Catching Up

Iron Man 2 comes out tomorrow. Can’t wait!

Ernie Harwell passed away. I heard his voice probably more than any other in my childhood. I’ll have to do a longer post about this soon.

Teachers remain under attack. National Teacher Appreciation Day came and went and I didn’t hear one person say anything about it. When I mentioned it at our faculty meeting on Tuesday our principal said, “Was that today?”

There are 18 days of school left with students. Then I have four days off (including the weekend) before summer school begins. Darned lazy part-time teachers!

May 4th has unofficially become National Star Wars Day. “May the 4th be With You…” Get it? How has it taken this long for someone to come up with that?

Speaking of Star Wars, I think I’m going to wait and have Sera watch it when it comes out on Blu-Ray (now that it’s been announced) and we have a bigger TV. And, we’ll watch it at night. I want her to get as close to the theater experience as possible. I just hope we are given the choice of watching the original version. Han shot first (and last)!!

I’m still not reading much in the way of comics. I’m still reading Invincible, Astro City, and that’s about it for regular comics.

Speaking of comics, I read the first 50 or so issues of Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead” in bookstores over the past few months in a huge compendium. I normally don’t go in for zombie stuff, but his name was enough to get me to start. And once I started, I didn’t want to put it down. AMC is making a TV series out of it. Good stuff.

I’m drawing again. I don’t have a lot of time for it right now, but in a few weeks, I’ll be back at it. I got a new graphics tablet to replace the one I gave to my niece over a year ago, and I really want to learn how to use it well. She has inspired me.

I wish I could use the font that I set up as my default in Microsoft Word as my font on the blog. It’s CCComicrazy from Comicraft.

Rumor has it that through a grant, every secondary math teacher in our system is getting an interactive whiteboard next year to improve math instruction. I’m very excited about this. I’ve been using a document camera/LCD projector for a few years now to improve my instruction, and the whiteboard will allow me to do animations, show videos to get realistic data to analyze, and better capture the attention of my videogame-oriented students. I’ve been reading blogs written by young teachers who are doing some really cool stuff in the classroom and I will never be too old to learn from them. I don’t want to be one of those teachers who quits because technology and new techniques pass them by.

Facebook is great. I have reconnected with so many people I haven’t had contact with in years! I communicate with old school friends (some of whom are grandparents!), some of my old teachers, former and current colleagues, and people who post on the Tigers message board.

Economics have forced us to cut way back on everything. We now look at our expenditures much more critically. For example, going to the movies, just for the three of us, is a $35 experience if we get popcorn and snacks. We can buy the Blu-Ray of a movie for $20-$25 when it comes out and watch it as many times as we want.

Speaking of not going to the movies, I have no interest in the Jonah Hex movie. The character was retconned into a supernatural figure a few years ago, and that aspect never appealed to me.

That's all I can think of for now. Hopefully I'll get a sketch or two done this weekend and can have something to show off.

Bad Blogger!

I was reminded by one of my colleagues today that I hadn't posted anything in a while. She was right, and I will do better. It's just that Facebook is so much easier and I have a much wider audience. I'm working on something that I'll have posted here soon.

Transportation Upgrade

Wow. Look how she's grown.

It's About Time!

Soon, we'll have the flying car.

Captain Tea Party

I wonder if Marvel will now be justified in showing a Tea Party crowd scene in one of their Captain America comics. Look what this guy wore to the Tea Party gathering in Washington today!

Vacation!

We got off to a rocky start last week, but I sure am glad it happened. On the Thursday before vacation was to begin, it was unseasonably warm. I turned on the air conditioning in the minivan, and all I got in return was hot air. We took the van in, and it turned out to be a disconnected hose, which apparently was a common problem with our model. Fortunately, the dealership was able to locate a part for it, but unfortunately they couldn't get the part or fix the van until Friday. We just couldn't go to Alabama without air conditioning. We've been stuck in hot traffic there too many times.

