lassitude

I like the word lassitude. It sounds like the marriage between Lassie, lazy, latitude, and attitude. Any of them work for me right now.

I had a semi-long post typed up yesterday about where I want to go on my next vacation, but our computer at work bit the bullet and lost it. To summarize, I want to go to Fairmont Chateau at Lake Louise (check out the slideshow), and I want to go now. In fact, I want to live there. I wouldn't mind dying there, either. Anyone? So it's a little pricey: LOOK AT THE VIEW!

Instead, I think I 'll end up going to Vancouver for spring break, or at least try to get out there. Anyone?

raven run

Down by the grist mill. The reflection of the trees on the ice was striking, though this picture doesn't capture it well.

A female cardinal with "internal injuries" that we saw along the trail. My dad called animal 911 (RR nature center) and we marked the spot. It was a sad thing to see on a beautiful day, and I hate myself for thinking that.

The KY River from an overlook. It's a beautiful spot that is also good for family photos, apparently. Don't be surprised if you get a slew of Xmas cards from our various families...and they all look the same!

We went for a hike at Raven Run today and finished it off with a picnic of leftovers from Gluttony Day. Mi and I had been there several times, but this time I went with my father-in-law and the 'rents on a trail to a grist mill. My new favorite portion of the sanctuary.

sunrose

The rising of the sun this morning was beautiful. Pinks, roses, yellows, oranges, all filling the sky and beaming through the window. I like waking up on mornings like this.

gluttony

What a wonderful holiday that celebrates consumption and follows it up with the "shoppingest" day of the year. Indicative of a social trend?

Enjoy it in whatever way you do.

pedagogy on the fly

Today went quite well. A quick rundown of my day:

I got to school around 6:30 to type up my lesson plan for tomorrow (I had to turn it in today) and print stuff out. It’s amazing that inspiration can strike when the body and mind are at their lowest performance level. I got it cranked out and am quite excited. It’s for conversation class, so we’re going to be talking about the origin and present state of Thanksgiving. We’re going to perform and then create another readers theatre piece about the feast portion to complement our unit on food. It should be fun.

My reading classes have started reading Treasure Island (an extremely expurgated and revised edition) and seem to be responding very positively. We actually stayed on task and working up until the bell ring, a feat of Herculean proportions for these coddled students. I had a great time connecting with prior lessons, and I was winging it! They were great at remembering terms that I was sure they would have forgotten (6 elements of a short story; types of characters; etc.) and took wonderful notes. I decided that we’re going to make a “character book” to help us keep track of the various scallywags and ruffians we come across. I’d forgotten how seedy some of them are!

My math class: depressing. You would hope that students in an algebra class would be able to complete 100 multiplication problems (1-10) in 4 minutes, but only 4 out of 20 did so. Nobody finished the division problems in the same time. ALGEBRA!

Okay, I’m off of here to grab some chow. Q’doba, mmmmm…

fall birds

fall birds
The dark stars of day
Birds that spin above my head

Obliviously

You have to look closely for the birds, but they're there.
They filled the trees behind our house by the hundreds, and they were so loud that they almost made your ears ring. The most amazing moment was when they flew away. As one, they left the tree and filled the sky, and the instant they left the tree, there wasn't a sound. I might almost have felt, for a moment, that I had gone deaf, so sudden and simultaneous was their silence.

Beautiful.

tofurkey

It's a beautiful day outside, and I've chosen to spend it inside doing work. House work, school work, movie-trivia-acquisition work, etc. It's been fun.

The rents and laws come in on Wednesday, an arrival sure to make for some interesting stories, though few shareable.

Current listening choice is "Requiem" from the Akira soundtrack. Fourteen and a half minutes of organs, Japanese drums, Japanese male choirs, Japanese female choirs, and a partridge on a bamboo stalk.

Currently procrastinating from typing up a formal lesson plan for my Conversation I class on Tuesday. Lesson topic? I have no clue. Lesson objective? Learn English, I guess.

Current pet peeve: education.

