb from there. Other interesting facts about Gustav, other than the hurricane taking its name from one of my favourite monarchs of all time: Gustav Adolf II (Better known by his Latinized name, Gustavus Adolphus) of Sweden; The Lion of the North and smasher of Spanish Tercios across Central Europe during the Thirty Years War! *ahem* Sorry about the History Rampage™ there.

Back to interesting facts about Gustav, the hurricane: Zero tornadoes have been spawned by the core of the storm, which is somewhat rare for a storm of its strength this far inland. As far as the rest of the storm is concerned, only a couple of possible F-0s (on the Enhanced Fujita scale) in extreme eastern Louisiana seem to have been spawned. Rob also notes what I pointed out to everyone earlier that Gustav seems to be moving now in more of a north-northwest (340ish°) direction as opposed to the northwest direction listed in the last advisory. Winds now definitely west-southwest (248ish°) in direction, and the wind speed seems to be in the 40-45 mph range. It’s still raining, but not as intensely as it had been.

1800: Supper! Chilidogs and/or BBQ beef sandwiches are on the menu. Of course, I’d have nothing less than the finest dining to hear Governor Jindal give a briefing on the status of the state as the storm begins the long process of winding itself down. Kudos as usual to the Jindalnator for his professionalism (A tiny complaint on my part would be that he needs to sound a little more prepared for these briefings. But I understand the sheer amount of data he has to be aware of and pass along, but that’ll come from experience) as well as showing the world how a hurricane should be handled, unlike my duck blind mate on more than once occasion Kathleen Blanco. Jindal reports Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes are the hardest hit areas, and begins to go through a laundry list of utility and infrastructure sites hit.

The most unique damage report? The ferry at White Castle that crosses the Mississippi River was sunk. The naval historian side of me conjured up an image like the photos seen in the aftermath of the invasion of Norway by Germany in 1940 for some reason: No clue why it came to my mind, but chances are it wasn’t that dramatic, or involved as much flying lead.

1815: Louisiana State Police are reporting on KATC as well as the radio scanner they are having a devil of a time dealing with people leaving their houses and driving around to survey the damage. I really can’t blame these people, despite the complete stupidity involved in driving around areas with tree limbs and live power lines lying about in the streets. After all, I’m dying to escape this house after putting up with these people and the same four tapes of file footage the TV stations have been showing for the past eleven hours!

1900: The winds continue to blow, now from the southwest (225ish°) at around 30 mph, but the rain seems almost done. I guess the storm is officially over. I mean, KATC has changed its intro pieces from GUSTAV: THE STORM to GUSTAV: THE RECOVERY. Apparently, trees are down everywhere… except in our neck of the woods (Bad pun.). Why you ask? Because we have no trees, of course!

1930: Rob Perillo points out how Acadiana has dodged yet another bullet in terms of a major hurricane blowing through the area with Gustav. According to KATC Weather Blog posts by Rob Perillo; National Weather Service discussions; and my two cents (most important of them all), Acadiana’s Worst Case Scenario would have been what would have happened had Hurricane Lili made landfall as a Category 4 storm like it was expected to back in October 2002. Lili was forecasted to lumber ashore with 140 mph winds near Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish. This would have put the most populated areas of Acadiana square in the northeastern quadrant of the storm as it made landfall, exposing them to the worst of the winds. In addition, a landing in Pecan Island would have essentially tossed all of the water in Vermilion Bay onshore. Imagine the flooding in Erath and Delcambre in Youngsville or downtown New Iberia under ten feet of water. And for the folks most interested in this blog, all of St. Mary Parish would have been under at least four feet of water save Morgan City, whose sea wall would have been about the only thing able to save it. Speaking of St. Mary Parish, everything seems too quiet for our own good on the news front. The only news I was able to gather on either the TV or the radio scanner is that the parish has zero electrical service. That little news coming out can’t be good.

2020: Kari Hall takes over for a bleary-eyed Rob Perillo and in Kari’s easygoing style points out the obvious: conditions are beginning to improve from south to north. KATC interviews St. Landry Parish Sheriff Bobby Guidroz, who makes sure to tell everyone his parish is still taking a pounding. He also extended the parish-wide curfew until daylight tomorrow due to the conditions.

