Breaking the Mold

The Environmental Trail #1

2008-08-09T08:04:00.003-05:00

My first big steps down the trail of environmental consciousness were through the book "Serve God, Save the Planet," but really I was preparing for those steps throughout my life. Appreciating the beauty, fragility and interconnectedness of nature as a whole has long been a part of my life through early camping trips with my family, campouts with the Boy Scouts, and then adventures planned by my friends and me. So if you really wanted to follow or just understand the process that brought me here, to my current thoughts, you really need to start out there. Go walk in the woods. Go float a river. Fly a kite. Watch birds. Sleep under the stars in your backyard. Visit a national park.

I think that going to these places, experiencing these "outdoor" type things, is more than just appreciating the beauty of the world around us, although that is a very good reason to go do those things. Instead, I think the importance comes more from the act of remembering that these places foster.

When we live in cities, in suburbs, we forget that we are actually dependent on the nature around us for our very survival. Food does not magically spring up at grocery stores. Gasoline does not condense out of the air into the fuel pumps. Electricity does not spontaneously and naturally flow through the wires that run to our houses and places of employ. Everything we do depends intimately on the natural world. Everything we see, whether a house, a car, a pair of Nike shoes, or the fajitas you ate last night for dinner, all of it comes from Nature. Someone mined the metal, harvested the grain, raised the beef, cut the trees...whatever the base product might be.

The processes that companies use to give us our modern conveniences affect us in myriad ways. The electricity that runs a factory comes from coal that was strip mined out of hills - probably in West Virginia or other Appalachian states. Many of the machines that mill, stitch, or assemble require some kind of cooling...which usually comes from our streams and lakes. This water is fed in, and used to cool down the machines, making the water hot. It goes back into the source from which it was drawn. And that is the most benign interaction with the local water ways. Chemicals might be added in order to dye or treat fabrics, to wash products, to make a special finish. This chemical water solution will often be dumped back into the rivers and lakes. Heat and air and vapors from chemical processes are also loosed into the air, floating on air currents to surrounding areas, or countries a world away.

These interactions are found just in the creation of a product. Our air, our water, our land is forever altered by each and every thing we create.

So when I read "Serve God, Save the Planet" I already had a sense of this interdependence. SGSP serve to take that interdependence and make it tangible. I had numbers - quanities of waste, cost of electricity. I had stories - devastating increases in environmental diseases and the damage they wrought on families. Most importantly, I also had solutions - I had actions, choices, presented in such a way that my own impact, while small, was still significant.

I began to conserve.

I'm Back!

2008-08-07T19:10:00.003-05:00

So my epic travels are currently over, although the next Big Trip is never far from my mind. If you missed it, my buddy Nick and I traversed the United States in my 2001 Toyota Camry, logging 9000 joint miles, and 11,400 before I was back in the hot, friendly confines of Houston. You can check out some ridiculous videos that we shot of our exploits at our other blog.

Along with huge amounts of driving, hiking, and beauty intaking, I also did quite a bit of reading this summer. The end result of this reading is a drastic shake-up of my lifestyle. Let's call this...oh, I don't know...maybe Breaking the Mold? Perfect.

My previous mold is now in pieces on the ground, and I am trying to make sense of a new world with words like "Organic", "Sustainable" and "Environment" taking center stage in its formation. I plan on laying out the entire progression of my current mental journey over the next couple weeks.

The beginning of my journey came when I read "Serve God, Save the Planet" by J. Matthew Sleeth. I blogged about this book here and here. You can find it at amazon.com here.

A couple months after reading that book and subsequently loaning it to everyone I know (who in turn, have told me they loaned/purchased it for everyone they know), I was told to watch this video, called "The Story of Stuff."

The video looks at the manufacturing process beginning all the way at material acquisition (i.e. digging up some bauxite that will be...), and ending at disposal (eventually turned into an aluminum can and thrown away or recycled).

Watching this video I was struck by a couple of points:

What is out of sight is generally out of mind - Since it isn't my backyard being dug up, I don't care. At least, that is how I have operated so far in my life.
I don't pay attention - Really an extension of the first, but even for the things that are in my sight, such as having 24 individual Gatorade bottles packaged in a bigger package, I don't even recognize how much I am wasting.
I do have power - Capitalism is based on supply and demand. When a demand exists for a product, a supply will grow to fill it. If I do not demand (as shown by my buying habits) triple packaging, but prefer a minimalist approach, that supply will grow.