After we finally got the minivan packed and hit the road, we made a quick side stop at Trader Joe's in Indianapolis. Let me just take this opportunity to say that I love Trader Joe's. They have a lot of food that is considerably lower in sodium than the norm. I can get beef jerky there that I can actually eat, as well as no salt corn chips that are quite tasty. Their microwave popcorn is unbeatable and even good for you. But probably the best thing they make is their organic version of Spaghettio's, called Joe's O's. I eat them for lunch with a chopped up hamburger, or a hot dog, sometimes chicken. Whatever I add, they are great! I also got several boxes of Vanilla Almond granola to add to my breakfast yogurt. That's some good stuff, too.

As we made our way south, we took advantage of McDonald's dollar drinks, because we knew that for speed and ease, Happy Meals were going to be the easiest thing for Sera to eat in the car. But because of something that happened later, we may have to revisit this strategy next time.

We hit some stop and start traffic near Nashville, and drove about 30 miles in one hour. This is not bad compared to what we got on the way back. We finally rolled into Gulf Shores, Alabama at about 6:45 AM local time. We decided to go to our favorite breakfast place, Hazel's Nook. Hazel's has been in Gulf Shores since there has been a Gulf Shores. They have a breakfast buffet that simply is the best breakfast on the planet. They have the usual scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, etc. The main feature of their breakfast, thought, is their scratch-made biscuits. Because sausage gravy is bad for me, I smother mine with strawberries, which are always in season when we get there for spring break. When you can finish your breakfast with a suitable dessert, you have a good breakfast! Refueled, we made our way down Fort Morgan Road and got to the Plantation resort at around 8:30, unpacked, and then crashed.

We got up after a few hours and drove back up to the bay. Magi's sister and her father and stepmother both have bay houses on Mobile Bay, right next to each other. Magi's youngest sister, Jessica, and her two children were already there, and we got to meet our newest nephew, Julian. Here, you see Granddaddy Pedro employing his infamous sleeper hold on the boy. The kids played happily and Sera and Josie really enjoyed the inflatable pool. When we finally got to bed, we did one of our favorite things. No, not that. We opened the sliding glass door so we could hear the waves crashing. There is no more relaxing sound.

The next day, Easter Sunday, we went back out to the bay, and enjoyed a nice ham dinner and some barefoot volleyball. It was very relaxed, but I was starting to get itchy. When I get to the Gulf, I need shrimp!

But first, Magi developed one of her patented cysts. They appear at the most inopportune times and in the most uncomfortable places. We made a trip into town to the local urgent care center to get it looked at, and while Magi waited in the long line, I went out to Billy's Seafood to get some shrimp. Billy's is in Bon Secour, right on the river, and in the picture you can even see the boats. The shrimp you get at Billy's literally comes in off the boats and into their store. It's fresh. They will even steam and season them for you for $1.00 extra per pound. For the price of one decent dinner in town, I got four pounds of jumbo shrimp and a quart of seafood gumbo. I got back to pick Magi up, picked up her antibiotic prescription, and since we were out already we decided to go get some lunch.

Mikee's is usually our first stop in Gulf Shores. No one, and I mean no one makes fried shrimp as well as Mikee's. It is the BEST! Magi had simply a shrimp lunch. I had the all you can eat shrimp, and I did some damage. Then, we got some oysters to go and headed back to the Plantation. By that time, Magi's other sister, Marcia and her kids were there.

We had a pretty good week, but repeated daily trips to the urgent care clinic kind of put a damper on each day. Magi spent a lot of time in pain after having the cyst lanced. At the end of the week, we had a huge family dinner at Villaggio Grille, a restaurant at The Wharf in Orange Beach. We celebrated the birthdays of nephew Ben, and Jessica, and Sera, whose birthday is next Saturday. The cake was called Death By Chocolate Cake, and it was quite tasty. But Sera liked the strawberry accompaniment best!