2030: Five Six Seven Public Service Announcements in a row on KATC during a commercial break. What, no sleazy lawyers wanted to pony up the cash to fill in the airtime? Oh wait an election commercial. I guess it took a sleazy politician to break the monotony instead.

2035: It’s been over twelve hours on this hurricane blog, and since things seems to be winding down on this end. But first, an important turn of events! A press conference starring Ray Nagin! Way to stay classy Ray by starting your press conference by making a snide remark about Gustav raining on the Republican National Convention. And you wonder why people think about you the way they do outside of Orleans Parish?

2045: Finally! Concrete news from St. Mary Parish! Too bad (for me) it’s about Morgan City. According to news reports Morgan City got hammered pretty hard, and has zero utility service, as a tornado (Guys, you do realize that hurricane with 100 mph winds at the eye wall is essentially a giant F-1 tornado, right?) damaging the town’s water and sewer plants. As a result, the city won’t be open for a while. That isn’t the kind of news anyone, much less my Instructional Facilitator will want to hear. I hate to be selfish and paraphrase Darth Vader at the same time, but I find the lack of news regarding Franklin disturbing. One last thing: Winds are down to 25 mph and steady from the southwest (225ish°).

2120: Finally! An end to the local Gustav coverage! Crap, it’s been replaced with national coverage of Gustav. Isn’t there a football game on this evening or something?

2200: Last blog of the day, so here we go: The 2200 advisory from the National Weather Service was just released. It downgraded Gustav to a Tropical Storm with 60 mph sustained winds with the centre southeast of Alexandria. I felt like concluding this blog post with a quick and dirty summary of the storm here at Carla and Eric’s house northeast of Gueydan, but I can’t be buggered to do so as the air mattress is calling my name. If I can quickly put Gustav in context of other hurricanes I’ve ridden out down here in South Louisiana, it wasn’t as bad as Rita back in 2005 or Andrew in 1992 (At least weather- wise. Who knows about the condition of my house?), but seems initially on par with Lili in 2002 and Danny and Juan in 1985, but hopefully without the long power outages those three storms inflicted on us.

The Hurricane Gustav LiveBlog, Part 2

2008-09-07T16:06:00.001-07:00

The Hurricane Gustav LiveBlog, Part 1

2008-09-07T13:28:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it seems odd to post a LiveBlog nearly a week after the event happened, but that's what happens when you're blogging on a six-column columnar pad instead of a computer.

The following three blog posts are the summary of what I did during Hurricane Gustav. I hope it is as entertaining of a read for you as it was for me to write it.

Part 1: 01 September 2008, 0615-1130 CDT

0615: My father does his usual walking-alarm clock routine by turning on the television and making sure that the volume is high enough to scare me out of my skin when he turns it on. I get the cobwebs shaken out of my head fast enough to catch Dave Baker from KATC, a fellow with whom I once had a running conversation about hurricane prediction models up and down ten aisles of a Super Walmart (Note the new spelling convention for the Big Box Store of Doom™), repeats the 0400 CDT advisory that Gustav’s maximum sustained wind speed is down to 115 mph. Looking at the forecast track, I’m betting on an official landfall within 8 miles of Cocodrie.

0702: KATC broadcasts the 0700 CDT advisory, which drops Gustav down to 110 mph, the maximum sustained wind speed for a Category 2 hurricane. Its movement remains approximately NE (320°) with a forward speed at 16 mph. I just finished tossing my stuff into the truck to head over to Carla and Eric’s house (My parents’ neighbours). Winds ≤ 20 mph almost due north (350ish°). No precipitation.

0745: Eye of Gustav passes over Port Fourchon/Grand Isle area, but centre of circulation remains over Terrebonne Bay. Official landfall looks almost to be a cinch within 5 miles of Cocodrie. I wonder who said that? Oh yeah, I did. Eat your heart out Jim Cantore.

0800: We walked next door to my parents’ neighbours to ride out the storm. Why you ask? Because my parents live in a camper trailer (not a FEMA Trailer. Long story.). On the walk over winds seem to have shifted to north-northwest (340ish°) but are definitely in the sustained 20 mph range. Precipitation in the form of mist increasing to sprinkles.