Summer

2008-06-20T10:26:00.003-05:00

I don't imagine anyone even checks this anymore, as I have been so tardy with posts.

For the summer I will be taking a break to drive all over the country, and if you have any interest in driving or trips or national parks or horrible beards, you can check that out over at America Clockwise. I will resume posting here in August.

Later!

Somemore Vocation

2008-04-22T21:30:00.004-05:00

I honestly don't have any updates on what my vocation actually might be, but for the moment I do have an answer for my next step. I still think that teaching might be my road, but not middle school.

I accepted a high school math position at YES Prep NC.

I am actually really excited about the job. First, I get to teach high school. Second, I get to teach at YES, which is just an amazing place to work. The faculty is fun, and completely focused on getting the kids to college. The kids want to be there. They work hard and are friendly. Secondly, my course load is sweet; 2 sections of Alg 1, 2 sections of Alg 2 and 1 section of Robotics. Yep. I get my own robotics course.

So I am staying in Houston for at least another year.

Blairanator

2008-04-13T21:29:00.005-05:00

I have this student. W. He is a squirrel job.

I mean, he totally acts like a squirrel. He is out of his seat. He is in his seat. He is picking things up. He is putting them back down in different places.

He's squirrely.

Anyway, he used to frustrate me all the time. Although I found him relatively amusing, he took a lot of time out of class. But then he made me a picture. And then I started thinking "maybe he acts so crazy because he is really excited and doesn't know what to do about it..." I don't know. Maybe I'm reaching. But the pictures are great.

Picture #1

So in this one, W is laughing and I'm telling him to "Get out, go, go, go out in the hallway now."

I have a blair suit. I don't know why.

I have a magical shave button. This is what happens when I use sarcasm. "Did you shave Mister?"
"No. I pushed my magical shave button, and the hair sucks back into my head."
"OMG!"

Notice how small Mr. Farber looks next to me. Ha.

Picture #2

Yes. I'm called the Blair-o-nator.
Yes. It says "Crazy with education."
Yes. I have a Do First Cannon that shoots 50 sheets per second. That's a rate in case you were wondering.

Picture #3

So, now I'm a ninja. Or more accurately, a shogun blairator.
I think that's a kind of blender actually.

The motivational quote says "The speed of true power...the speed of education!!!!!" I think that our school district should adopt that as its slogan.

I also have a meter stick sword and a clipboard.

All of these pictures show me with a six-pack. I don't have that yet. But I am definitely that much bigger than Mr. Farber. And I do have a Shogun suit. And a Blairsuit (that's trademarked.).

Tracking

2008-04-13T21:21:00.004-05:00

One of the ways I motivate my students is with this giant wall tracking chart. At the beginning of the year each of my classes chose a class name, and then students submitted illustrations. The best ones (chosen by class voting) went up on the wall.

Once the classes had a name, competition naturally ensued. For each unit, objectives are posted on the wall, and class results are recorded. Blue means "We met our goal", Green means "We are close to our goal", and Red means "We kinda sucked it up on that one." Okay, really Red means "We are far from our goal".

Things have really been heating up lately, because the classes are all really close. I add fuel to the fire on quiz days by saying helpful things like "First period doesn't think you can catch them today. Actually, they said there is no way you catch them ever. Are you gonna let them get away with that?"

Originally I had to make up all the goading statements, but now my students are really getting into it. One of my classes is the Bananas, (thank God they don't sing that Bananas song "Go bananas, B A N A N A S"...I would have to leave.) and third period rolls in an JM goes "MISTER! Tell 2nd period I eat bananas for breakfast!"

Surprise

2008-04-13T19:38:00.003-05:00

My friends threw me a surprise birthday party. It was awesome.

I think that everyone should have a surprise birthday party at least once in their life, and probably more than once for good measure. Since asking someone "have you ever had a surprise party?" kinda gives away the fact that you want to have a surprise party, I think I will just start setting up surprise parties all the time. Maybe I will get a business card.

"Spontaneous Surprise Parties"
We throw one hell of a shindig.
On a moments notice.

But then people would start expecting me to throw surprise parties for them. And that wouldn't be a surprise anymore. So then I'll have to show up on their birthday and say "Surprise! I didn't throw you a party! But I know it's your birthday and that's cool. let's go eat cake."

They might be a little let down, but that would keep them guessing, which is what makes life fun.

Back to my party. So I really like rock climbing. I've been going to this gym called Texas Rock Gym about 3 times a week all year. I know quite a few people there, since I've been going so much, and I'm getting pretty good. When I started, I couldn't even climb a V0 route, and now I can climb V2. My goal is to get to a V4. That would be really cool stuff.