Over and out of things to say.

oops

I dropped the f-bomb in tutoring yesterday afternoon. It really functioned like a bomb: loud crash followed by utter silence. It also eliminated the problem, so was it justified? Perhaps not as profoundly thought-provoking as the A-bomb, but the F-bomb has its own particular power.

the library of babylon

Library sciences is sounding more and more beautiful to me. I decompressed with a fellow teacher today who is also having an "educator crisis" (by the way, my lessons today were on why/when we say 'a' or 'an,' and may I say what a joy it was to teach count and non-count nouns), though we've come to quite different conclusions. We did agree on one point: all in all, education is headed down a very bumpy road with very little road repair. God, I hate stupid metaphors...

school thoughts

Rob Gonsalves - from Imagine a Night

Perhaps it's because of my chosen profession, or perhaps it's because of recent readings, or perhaps it's for no reason whatsoever, but recently my mind has been lingering around the idea of education. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I've never been passionate about education, and I despise those who say "Education is a calling" (too religious for my taste); I believe in the importance of educaiton, and I've committed myself to being a quality educator, but I've never had any illusions about what that might entail. I try to maintain a pragmatic approach to education as an alternative to the messianic egoism of many people who enter education to become "the person who changes people's lives." Passionate isn't a word that comes to my mind when I think of myself as an educator, and I would actually be a little put out if someone called me that. Passion is all well and good, but passion isn't synonymous with good education. Too few people distinguish the two, and it's those people (the Jaime Escalantes and Robin Williams-characters) that I despise talking to about education. They're so invested in the traditional ideologies that create the foundation of contemporary public education that they cannot imagine the changes that could revolutionize and strengthen The System into a strong educational paradigm. It's that myopic perspective which is driving me mad, moreso because I see it in myself.

• No Child Left Behind - I've taken issue with this from its nascence, though partly because it was being derided by many edcuators who I admired and less because I had a real quarrel with it. Now, though, I despise it for ideological reasons, not financial reasons. It represents--not subtly--one of the great hypocrisies of public education. While it purports to be about individual children, especially minority children, the means by which it ensures that each child is taught as an individual is completely antithetical to the notion of individuality. We standardize the curriculum, the assessment, and even our teaching methods, all so that we can make sure that all children receive a good...what? Education? If every person is receiving the same thing, it's not individualism. As all new teachers are being taught, equality is not equity, and NCLB (funny how it sounds like Nickleby) celebrates equality with complete disregard for the hints of communistic ideology.
  

• What is the purpose of education? - I know that I should have asked myself this years ago, and I did, but it's a hard question, dammit! I have two theories: 1) Public education is actually a training ground for future attendees of cocktail parties; 2) Public education is a culling ground for the future technologists of the world, and it's really just an expensive sieve. The System is a giant pan-sieve (what prospectors used; the name eludes me and I have no idea what I'm talking about) and all the students are bits of dirt and stone being shaken violently to find the few pieces of gold who will rise to the top or not fall through the cracks. Am I willing to be one of the people shaking that pan? I'm not sure. I'm a cynic, but even I hesitate at that analogy and role! I have much more to say about this, but it may have to come in "School thoughts II."

It's pouring, gusting, thundering, and flashing outside my window, and I sit here calmly listening to music and writing down words which will lose their meaning, relevance, and any power they might possess as soon as I hit "publish." On a complete aside, I think that one of the problems I have with Christianity is the self-importance it gives to humans in the grand scheme. Do we think the ant thinks itself an ant and not the greatest creation? Although I'm human--not a demon, contrary to popular opinion--I don't think that I'm all that important. All religions seek to find a purpose for life and a place for humans in the cosmos, but few religions have put humanity at the dead center of an infinite universe. I find it much more satisfying to think that I'm a blip in the history of an endless world than to think that I'm divine and living in the squalor of humanity. The strangest thing about that thought is that I don't find it strange...

mountains of creation

Click on this link for a spectacular picture of one of the most beautiful mountain ranges I’ve seen.

tuesday mornings with a headache

I've had this title sitting on the screen for about half an hour and cannot think of anything to accompany it's horrible pun. That's the curse of this blog: I sometimes feel obligated to write something when I truly have nothing to say. Of course, I rarely do have something to say, but that hasn't stopped me, has it.

Today feels like it's going to be a blur. How many days, do you think, will we live and have no recollection of having lived?

rapture

I just obtained an interesting “documentary” called The God Who Wasn’t There. I use quotation marks around the documentary because it’s really more of an extended editorial. It has some great insights, some of which I may share, though I really doubt it. For a good laugh, though, check out Rapture Letters. Contextualizing the Bible, baby!

school model

One of my colleagues and I have been talking about the education model (and variations thereof) outlined in prior posts, and he came across Sudbury Valley School, an odd yet fascinating example of that model in action. I haven't explored much of their site, but I recommend browsing through it, and I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

final quinn

I feel that I’m deluging the blog with Daniel Quinn, so I’ll wrap it up with a parable that I found on a website dedicated to his works.