0830: Eric changes the channel from KATC to The Hysterical Weather Channel. They’re up to the usual histrionics with their chief meteorologist estimating storm surge for St. Mary Parish and Vermilion bay to be in the 9 ft-16 ft range. Look, I know you have a Ph.D. in meteorology and all, but how can Vermilion Bay get a 9 ft-16 ft storm surge after landfall when the wind is blowing the water out of the bay? And by the time the storm passes enough to the northwest to allow for a southerly wind to pile the water onshore, the winds will have lessened enough to Category 1 or even Tropical Storm force, making a storm surge that high a bit difficult to say the least. Perhaps Charlton Heston will be on the job?

0900: The Weather Channel is already on my last nerve with its “live report from the impending disaster here in New Orleans!” said oddly enough by their reporter in Morgan City. Luckily Eric saves my sanity…or so I thought by changing the channel. Instead of hysterics and poor geography, we’re stuck with a pseudo-Spaghetti Western written, produced by, and starring Jack Nicholson. Yeah, it seems as nonsensical as you assumed it would be when you read that last sentence. My mom and Carla jumped into Carla’s truck to run to Marceaux’s, Gueydan’s local grocery store that’s open for all disasters, but never on Sunday afternoons, for some more junk food. Winds sound about 25 mph remaining from the north-northwest (340ish°)

0938: Enough of Jack Nicholson already. I’m bored out of my mind, so there’s only one thing left to do: pull out my dynamo-powered shortwave radio! Unfortunately it’s a cheap model, so I’m only able to catch the SW1 and SW2 bands, so my chances of catching anything really interesting are slim to none. But offhand I think I can catch a BBC World Service snippet, which would let me in on what’s happening on the transfer market in European soccer, since today is the deadline. Let’s see what I can find.

0945: Snap. Nothing on shortwave. Here’s the result of my shortwave search:

(1) Spanish Language station, probably Voice of Habana in Cuba. I can guess this not so much because I know Spanish (And I don’t. Just enough German to [successfully] pretend I’m fluent to strangers and enough Dutch to read de Telegraaf.), but because I don’t think after over forty years, The Beard has managed to find a good enough translation for “Marxist-Leninist Dialectic.”

(2) Chinese-language station, probably Voice of Taiwan. I’m not positive of its identity but based on previous jaunts with this radio, I seem to remember the Voice of Taiwan in that vicinity.

(3) Random Christian Televangelist. Hmm, no low-power FM station to hitch a ride onto?

(4) Conspiracy Theory Talk Show. Whoa Nelly! I couldn’t figure out what this was initially since the host was talking about calling in the hotline early to get their introductory offer, but the nature of the show became evident when the special guest, a “world-renown expert on high-altitude poisoning, shadow governments, and UFOs (A Tinfoil-hat Brigade Yahtzee?),” came on an said how he was happy to be on to spread the word in the fight against the New World Order. Apparently, the airlines are poisoning us with Chemtrails sprayed by airliners at high altitude. Thankfully, we know when the International Conspiracy is harming us by the trails in the sky! Er, they do understand the concept of condensation don’t they? Perhaps this fellow was in the same science program when they were discussing storm surge values on the western side of a tropical system in the Northern Hemisphere? Oh, I almost forgot. Winds up to 25 mph and continuing north-northwest (340ish°), but it doesn’t seem long until I can say it’s coming from the northwest. Precipitation in the form of tropical showers coming down constantly now.

1000: New National Weather Service advisory and forecast track: centre of Gustav is just SW of Houma (between Houma and Waterproof) and eye wall approaching Morgan City, possibly already affecting Amelia. Gustav is moving to the northwest (340°) at 16 mph. Winds sustained at 110 mph. KATC states winds in Franklin will probably just miss 100 mph in sustained wind speed, but I disagree considering the current track will put Franklin in the southwest quadrant of the eye wall. I say sustained winds of 80-85 mph with gusts probably 95-100 mph. Don’t believe me? Well you should. Dave Baker just confirmed that Gustav made landfall 4 miles southeast of Cocodrie. Perhaps I should moonlight as a meteorologist? Winds here approaching 30 mph, now from the northwest (315°). Rain continues.