Anyway. My friend's rented the party space at Texas Rock Gym (TRG) and all showed up and climbed! And my parents even came! They didn't climb though.

Vocation

2008-03-24T19:03:00.003-05:00

I was talking with one of my buddies from Purdue when he mentioned that I sounded depressed. Well, not "sounded" depressed, but that my blog made me seem like I was depressed.

I am not depressed. Currently, I am facing a vocational crisis, and it is consuming a good amount of my energy. Luckily, my pal Thomas Merton arrived just in time. The chapter on "Being and Doing" just ended, giving way to chapter 8: "Vocation." Hallelujah (or in other words: it's about time).

So here is a little soothing balm for anyone who is also suffering a vocational crisis.

Each one of us has some kind of vocation. We are all called by God to share in His life and in His Kingdom. Each one of us is called to a special place in the Kingdom. If we find that place we will be happy. If we do not find it, we can never be completely happy. For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

We must not imagine that we only discover this destiny by a game of hide-and-seek with Divine Providence. Our vocation is not a sphinx's riddle, which we must solve in one guess or else perish. Some people find, in the end, that they have made many wrong guesses and that their paradoxical vocation is to go through life guessing wrong. It takes them a long time to find out that they are happier that way.

In any case, our destiny is the work of two wills, not one. It is not an immutable fate, forced upon us without any choice of our own, by a divinity without heart.

Our vocation is not a supernatural lottery but the interaction of two freedoms, and, therefore, of two loves. It is hopeless to try to settle the problem of vocation outside of the context of friendship and of love. We speak of Providence: that is a philosophical term. The Bible speaks of our Father in Heaven. Providence is, consequently, more than an institution, it is a person. More than a benevolent stranger, He is our Father. And even the term Father is too loose a metaphor to contain all the depths of the mystery: for He loves us more than we love ourselves, as if we were Himself. He loves us moreover with our own wills, with our own decisions. How can we understand the mystery of our union with God Who is closer to us than we are to ourselves? It is His very closeness that makes it difficult for us to think of Him. He Who is infinitely above us, infinitely different from ourselves, infinitely "other" from us, nevertheless dwells in our souls, watches over every movement of our life with as much love as if we were His own self. His love is at work bringing good out of all our mistakes and defeating even our sins.
- Thomas Merton. No Man Is an Island. Pgs 131-132.

Projector

2008-03-24T18:57:00.004-05:00

From January until spring break, I was not too excited about teaching. In fact, I was not excited to the point that I adopted a behavior that had never before existed - I began hitting the snooze button.

Regardless of how I arrived in that low place, nor what I ought to do as a result of it (in terms of life, vocation, etc.), I decided that 2 months of dreading work was just not something I was prepared to accept when I could take steps to change it.

And so, steps were taken.
I purchased a projector. For my classroom.
And for watching movies with a 17.5 foot diagonal screen in our living room.
But mainly for my classroom.

Today was the first day teaching with my new projector. My kids were excited. I was excited. I am still excited. I am actually planning right now (well, not right now).

So, if you ever get to the point where you are hitting the snooze 3 times a morning because you don't want to face the day, all you need to do is visit your nearest electronics retailer or Amazon.com and purchase yourself a projector. Guaranteed to boost morale, or your money back.

Of course, having a week off helps too.

Freedom

2008-03-23T10:03:00.003-05:00

I attended a sunrise service this morning. Setting my alarm for 6 am after not setting it and not getting out of bed before 9 all week was difficult. The service was moving.

The pastor started the service by reading Genesis 1 - the creation story. When he finished, he did not go into any sermon or anything, but instead, he sat down. Thirteen other passages were going to be read, but volunteers from the church body would come forward to read. The second passage was Psalm 46. Then came Genesis 22, the sacrifice of Isaac. Then Psalm 33. Then someone began to read Exodus 14.

I have heard Exodus 14 before. I have read it. Groups have studied it. I am familiar with the story. Moses is an Israelite, but gets adopted into the royal family. He discovers his heritage, murders a slave master and flees. God meets him in the desert. God calls him to lead His people. Moses goes back. He performs miracles. The people leave. Pharaoh chases. The Red Sea gets parted. Pharaoh's army gets swallowed by the sea. The Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years.

I know the story.