Sinking Ship
The ship was sinking---and sinking fast. The captain told the passengers and crew, "We've got to get the lifeboats in the water right away."
But the crew said, "First we have to end capitalist oppression of the working class. Then we'll take care of the lifeboats."
Then the women said, "First we want equal pay for equal work. The lifeboats can wait."
The racial minorities said, "First we need to end racial discrimination. Then seating in the lifeboats will be allotted fairly."
The captain said, "These are all important issues, but they won't matter a damn if we don't survive. We've got to lower the lifeboats right away!"
But the religionists said, "First we need to bring prayer back into the classroom. This is more important than lifeboats."
Then the pro-life contingent said, "First we must outlaw abortion. Fetuses have just as much right to be in those lifeboats as anyone else."
The right-to-choose contingent said, "First acknowledge our right to abortion, then we'll help with the lifeboats."
The socialists said, "First we must redistribute the wealth. Once that's done everyone will work equally hard at lowering the lifeboats."
The animal-rights activists said, "First we must end the use of animals in medical experiments. We can't let this be subordinated to lowering the lifeboats."
Finally the ship sank, and because none of the lifeboats had been lowered, everyone drowned.
The last thought of more than one of them was, "I never dreamed that solving humanity's problems would take so long---or that the ship would sink so SUDDENLY."

Pragmatism incarnate, if you ask me. Of course, you didn’t, but I answered anyway.

thoughts for food

I'm skimming through a semi-interesting book called My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn's sequel to the brilliant Ishmael, and am thinking that I may have to go back through and skim more thoroughly. I checked it out from our school library because I adored the first one and thought that this one might take it to new places. Well, the first 20 pages were a near-perfect facsimile of the first 20 pages of Ishmael, and I became a little disappointed and pessimistic about where else Daniel Quinn could take his ideas, so I stopped. Last night, though, I skimmed back through it and found that he actually takes his ideologies about human and social development and applies them to education. His works are highly misanthropic on the surface, but I'm sure he would argue that they are actually aimed against modernity and the egoistic evolution of mankind into gods, particularly in the West. It's hard for me to capture the spirit of his works (it's also been some time since I read Ishmael), so I'll give you an excerpt from My Ishmael as an example.

I wanted to show you a model of education that works for people. It works very simply, without cost, without effort, without administration of any kind. Children simply go wherever they want and spend time with whomever they want in order to learn the things they want to learn when they actually want to learn them. Not every child's education is identical. Why on earth should it be? The idea is not that every child should receive the entire heritage but rather that every generation should receive it. And it is received, without fail; this is proved by the fact that society continues to function, generation after generation, which it couldn't do if its heritage were not being transmitted faithfully and totally, generation after generation.

Another excerpt:

Every one of your systems is a utopian system. Democracy would be heaven--if people would just be better than people have ever been... And of course your schools would work perfectly under the same conditions.

And this is brilliant:

Your basic citizen's education wasn't expanded from four grades to eight in order to include astronomy, microbiology, and zoology. It wasn't expanded from eight grades to twelve grades in order to include astrophysics, biochemistry, and paleontology. It wasn't expanded from twelve grades to sixteen in order to include exobiology, plasma physics, and heart surgery. Today's graduates don't leave school with all the advances of the past hundred years in their heads. Just like their great-great-grandparents a century ago, they leave with enough in their heads to start at the bottom of the job market, flipping burgers, pumping gas, and bagging groceries. It just takes today's graduates a whole lot longer to get there.

Take it or leave it, but he does make some interesting points. Of course, some of his solutions are whimsical, in my mind, but he would say that's because I've been acculturated into the system from birth, and the notion of anything else as functional is impossible for me to accept. For example, he says that a "tribal system" of education would be as or more efficient than any model we have today (I can't say I disagree completely); children would learn from parents and peers, "learn to read the same way they learned how to see, by being around sighted people," and so forth. Perhaps it's my cynicism, but I don't see this happening without some fundamental changes in our humanity and society (there's a "no duh" statement).

One more quote that's on his website:

One of the great, persistent myths of education in our culture is that children become reluctant learners as they grow older. In fact, what they become reluctant about is going to school, where they're bullied, regimented, bored silly, and very effectively prevented from learning. Providence

More later, must teach now.

please?

Would someone please shut Pat Robertson up? I love to see a nimrod dig his own hole as much as anyone, but there comes a point when it's more painful than humorous, and he passed that a few years ago. He's the David Brent of Xianity! Observe:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck...Last summer, he hit the headlines by calling for the assassination of leftist Venezuelan Present Hugo Chavez, one of President George W. Bush's most vocal international critics.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.