1024: For some inexplicable reason the TV goes back onto The Weather Channel. Storm Magnet Extraordinaire Jim Cantore is in Houma outside a Catholic church in the eye of the storm. Damage is everywhere including the new copper roof on one of the buildings sitting on a police car. After much hand wringing, they admit that the storm surge won’t be as high as they were saying in Vermilion Bay and St. Mary parish. Duh.

1030: TV goes back onto KATC (Why did it leave in the first place?). Canned news report interviews a family that evacuated from New Orleans in a U-Haul. When interview, the guy, who had 10 dogs; 2 ferrets; 3 adults; and a lawn tractor in the back of the U-Haul, said “I’m not going back! It can sink or drown or whatever for all I care!” You’re probably not the only person that’s thinking that, mate.

1100: I finally asked and got permission to go online (Yippee!). First thing I did was went to check my e-mail. @stmary.k12.la.us? Server down. @bellsouth.net? No go. Gmail? Yes! Any mail? No. :^(

1115: Lunch. Good old-fashioned German food: Sausage and Potato Stew. Carla made some fig cake that was rather tasty. The TV remains on KATC but I’m not listening. More of the same things I’ve heard for the last 48 hours really.

1130: KATC reports the centre of Gustav is over Lake Palourde and eye wall is approaching Franklin with winds > 90 mph. Nicht so gut. Rather than sit through a wretched remake of the Magnificent Seven, I sit hidden in Carla and Eric’s office in the northwest corner of the house on the magnificent (sic) 24.0Kbps dial-up connection, as opposed to the 6.0Mbps I get in Franklin. Hey, I’m not complaining. It’s better than nothing! Winds near 35 mph from the northwest (315°) with rain continuing.

Run for the Hills!

2008-08-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

I must say that I expected in some ways that this first year teaching in public schools would be a memorable one. The moving to a new place, new school, (kind of) new culture would be bound to provide me boatloads of witty and thought-provoking anecdotes. What I wasn't expecting was a hurricane to come and make sure I'd never forget this first year. As of the time of this writing, Hurricane Gustav is forecasted to make landfall on Tuesday around Franklin as a solid Category 3 hurricane. Of course, everyone is in an absolute panic of this, despite Gustav churning south of Cuba as I'm typing this. The School Board put us all on alert yesterday and even canceled classes on Tuesday as a precaution--5 days before it was scheduled to make landfall. I had to spend this afternoon securing our Fast ForWord lab, and me being me, I wouldn't settle on just draping trash bags over the workstations, but instead I packed them in individual trash bags, labeled them for when we get to set them back up, put them on a folded table to keep them off the floor, and surrounded them by tables to protect them from flying debris. At least these computers have a chance to survive now.

Everyone at school was debating about its impact and conjuring up memories of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which made a direct hit on Franklin, and Hurricane Katrina, since many of the faculty have family in the area. I on the other hands was trying to be the voice of reason and dragging up facts from the official forecast discussion from NOAA and stuff I learned when I was in engineering about wind fields and dynamics, but to no avail. "They all lie anyway." said one faculty member. "You should listen to me," she continued, "because I said that Rita was going to hit Lake Charles when no one did!" I wanted to point out that Rita didn't exactly hit Lake Charles, but rather the Sabine Pass/Golden Triangle area, but I figured that that was a useless exercise.

It isn't as though I'm not used to hurricanes. After all, I can remember Danny, Juan, Bonnie, Chantal, Jerry, Andrew, Opal, Frances, Allison, Lili, Katrina, Rita, Humberto, and Edouard earlier this summer--and that's the storms I can think of off hand. These were by no means easy events (We lost a barn for Lili, we were out of power over a week after Rita, had damage after Andrew, and were almost flooded out by Allison for example), but I've never been stressed out over it. It happens and there's nothing you can do about it other than pick up the pieces and move on.