But today, as these words were read:

"As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the LORD. They said to Moses, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn't we say to you in Egypt, 'Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians'? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!" "
- Exodus 14:10-12

I realized just what the Israelites were saying. They were yelling, demanding, complaining with Moses and with God. They were wishing for the past days, the days when they were slaves.

So I thought, "Wait...they want to be slaves?"

I was surprised. It was almost one of those Loony Toons, eyes out of your head, awooga awooga surprises. How had I missed this? How did this make any sense? I mean, for the first time in their lives, these people are free! Why would they ever want to be slaves again?

The conclusion I came to, that now seems to make sense, is that they were free, yes, but they were immediately faced with a reality of freedom in this world. They found that "In this world you will have trouble." (John 16:33). They found danger and uncertainty and fear and a God who could do amazing things but who still asked for faith.

I think that this story is my story. I think that God frees me, offers me these amazing and beautiful things saying, "Look, you're free! Now follow me!" but instead of looking around with joy and following immediately, I look around and see danger and uncertainty. I step right back into the bondage because it is familiar and known, and faith is oh so scary.

It is like the story of the POWs that I heard once. The heroic soldiers break-in, knock down the door, letting light stream into the room. They whisper, "Come on! You're free! We are here to rescue you!" but all the POWs do is huddle on the floor. They don't even look at the open door. They don't even look at the faces of their rescuers. They are too broken. They have lost all hope of anything other than their captivity.

So the soldiers try and pick them up. It doesn't work. There are too many. They plead. They urge. They shout. Nothing works.

Finally, one of them lays aside his gun, and gets down, and huddles with the POWs. He becomes one of them. Only then do the POWs realize that this is not some trick of the guards. The guards would never deign to become like prisoners.

I think that I don't know what to do with freedom. Even when it slaps me in the face. I am like the POW. I am so used to my captivity, that even with an open door, I do not have the ability to walk out of it.

I am Good

2008-03-20T13:32:00.004-05:00

My friends came home yesterday.

Being a teacher, I am afforded an amazing opportunity to vacation. Just like a kid, I look forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas and Spring Break with an eager anticipation that can only be described as liberation. Last year I went to Big Bend National Park for spring break. The year before that I went to Great Smokies National Park. This year, I stayed home.

My friends went down to Port Aransas for 5 days. They rented a house on the beach, and had crazy adventures like going on a casino cruise boat during a tornado warning, not bringing any cash, having credit machines go down in the storm, and being trapped, sea-sick, with nothing to do except watch other people drink and gamble (because they couldn't get any money). I stayed home.

My friends asked me to come but I declined. I was feeling very single. Three couples were going on the trip, and, well, I just didn't want to deal with it. Looking at them, thinking about being in their company seemed to highlight things that were not (I am not in a relationship. I do not know what job I will have. I do not know what I want.) instead of the things that were (My friends love me. They enjoy my company. I love my friends). So I stayed home.

During the time they were gone, I bummed around. I rode my bike. I climbed at TRG. I watched movies. I read books. I didn't cook. I thought about my future.

Thinking about the future is dangerous for me. I start thinking, and the thinking just spirals outward, ever outward. Figuring out the future is hard because it hasn't happened yet. And I don't want to mess it up. Those two governing criteria make success pretty difficult. Especially because I am not that great about Today, and shoot, I'm doing that right now.

Take teaching. I guess I am an okay teacher. I am not great. I am not bad.
Take engineering. I am an okay engineer. I am not great. I am not bad.
In fact, there is a list that could extend across multiple pieces of paper listing the things I am okay at.

And this fact also adds to the spiral of future thinking. I don't know what I want to do. I look around at people around me, like my friends, and I see qualities that I want to emulate. I see there not-singleness. I see there plans. I see their passion. I see their success. And those things stand in stark contrast against the corresponding abilities in me; the only difference being that I find my qualities to be lacking.

I've been reading a chapter called "Being and Doing", in Thomas Merton's No Man Is an Island.

Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?

We cannot be ourselves unless we know ourselves....We cannot begin to know ourselves until we can the real reasons why we do the things we do , and we cannot be ourselves until our actions correspond to our intentions, and our intentions are appropriate to our own situation. But that is enough. It is not necessary that we succeed in everything. Am an can be perfect and still reap n o fruit from his work, and it may happen that a man who is able to accomplish very little is much more of a person than another who seems to accomplish very much."
- Pg 126

I think this is very true. When Jesus called his disciples, they were not Torah rockstars. They were not rich, successful people. They were fishermen. They were the people who were not good enough to make the cut to be disciples of Rabbis in the regular Jewish culture. And they messed up. They messed up a lot.