Our last dinner in Gulf Shores was another family affair at Tacky Jack's 2, which is at the marina near the end of the peninsula near Fort Morgan. I got this nice sunset picture while waiting for our table. We finished the week with shrimp and crab claws and grilled mahi mahi. Thanks to Pedro and Nora for their generosity in not only letting us stay in their condo, but also for some very fine dinners.

Our day yesterday was pretty long. Because Magi is on painkillers, I got to drive the whole way home. And because of the Nashville construction, and the Alabama construction, and the other construction, it took 20 hours to get home. We were sure glad we had the air conditioning fixed before we left! 920 miles in 20 hours, let's see, is an average speed of 46 miles per hour.

I do love our spring breaks in Gulf Shores. Even when adversity strikes, we still find it peaceful and relaxing!

Really?

How private could it be?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Tweeting Vacation

Well, why not try this whole Twitter thing? I'll be tweeting at @ofmasksandmen during my vacation. Oh, and if you try to rob my house, don't forget I have a big dog. If you really want to make him like you, dress up like the UPS guy. I got five stitches a few years ago trying to keep him off the brown shorts.

10

Today marks my wife's and my 10-year wedding anniversary. Each year, I try to come up with something better than I said the last year. This year, it's about perspective.


My wife is my guide. Whenever I'm not sure of what I should do in a given situation, I try to think about what she would do. Sometimes I don't do what she would do, but I have come to believe that I almost always know what she would do. We've had health scares in the past ten years, the worst being when she developed a pulmonary embolism. Pulmonary embolisms have killed a lot of people, more than you're probably aware of. They usually get diagnosed post-mortem, so we know we were lucky. And thinking on how I would raise Sera without her, I know that I would be a better father to her because I know how Magi thinks. Even now, my reactions to things that Sera does are tempered because my first thought, as is natural, is how I was treated as a child. And I almost always override my initial instinct before my mouth opens. It would be the same even if she wasn't there. Her presence is that powerful.

She's with me at work, even though we work in separate buildings, a few miles apart. We always exchange emails during the day, and it's a comfort knowing that she's going to be able to answer any question within an hour, at any time. She teaches business at the high school that my middle school feeds, and I know that if I don't do my job correctly, it will make her job harder.


Even when I go out with my friends, we often hang out at Border's in Mishawaka, where Magi worked when she first moved here so long ago. It's impossible to even look at the cafe without thinking of her there, and all the time I spent just hanging out at the bookstore because she was at work while I was not.



Books that I read and music that I listen to will remind me of her, as well. I will always think of my favorite author, Pat Conroy, as her influence. I read Gone with the Wind while shuttling her back and forth to Goshen College while she finished up her teaching requirements. I would listen to a Journey CD that she brought while waiting outside her classroom. One of the songs from that CD became the song that we would dance to at our wedding reception.

It's funny how morbid these thoughts sound when I read them back. It's almost like a eulogy or something. But it's better, I think, to measure the effect that someone has had on your life while they're alive. The problem is that there's no adequate measure for how my wife has changed my life. She makes me a better teacher, a better father, and a better man. I can only hope that someday, I'm good enough to deserve her.

Outside the Box

I am often considered by my colleagues and friends to be well outside the mainstream. I'm okay with that. I like to consider what I do to be thinking outside the box. When I walk into my school's conference room for lunch, I more often than not will be carrying a grilled New York strip steak and a baked potato. Some of my colleagues (the ones who are not my friends) look at me like I'm crazy or a spendthrift ("Who are you, Howard Hughes? Bill Gates?" followed by raucous, yet one-sided laughter), but the economics of my lunch are rather simple.

School lunches are outrageously expensive for what they are and moreover for what they taste like. As a teacher, I'd have to pay $3.25 per day for a school lunch. A couple of weeks ago, I bought an entire New York strip for $3.99 per pound. I had the guy at the meat counter cut it up into eight-ounce steaks, and when I got home I sealed each one up in its own freezer bag at a cost of $0.20 each and dropped it into the freezer. I bought a 10-pound bag of Yukon Gold potatoes for $4.00, which yields me 20 potatoes at a cost of $0.20 each. Throughout the morning, my steak thaws in my lunch bag. At 11:05 I use my garage sale George Foreman grill to cook up my steak while the potato bakes in the microwave. In five minutes, I have a healthily grilled New York strip steak and a plain but tasty baked potato, which costs me a grand total of $2.40.