But here in the post-Katrina world we live in down here it's just too much. I mean seriously, do we need the governor declaring a state of emergency five days before the storm is forecasted to hit? Do we need wall-to-wall media coverage about the storm for 120 hours before, and a year after the storm? And don't even get me started about those yahoos at KLFY and their "We're all going to die!" attitude they use to describe every tropical system that thinks about forming. At least the folks at KATC try to temper the panic inducement a bit with Rob Perillo and Dave Baker giving scientific explanations for the storm's track as well as explaining the different computer models for folks who don't look for them online, but it's all overkill.

I'm not stressed out about any of this, just a bit perturbed. Since there isn't much I can do I'll just pack up my important belongings, stick everything else at the top of the closets in here as a precaution, and head to my parents' house in Gueydan to ride it out with them and make plans to return to Franklin ASAP. If everything goes according to the forecast the weather won't get much worse than it did during Rita (We had about 24 hours of Tropical Storm and Hurricane-force winds, peaking with several gusts around 100mph), but at least this time we'll be on the West side. And frankly, the further to the west the better for me. Regardless, it'll be yet another story to tell afterward at minimum, and possibly the defining moment for my school year.

Grumpy Old Teachers

2008-08-26T17:50:00.000-07:00

One constant I found when changing from private to public schools is the existence of Grumpy Teachers. Now when I say grumpy, I don't just mean grumpy in mood, but rather grumpy in their entire outlook on teaching. When I was at Bethel, we had more than a couple of them and it was rather obvious who they were. All the time it was whinging and complaining about how horrible the kids were this, how useless the parents were that, and why oh why did they even choose this profession because the pay is so horrible and there's so much indigestion involved. They of course don't stop there as they make sure to let the students know how grumpy they are and how it's All The Students' Fault for this. If only they would listen/obey/study/do their homework/try to achieve World Peace then the classroom environment would improve and they wouldn't be so grumpy. Of course, students, whilst not always having the best grades all the time are not stupid by any means, don't believe a word they are saying and treat them as such. The grumpy teacher then disciplines the students left, right, and centre, getting grumpier the entire time. Once they're out of class they then find the nearest teacher to dump on and the cycle continues unabated.

Ugh.

I got so tired of it that by the end of the year I wasn't even acknowledging their existence. Of course, it didn't hurt that they weren't exactly the most savoury of characters, so not admitting their existence wasn't as hard as it sounds. Now I'm in a new environment and unfortunately, I wasn't able to escape the presence of Grumpy Old Teachers. Just this time there seems to be more of them. The complaints are the same and from the scuttlebutt the students (who amazingly enough almost always tend to tell each other the truth when talking about school based on my experience growing up and teaching) speak within earshot, what goes on behind the classroom door is the same.

I've always struggled with the concept of why a Grumpy Teacher continues to teach. Now, I know I'm different and all, but I was taught growing up that if you don't like doing something it's probably best to quit doing it and find something more enjoyable. I ostensibly think that this should apply to teaching. If you can't stand the kids, the curriculum, the administrators, the physical plant, the discipline policy, and everything else, why even teach? It's evident that you're not happy, so why not try to be happy by doing something that will make you happy? Unless you're one of those weird (Yeah, I'll use the term.) people who enjoy being grumpy, and if that's the case, well, just don't be grumpy around me.

Of course, I know that the answer isn't as easy as I made it, but the Grumpy Teacher is someone I'm going to have to be always on the lookout for. I'll readily admit that I'm still wide eyed, wet behind the ears, and any other cliché you can think of (And speaking of clichés, check out what I found, a clich é finder!), but I just can't accept that once the newness wears off that the dirty truth is that students, other teachers, administrators, etc., etc. are nothing but trouble and the only thing we can do is sulk, complain, and get used to the fact that we can't do anything about it. There's just too many examples of students who were seen as just another problem student that turned into something special because a teacher managed to show interest in them and convinced them that the status quo was just not good enough. I ascribe to this theory and every day I walk onto our school I literally say to myself "Whose life am I going to try to change for the better today?" The answer to this rhetorical question is of course "All of them!" And I know even a couple of weeks in that this outlook, not the Grumpy Teacher's outlook, is the effective one.