Right after Jesus was crucified, he appears to the disciples and he has a conversation with Peter. Peter was one of Jesus' three closest friends, but Peter lied about this friendship 3 times while Jesus was imprisoned. He had messed up. But the conversation is not about the betrayal. Instead, Jesus comes to Peter and asks if him if he still wants to follow, if he still wants to take part in Jesus' work. Peter doesn't respond with joy. He doesn't even respond with guilt. He responds with, "Well what about HIM? What about John? What are you going to do with John?"

I think that I too often act like Peter. I too often "strive to be something I would never want to be" because I see it in other people and it seems to be working so well. But I am not made that way. Currently, I am an okay teacher. And that's okay. It is not okay if I stay here, if I do not try and improve, but for today, it is okay.

There are other things I can do. I can cook a meal for my friends. I can bless them by providing that for them. I can combine tastes into something amazing that makes you pause as it shouts on your tongue.

I am good at that. And that's okay. For today.

Stress

2008-03-18T09:42:00.007-05:00

My dentist is awesome. She is from Bulgaria or Estonia or one of those Eastern European nations that all blend together to me because I am so poor with geography. She has a pretty heavy accent, and regularly takes breaks while cleaning my teeth to ask my accusing questions like, "Do you drink the soft drinks?!"

When I answer that "No," I don't really drink soft drinks ever, she nods in dubious approval, and responds with a "Soft drinks are very bad. 80 grams sodium in each can. Bad for your heart. And caffeine! Ah! Soft drinks bad for teeth too."

I like her because she gives me information on every single thing she does. She asks about every aspect of my oral health, and then describes, in detail, how that will contribute to either bliss or my imminent demise. Well, she doesn't actual link flossing to my death or salvation, but it seems that way.

And she is extremely thorough. Since most people go to the dentist every 6 months, but rarely go to the doctor, she has taken it upon herself to take heart rate and blood pressure readings upon every visit. Apparently, there is something wrong with me, because in 6 months, my blood pressure went from "Really good" to "You are in the danger area. Do you smoke? Drink? Do you sleep? Ever?"

I think it is stress. For good or ill (and at this time, it seems ill) I have taken the TFA mantra, "I am the instructional leader of my classroom" to the nth degree. One of my roommates, who has a poor opinion of our public schools, says "You can't worry about them (the students). They choose to screw around, so you can't make them learn." Part of me knows this to be true. The whole, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" phenomenon.

But then the other 90% of me, the part responsible for my high blood pressure, says, "Yea, but isn't that why TFA accepted me? Because I would work relentlessly, I would continuously improve and do all the other rah rah stuff necessary to motivate and inspire and coerce (if necessary) my kids until the do learn?

And so I am stressed out. I am completely wound up. I am getting wound up just thinking about it. My kids need to pass the state test. They need to do well. They need to learn all of my material so they can enter 8th grade on level for a change.

But then I read this passage by Merton:

A simple intention rests in God while accomplishing all things. It takes account of particular ends in order to achieve them for Him: but it does not rest in them . Since a simple intention does not need to rest in any particular end, it has already reached the end as soon as the work is begun. For the end of a simple intention is to work in God and with Him - to sink deep roots into the soil of His will and to grow there in whatever weather He may bring.

A right intention is what we might call a "transient" intention: it is proper to the active life which is always moving on to something else. Our right intention passes from one particular end to another, from work to work, form day to day, from possibility to possibility. It reaches ahead into many plans. The works planned and done are all for the glory of God: but they stand ahead of us as milestones along a road with an invisible end. And God is always there at the end. He is always "future," even though He may be present. The spiritual life of a man of right intentions is always more or less provisional. It is more possible than actual, for he always lives as if he had to finish just one more job before he could relax and look for a little contemplation."
- Thomas Merton. "No Man Is an Island." Pgs. 72, 73.

What Next?

2008-03-16T19:03:00.006-05:00

My commitment to Teach For America, and to my original placement school ends with the school year. My friends are all eagerly discussing their applications and interviews, cheering acceptances and morning rejections. I have applied to one position. I was rejected.

But this is not a post about rejection. Yes it sucks, but it does not control my life. It happens, sometimes a lot, and we have the choice to learn or not, try again or not. My thoughts are not on "what did not" but instead on "what I should".

I am envious of people who have a plan. I still remember the cutting words of my friend B., a pivotal person in my spiritual growth, who said, "What are your plans? You don't know? I've been telling boys I know that they should Be a Man, have a plan." It is one of those pithy sayings that makes one's spirits immediately sink. I fear that what was true for me then is still true now; I am big on dreams, pretty light on plans.