And the best part of it is, my lunch is always outside the box.

Comic Book Villain Attacks Minority Whip

From the Washington Independent:

"The Richmond Police Department is investigating an act of vandalism at the
Reagan Building, 25 E. Main St., Richmond, Virginia. A first floor window
was struck by a bullet at approximately 1 a.m. on Tuesday, March 23. The
building, which has several tenants including an office used by Congressman Eric
Cantor, was unoccupied at the time.

A Richmond Police detective was assigned to the case. A preliminary investigation shows that a bullet was fired into the
air and struck the window in a downward direction, landing on the floor about a foot from the window. The round struck with enough force to break the windowpane but did not penetrate the window blinds. There was no other damage to the room, which is used occasionally for meetings by the congressman.

The Richmond Police Department is sharing information about the
incident with appropriate law enforcement agencies."

The only reasonable explanation is that the bullet was fired by master marksman Deadshot. Who else could have fired a bullet upward into the air, and have it hit its intended target on the downward arc? We can only hope that Batman is on the case.

Sugar Camp Days

Each year at Bendix Woods Park in western St. Joseph County, Indiana we have Sugar Camp Days. It's a weekend where there are tours of the sugarbush, complete with lectures and lessons on how European settlers learned from Native Americans how they tapped sugar maples and made maple sugar and syrup. There's a pancake breakfast with all-you-can-eat pancakes and sausages. And the best part of the whole thing is that they use real maple syrup made on site. There are also demonstrations of ice sculpture, as well as making kettle corn in a real cast iron kettle. Guess who liked that?

I Can See Clearly Now...

...the train is gone!

I don't know for how long, but the grafitti-covered train that has sat idle behind our house for the better part of a year is now gone. We still miss our treeline, of course, but at least we can look at a wooded area across the tracks without seeing George Carlin's seven words you can't say on television.

Fire the Doctors!

Paraphrased from USA Today:

Under President Barack Obama's new plan to reform health care, the USA's lowest 5% of hospitals — about 5,000 — will be required to take drastic steps to improve, including firing their chief administrator and, in some cases, at least half of their doctors, as happened last month at a Rhode Island hospital.

Shocked? Now replace the words "health care," "hospitals," "chief administrator," and "doctors" with "education," "principal," "schools" and "teachers," respectively. Does it sound acceptable now?

If you base the hospitals' performances on survival rates, where do you suppose those lowest 5% are going to be? I would guess that they'd be in the same neighborhoods where the lowest 5% of schools are.

Worrisome Things

"But there is also worrisome things, as I understand in the blueprint." --Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, commenting on President Obama's new education plan.

The 2010 Academy Awards

Michael Giacchino won for Best Music (original score). That's all I cared about. This guy's music is simply the best. The first ten minutes of "Up" was one of the most beautiful sequences I've ever seen put on film. It made me cry and Giacchino's score was a big part of the emotional impact.

His original score was the best thing about the new Star Trek movie. And his music from "Lost" plays a huge role in conveying the drama in my favorite television show. His soundtrack from "The Incredibles" was the one of the first CD's I put on my iPod. It's evocative of John Barry's James Bond music with some 60s Batman thrown in.

Congratulations, Michael!

A Lesson from Mark Twain

"Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog."--Mark Twain

If I Were a Rich Man...

...I'd have one of these.

But since I'm not, it'll be the superhero team headquarters in the next RPG I run or play in.

NCLB Not Working? You're Kidding!

This article from NPR tells the story. Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch changed her mind about the law, saying exactly what teachers have been saying since the passage of the law: "The basic strategy is measuring and punishing."