As a new teacher I got my copy of Harry Wong's seminal book The First Days of School and I've been thumbing through it almost every evening, mainly because I'm desperately bored, but also I know that if most of the Project STAY curriculum was based on this book it must be good enough for me to take some wisdom out of. When I was at Bethel my principal gave me her copy and told me it had some good stuff, but she didn't know how much it would be of use to me since it was written more for elementary teachers (Don't look at me! I'm just telling you what I was told!), and the next day she came by and picked it up, never for me to see it again. As Mr. Wong (I can't get his voice out of my head when I think of his name) points out at the beginning of the book, we teachers are a smart lot, so it's OK to skim through it looking for wisdom to pick up.

The one part of the book I've been stuck reading in is his last unit on being a successful professional, and I think Mr. Wong hits the whole Grumpy Teacher thing right on the head. Grumpy Teachers are only out to maintain the status quo because they're merely maintainers. Fortunately, I learned at an early age that to merely maintain is just the same as failing, and so the only way to succeed is to press on and move forward. As I read that section it dawned on me exactly why my time out of teaching was so excruciating: I was not in a position to press on and move forward, but because of circumstances I was forced to just maintain my status. When I think about how miserable I felt some days stuck maintaining the status quo, it gives me that much more motivation to not become a Grumpy Teacher. I won't just complain and accept things as they are, I'll do something to change it. Even if I'm the only one trying to change things for the better, it's OK, because I don't need grumpy opinions to help me sleep at night.

And speaking of sleep, I may just do some of that.

Share Fair!

2008-08-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

This weekend was rather useful I must say. I got a new washer/dryer and a small air conditioner to complete my appliance collection and I filled myself with soccer from around the world, including the Stoke City-Aston Villa thriller. Most importantly, I attended the St. Mary Parish Technology Share Fair Saturday morning!

I went into it rather wide-eyed and hopeful. I was really excited about getting in on some interesting topics, especially the seminar on using Wikis in the classroom, a topic I've been chewing on for quite a while. By the time it was over it felt more like a dud to me than the slam-bang I was expecting. I didn't really learn anything new technologically-speaking (I did get some good thinking points from my Instructional Facilitator's seminar on integrating technology and literacy strategies, but they were more of the literary than technological in nature), but I did get to help out a couple of teachers in the online portfolio seminar think of some more efficient ways of displaying students' work online than normal, so I was happy about that. Now I'll freely admit that I'm probably not the best person to evaluate a technology fair aimed at average folks. I routinely ramble into the world of software development when talking about basic computer programs (I've already unfortunately reduced several teachers to an eyes-glazed-over state when I talked about my computer lab's problems with Fast ForWord.) and most tellingly, I'm probably the first middle school teacher most people have met that is a member of ACM.

So let me say this: if you're an "average" computer user and you want to have a fantastic time learning about integrating technology into your classroom from some really great people, and you weren't at Share Fair, then shame on you. The classes, which varied from an introduction to Fast ForWord to Flash animation to Google Earth to gadgets and gizmos, were all well-presented and perfect for neophytes. Best of all were the door prize doled out to the participants. Now I wasn't all that lucky (The person with the ticket numbered after mine won something. Hmpf.) but the folks who walked away with digital cameras, scanners, LCD projectors, and even a laptop sure were lucky. But hey, I'll be getting a flash drive out of it, so I can't say I went there and left empty-handed.

So all in all, Share Fair was a pretty neat experience. Whilst I didn't get too much out of it (Go figure. Loren goes to something and find out he's on the wrong end of the learning curve for the event.), anyone who desires to get on the technology bandwagon (And who shouldn't?) should be there.

My Kingdom for some Sticky-Tac!

2008-08-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

If you've looked at the title of this blog and read my first entry, it should be fairly obvious that I am of the opinion that I have moved to another planet, despite in reality only moving sixty-five miles (via highway). I'm quite sure you're thinking why I would think that. Perhaps you're saying to yourself "Meh, Loren is some sort of highbrow fellow who thinks he's too good for a little town like Franklin (Population 8,354)!" Well, let me tell you--it isn't like that at all.