I have friends who tell me that I am good at finding opportunities, going or doing things that are out of the ordinary course. My mother says the same thing, which makes it definitely true. But even if I am good at finding opportunities, my current hang-up is on what opportunities I should find. What dream should I turn into a plan.

The normal things are guiding me. I want to get paid. Hopefully, enough to eat, have a place, take some trips, have Internet. I want to meet new and exciting people. I want community. I want to grow and learn. I want to see and live in the outdoors. I want to meet a girl before the questions from my family become to frequent and I stop wanting to visit as a result.

But more than these things, I want to be challenged and I want to know that what I do matters. My application to TFA was centered on these two ideas. Of course I got almost all of the other things as a bonus, but I was seeking a challenge, and significance in my life. And I don't know where I can find that again.

And it is not that my current job lacks significance all of the sudden. Or that I am some amazing teacher and it is no longer a challenge. Maybe I just want more...excitement. Maybe I just want the new car smell.

I guess this post kinda lacks a conclusion. Well, I don't have this figured out. If anyone does, please let me know.

Long Time

2008-03-15T14:13:00.003-05:00

I haven't posted in three weeks and five days. Life has been...*head shaking* lately.

I don't know about other people, whether they get in these patterns of behavior like mine. At a bible study a couple weeks ago we talked about how our immediate surroundings make us think that one thing is true, like when you are in the ocean and the waves roll, and you are in a trough and can't see beyond those waves to your immediate right and left. Everything else in the world is blocked from your sight. That's how I get some times.

I was reading something, I think it was this eulogy for a dead high school athlete. The father of the dead boy gets up to speak, and he just can't make it work, but from somewhere, strength musters, and out pours this story. And he talks about how gang violence took his son for no reason, honestly no reason, because his son never put a toe out of line. And he talks about how gangs are this horrible thing and how the community needs to step up to make them not have power in the neighborhoods. And that was all moving, and true, if somewhat cliche. But the father doesn't stop there, for he recognizes this short-coming, and says what I found particularly poignant.

He says, the kids joining the gangs, they are joining for the wrong reasons. But for them, for these kids, its the right reason.

That's how I feel, looking at my life of the past 3 weeks and 5 days. I look at it, and see the lack of...any type of desire, and know that this languor is completely pointless and useless, and yet the reasons seem right for me.

See, I have been kind of riding solo of late. And I am fine with that; I am not the type of person who freaks out if there is no one around. But everyone needs community. And when I feel (note: it doesn't have to be true, it just has to seem true) that my community is absent, I start retreating. I retreat in. And in. And in. And in.

And it seems natural. And then before I know it, I have spent 2 straight days of not talking to anyone, not moving anywhere, not even going outside. And my heart feels like it is dying. Then someone calls and asks how I am, or tells me to come to lunch, and I come, and I remember how much I love my community, and how vibrant and fulfilling it is. At that time, I will look back at myself, and wonder how I could possibly retreat so far, make those choices.

It was the wrong reason, but it was the right reason for me. Which is why I need God.

More Heavy Merton

2008-02-19T20:29:00.005-06:00

I have been slowly working through "No Man Is an Island" by Thomas Merton. I've been trying to read this book for something like 3 years now, as I keep starting and stopping. Each section is so much for me to handle; I usually have to re-read a one page section a couple times to really understand the points. Then once I have understood it, I need more time to look at my life through the lens of that particular section.

Since we are in the season of Lent, it is fitting that the chapter I am currently working through is entitled "Asceticism and Sacrifice". Below is an excerpt from the section I read last night.

No matter what our aims may be, no matter how spiritual, no matter how intent we think we are upon the glory of God and His Kingdom, greed and passion enter into our work and turn it into agitation as soon as our intention ceases to be pure. And who can swear that his intentions are pure, even down to the subconscious depths of his will, where ancient selfish motives move comfortably like forgotten sea monsters in waters where they are never seen!

In order to defend ourselves against agitation, we must be detached not only from the immediate results of our work – and this detachment is difficult and rare – but from the whole complex of aims that govern our earthly lives. We have to be detached from health and security, from pleasures and possessions, from people and places and conditions and things. We have to be indifferent to life itself, in the Gospel sense, living like the lilies of the filed, seeking first the kingdom of Heaven and trusting that all our material needs will be taken care of into the bargain. How many of us can say, with any assurance, that we have even begun to live like this?