Give me accountability. Test them when they come in and test them when they leave. If they don't gain a year's worth of growth, I'll tell you exactly why. If you have data that proves me wrong, fire me. That's accountability I can believe in. But don't come in and think that a kid who can't reliably multiply 8 X 7 in his or her head when entering 8th grade is going to magically be able to graph and manipulate quadratic equations just because you threaten to close my school, transport all the students elsewhere and fire the whole staff. And that's what I've been hearing since 2002. Yes, I'm mad. It's about time someone with a platform was heard on this matter.

No More

“Why you talkin’ shit?”

That’s what one of my students said to me when I reprimanded him for throwing paper at another student. It’s not the worst thing ever said to me in school. It’s not even close. That would be, “Get your goddamned hands off me before I break your fucking glasses.” I had told that particular student to report to the office and he walked the other way. I had audaciously placed my hand on his arm to gently guide him in the right direction. Before I tell you what was done to these students, I want to you think carefully about what would have happened to you when you were in 8th grade if you had spoken to a teacher in that way. Do you have it in mind? Good. The paper thrower was suspended for one day. The would-be glasses breaker was sent to class (not mine) without punishment.

This isn’t a recent development. In my career I have seen things that would make the average person cry. Once, in my first three years of teaching, my colleagues and I were coming back to school from lunch. We were walking from our cars to the front door, when we found a student lying between cars, bleeding profusely from his mouth, his nose, his ears, and his eyes. He had been “beaten into” a gang. At that same school, I often encountered evidence that students had defecated in the stairwell. Students would have to walk through puddles of urine to get to class because someone had relieved themselves in the hallway. I remember a mother coming in to my classroom to find out where her daughter had been after school every day. When she found out that the daughter was taking an after school class to get an extra math credit, the mother punched her daughter in the face. Two students, both innocent bystanders, were shot at graduation because they happened to be seated between two thugs who started shooting at each other on sight. There was one time when an assistant principal’s voice came over the intercom, calling for a student who had been shot to death earlier in the school year to report to the main office. I sometimes joke that I called security once in 1989 to come get an unruly student who refused to leave the classroom. When I left that school in 1997, I was still waiting for the security guard to show up.

This is an example of what teachers face today. These are our clientele. Sure, we have good kids. Sure, we have students who are going to be doctors in our classes. Those kids do well under our tutelage. But some days, we face an uphill battle maintaining discipline and motivating students to take a more active part in their learning. How do you appeal to the hard core banger, the kid with 13’s drawn all over their notebooks? What’s that? You don’t know what that is? Google “Sur 13” and come on back. Aren’t you glad you looked? What can a teacher do to change that kid’s mind about the horrible situation that is his or her life? What can I, an individual who has clearly won the education game, offer this kid when ALL of his peers pressure him to not do well in school? Oh, yes, the pressure is there. It is a violation of protocol to do well—heck, to do anything in class. And yet, I keep hearing about how 51% of my evaluation is going to be based on my students’ test scores. If I lose my job over that, good luck finding someone who wants to replace me. This isn’t a picnic.

In 23 years, I have broken up at least 100 fights. I have been personally attacked and have had to defend myself. I have had my property destroyed, stolen, marked with graffiti, and my car has been vandalized in the school parking lot. Despite this, I have put thousands of dollars of my own money into my classroom, with the purchases of dry-erase boards, markers, computers, document cameras, VCRs, DVD players, LCD projectors, and last but not least, batteries for an insulin pump. No, I do not have diabetes. One of my students did and I didn’t want her to have to report to the nurse and miss class just because her pump needed a new battery, which happened frequently. I have given out my home phone number so that students could call for help if their parents were not able to help them. I have volunteered my time in innumerable committees, such as the school improvement team, the homework committee, the climate committee, the PL221 (look it up) committee. I have coached sports, sponsored events, hosted talent shows. You name it, and I’ve done it to help my students learn and to help my school improve. And I, by the way, am far from unique in my building.

I am sick and tired of the constant teacher bashing I see in the press and on television. You want to assign blame for the failure of students in today’s public schools? Look somewhere else. I’m not having any. Not today and not ever.