Are you kidding me? Wait, there's more:

In 1998, Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Florida that it risked hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist bombs after it allowed homosexual organizations to put up rainbow flags in support of sexual diversity.

Well, thank you Pat for that outstanding observation. You mean the chances of a hurricane hitting Florida are high? Wow, I wouldn't have guessed that, ever! Minnesota, maybe, but not Orlando.

WHY IS HE STILL ALIVE?! Proof positive that there is no god, if you ask me. Of course I don't mean that, but I'm pissed.

church doors

PICT2242
Originally uploaded by dwanker2000.

I took this picture in Cusco, Peru, and I kick myself for not having taken it 10 seconds earlier. This woman and a man were knelt at the door for a long time praying. Mi and I were sitting on the steps of the main cathedral on the Plaza de Armas when we saw them walking by with heavy bags on their backs. The old man was hunched over from the weight. They were obviously in a hurry, but they stopped, knelt, and prayed. It was an incredibly moving picture of devotion and loyalty (faith, even) that meant so much more than most professions of faith I've ever heard.

lost

Lost is the devil. It possesses magical powers of bewitchment that draw you in and don't let go.

At least one of my least favorite characters is dead. And that statement is disgusting in and of itself. I think that film and theatre (but especially film) make it easy to wish someone dead or to gloss over a death without thought of the permanence of it.

Another thought: how important are humans in the grand scheme? I posit that not at all, but of course I don't live my life that way. Even though my life in the grand scheme may mean nothing, it means everything to me, so I live it as if it was the most important life in the world. How can anyone say that Darwin was wrong? Speaking of, screw Kansas.

rump

Weekends go by altogether too quickly. One day you're playing poker, the next minute you're playing volleyball, and the next day you're teaching a bunch of kids with no inner monologue or volume control.

Millions is really cute, by the way. Danny Boyle is quickly becoming my favorite director, a category which, till recently, I had paid little attention. Sure, Darren Aronofsky and David Fincher are great (I could probably think of a few more if I weren't so knackered), but Boyle has been consistently good (a few bumps along the way--Cameron Diaz).

I hope to have a chance to blog more frequently, but real life is beginning to get in the way of my cyberlife!

over

I’m thoroughly enjoying Flickr. I’ve added quite a few fotos, and it’s 10x easier than doing it in Blogger, though also less accessible. If you have some time to kill, check out the fotos of Bolivian children that Mi and I took (the good ones were taken by her).

Today ended my first cycle of internship observation and evaluation, so it’s a bit of a happy day. It was a long road, though. It  began this morning with getting up at the buttcrack of dawn (circa 5.30) to type up a lesson plan for the day. It was soon followed by the tirade of expletives I let fly when I got to school and realized I had left my jumpdrive at home along with all of my work. Fortunately, since the info was only minutes old, I was able to recreate it and improve it.

The observation by the retired teacher (he’s my “university supervisor”) went relatively well, and he only had one concern/question about some behavior management. After the observation, I had a meeting with my supervising teacher, assistant principal, and the uni sup. I must say that I was quite encouraged by their laudatory comments, especially in regards to my classroom management. It’s always been one of my main concerns, but they were extremely impressed by how comfortable and focused the class was. Those of you who know me will be surprised to hear one of the words they used to describe my classroom persona and management: “compassionate.” Can you think of a word that seems less appropriate for me? Anyway, the first 3rd of the internship is over, and I’ve set a high standard for myself in my eyes and theirs, so we shall see how this turns out.

Nina Simone sings one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs I’ve heard, “Where Does the Time Go,” and the copy I have (there may be multiple) is performed live in one of the most beautiful performances I’ve heard. She spends a few minutes chatting and talking about time. Then she sings. If you’re interested, email me and I’ll find a way to get it to you.

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leavingBut how can they know it's time for them to go?Before the winter fire, I will still be dreamingI have no thought of timeFor who knows where the time goes?Who knows where the time goes?Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leavingAh, but then you know it's time for them to goBut I will still be here, I have no thought of leavingI do not count the timeFor who knows where the time goes?Who knows where the time goes?And I am not alone while my love is near meI know it will be so until it's time to goSo come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring againI have no fear of timeFor who knows how my love grows?And who knows where the time goes?

rotten veggies

This blog gets updated about as often as Bolivia wins a war! (click here)

My work here is done. I’m off to start typing a lesson I was to have emailed this morning. Yummy.