Lacking this detachment, we are subject to a thousand fears corresponding to our thousand anxious desires. Everything we love is uncertain: when we are seeking it, we fear we may not get it. When we have obtained it, we fear even more that it may be lost. Every threat to our security turns our work into agitation.

So this section basically punched me in the face. I think I will need at least a week to sort through it. The detachment section...geez. The reality is that as I am currently thinking about what to do next, yes I am praying "Thy will be done" but at the same time I am thinking "Hmm, I want some place with lots to do, that has mountains and water, that is warm. I want a place with a job that gives me lots of time off, but is meaningful, and uses all of my abilities. I want it to pay a lot. I don't want it to be too stressful. I want a community who will appreciate and validate me. I want I want I want."

Will you be my nephew?

2008-02-17T13:36:00.003-06:00

On Friday, I attended a celebration party for my friends Mr. B and Ms. G. The cause for celebration (and general merriment) was the recent engagement of these individuals.

The event itself was simple; there were about twenty people, about twelve bottles of wine, and various hors' dourves including

20 avocados worth of guacamole
pico de gallo
handmade tortilla chips
mixed berries
fresh mozzarella pizzas
baguette with various cheeses

So we sat and chatted and laughed and reminisced and teacher vented.

And after some time passed, Ms. G saddles over and sits next to me on the couch.
"Mr. Blair, I have something serious I need to tell you."

I giggle. I tend to laugh at things I find ridiculous, and that statement was very ridiculous. First off, Ms. G and I have never had a truly serious conversation; they always include random absurdities. Second, Ms. G has bright red hair, and an ever-smiling face, so when she sat down with this earnest "I have something serious to tell you" face, I had no choice but to giggle.

"Ok," I respond.
"I have nephew," she begins, drawing me into her narrative with it's simplicity.
"I have a nephew who is just like you. He is tall, like 6'8"..."
"So he's taller than I am. But not when I have shoes on."
"Oh okay, well he's tall, and athletic and he was going to be a priest, but then he got married instead..."
"Oh yea I did that too! Oh wait, no...I didn't. But I could, that sounds cool."
"Shh! And he is really nice and smart and just a very honest person. And every time I see you I think of him, and every time I see him I think of you."
"Okay."
"But that isn't the serious thing. The serious thing is that since I always think of him, I really want you to be my nephew too."

Now at this point, any potential for giggling is completely removed. I laugh. Full belly laugh. Guffaw even.

"I secretly want you to call me Aunt G. and come to family reunions and stuff. All my sisters are married already, but I have lots of nieces who are nice. You met one, and the entire time you were talking with her Mr. B and I were talking about how cute you looked together and plotting to get you to be my nephew."
"I can tell you have put a lot of thought into this. I'm flattered."
"So basically, I want you to marry one of my nieces and have lots of babies."

I'll get right on that.

Conservationalism Again

2008-02-16T06:32:00.003-06:00

I loaned "Serve God Save the Planet" to a friend of mine, so it was out of my possession for a couple months. During that time, I talked about it on various occasions with a diverse group of people. I made choices for my house as I could make them. The call to be stewards became one always near the forefront of my mind, imposing itself in the periphery of my daily life.

Now that it is back in my possession, I was thumbing through it, recalling different aspects of the challenge that it offers, when I came upon the following passage, taken from one of the giants of Christian theological thought.

Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by negligence; but let him endeavor to hand it down to posterity as he received it, or even better cultivated. Let hi so feed on its fruits, that he neither dissipates it by luxury, nor permits it to be marred or ruined by neglect...Let every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. - John Calvin

This last, "Let every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses," represents an idea that has been moving me during this school year. Just like in the parable of the talents, where the master rewards the servants who worked hard with the amounts they were given, so every single gift, ability, possession is given me that I might be a blessing to others with it.

It is not unlike a parent giving toys to a child. The parent does not start off, unless they are foolish, by just buying a $3000 entertainment center or drum set or roller blades. First, the parent will get a simpler object, an introductory object, which will satiate the child's desire, but at the same time, will serve as a test to see just how interested, how serious, the child's original request was. The child's actions bear out true intentions; if the child cares for it, uses it, is willing to share it, then they were earnest in their request and a further investment would be prudent.

This idea is one of the causes of my current career struggles. I feel pressure, now that I know I ought to be sharing whatever I can do, to invest in all my abilities. I feel somewhat like a failure because I cannot come up with some brilliant idea that utilizes all of my personality quarks, each of my skill sets, and at the same time is a service to God and man.