You see, I moved from a town called Gueydan, Louisiana. Population 1,598 (According to the 2000 US Census). Unlike Franklin, Gueydan does not have the following:

A Pizza Hut and Domino's
A McDonald's, Sonic, and Burger King
A Wal-Mart
A chain grocery store
A chain gas station
A middle school
A radio station
A red light

So it isn't as though I've moved from New York, Houston, or even Lafayette and look down at the humble residents here. No, it's rather what Franklin does not have for a town of its size, which I found out in all too painful of an episode on Tuesday.

The theme of my classroom is Dr. Seuss--since not only do I think Mr. Geisel was a fantastic writer and advocate for keeping a child's sense of wonder as an adult, but most of my students listed him as their favourite author (something which I am not sure what to think of yet)--and one of the showpieces of my classroom is a giant Cat in the Hat that I wanted to stick to the inside of my entrance door, because since he's so big I could affix him to the door at the students' eye level and he would almost touch the floor. A fantastic conversation piece for sure. The only problem was sticking our hatted friend. I found a roll of double-stick tape in the classroom, but alas it was so old that it wouldn't come off of the roll for me to use it, and the pack of sticky-tac I had received from my principal had grown legs and walked off, much to my chagrin. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just go to Wal-Mart here in town and pick some up."

Well...

First off let me dispel an urban legend. Wal-Mart did not convert all of their existing stores into Super Wal-Marts. I am sure of this because Franklin has a Wal-Mart without a grocery store built in. Instead, it has a bridge across a drainage ditch to the local Winn-Dixie. Apparently the fine residents here spend their Saturdays running from Wal-Mart to Winn-Dixie or vice versa, waving at each other along the way. After observing this once and waving at about twenty people I've never met in my life, I think this is some sort of tradition.

Anyway, I walked into the Wal-Mart and within thirty seconds I was wandering around the store in search of the office supplies...just like how I spent twenty fruitless minutes the previous week searching for a water filter until I found it "on the back wall," as one associate flippantly directed me. I looked high and low until in the back corner of the store was a small sign entitled "Home and Office." Clever these Wal Mart folks are. I can see it now: three store layout designers are standing over a set of blueprints saying to themselves "You know, the best place to put the office supplies is in the back corner behind the shoes! They'll never find it there!" They were right, as I would have never considered going to find office supplies next to the shoes.

However finding the department was just the beginning of my woes, as I searched high and low through the three aisles wondering why tape could be found in three different places on one row and notebooks could be found on all three aisles, I failed to find my prey. Rather than spend another chunk of an hour walking around in circles, I sought out the nearest employee to help me. I found someone in the electronics department and I asked them if they sold sticky-tac.

Er, I don't think so. I think we stopped selling it about a year ago.

Hmm... Are you sure? I mean, I don't want to be rude but you guys are a Wal-Mart. I'd think you would sell something like that.

Well, we're not like the other Wal-Marts as you can see.

Well that's obvious. OK, well, surely there's an office supply store here in town--even a local outfit, right?

Nope.

How about a pharmacy chain store, like a Rite-Aid or CVS?

Oh, well, they're building a CVS in Morgan City now!

Well that's helpful. But what about here?

No. We're not a big town you know.

Yes, but I used to travel to Abbeville for my shopping and Abbeville isn't really significantly larger than Franklin, but they have all of that.

Well, we're just here. But let me make sure we don't sell what you're looking for before you drive to Morgan City.

Who said I was driving to Morgan City?

So the helpful lady called, and called, and called, and finally found a manager to help me. It wasn't just any manager. It was the store manager. After shaking my hand we set out to find my sticky-tac. It took us four trips around the department but we finally found it--hidden between stacks of sticky notes--which were hanging on racks on all three aisles also.

So I escaped with my prize brimming with anything but confidence. I'm here in what is purportedly a larger town than the one I moved from with actual amenities, but despite them, I'm still having to drive thirty minutes to get stuff like I did when I lived in Gueydan. I still was intrigued at the fact they apparently did not have an office supply store in Franklin. I just hope the day doesn't come when I'm stuck without a red pen. I'd be really up a creek then.