I mean, I spent all of college honing my mind in the rigorous problem-solving structure of engineering, and teaching simply does not utilize that kind of technical aptitude. And a traditional engineering job denies my athletic nature and my social nature; I cannot sit in a cubicle all day.

So I think I finally came up with the perfect job. I am going to travel by foot (running, cycling, walking, hiking) from place to place, and clean the areas I go, while doing some sort of rigorous environmental study, and then show up in some place and have an amazing kitchen waiting for me where I will cook gourman meals for people I meet and design custom engineering devices. Oh and I am going to get paid for this. Who will fund this enterprise I have yet to iron out, since I just made this up.

A thought

2008-02-13T21:22:00.003-06:00

I have Bible studies on Wednesday nights. This week we talked about sacrifice. While I was preparing material for that lesson, I came across this passage in Hebrews.

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

I paused over "unswervingly" and "spur one another on". I like both those images. The first moves in my mind a person walking in darkness, with dim lantern in hand. The lantern gives just enough light to see two steps in front, and the walker continues to trust the path through the night.

The second phrase creates this image of a runner. His muscles are tensed, veins wide, sweat filming his body, and his eyes have the far-away look of a man who has retreated inward, away from reality. Step after tired step continues to move his body forward, but no longer is it actually a choice, instead it is momentum. Then friends, family, loved-ones step up to the side of the course. The shout, they cheer, they smile encouragement. They offer water, some even run a little way with him. At first, recognition eludes the runner, but slowly, eyes begin to draw back to focus, calves begin to flex on the planting step.

I pray that I might be the first traveler, the racer and the supporters.

Green City

2008-02-10T10:45:00.001-06:00

So Abu Dhabi is constructing a green city. This article in the BBC details the project. Stats from the article boast of 25% of power consumption and 60% of water consumption of a similar sized, non-green community.

This is ambitious and amazing. My question, however, is why is this happening in Abu Dhabi?

I mean yes, the oil nation has plenty of disposable income, and an image problem due to its excessive carbon foot-print, but I don't think those should be strong enough reasons in and of themselves to justify a 22bn USD investment. The world community does not exert enough pressure for carbon excess (yet) to make that much of a motivator, and money can always be used to make more palm-frond islands or islands to represent the globe.

I am going to assume that the leaders of UAE are somewhat rational, and by that I mean that they have their own best interests in mind when they are using their money. As a result, the two reasons I can come up with for the construction of this green city are publicity and technological investment.

Publicity is not hard to grasp. If the country makes headlines with the crazy islands, with a green city, maybe people (from Europe or the US or wherever) will want to go there and spend money.

Technological investment is pretty straight forward as well. I think that pretty much everyone believes that at some point we will need sustainable energy apart from fossil fuels, and the only question is when. Note that this is not an argument about global warming or even pollution in general, but instead an argument about consumption of a limited resource and the increasing cost linked to its increasing scarcity.

My question again, is why is this happening in Abu Dhabi?

Why is the US not taking the initiative on a technology that obviously be at the forefront of the global economy down the road? Economically speaking, private enterprise will shift to sustainable energy when it is cost effective, but our energy is not taxed as heavily as Europe and the social cost (social pressure) is not as high as well. This means that places like the UK, France, Germany, or even the UAE will be years ahead of the US in development of cost effective, large-scale solutions to the energy problem (not involving ethanol since that diverts food stuffs and demands so much geographic area), that even with the huge amount of intellectual capital that the US has to expend, I just don't think we would be able to make up lost ground.

The US currently is a world economic leader because of its innovation, its technology. If we are not pressing forward on such an obvious technological front, I think that our position in the global economy will weaken.

Why the Balancing Act?

2008-02-09T22:00:00.002-06:00

This earlier post talked about two sides, schools of thought, on education.

Here is a summary from one of the education blog reel I read. It emphasizes the human quality of teaching including the following:

I’m concerned with the jobs my students get - especially with the jobs my special education students get. But I’m more concerned with the sort of people they become. And what of the minimalist approach that looks at children and teenagers and thinks first (or only) about their place in society’s economy? I find it insulting to core. It makes me want to heckle public speakers and defend the values I imbibed as a student of the liberal arts.
- Dangerously Irrelevant Blog

For another view on this topic, this blog post by another TFA alum argues for national assessments.

Won't this just take teaching to the test to the nth degree?
Teaching to the test happens when the test doesn't reflect what otherwise should be taught. If teaching to the test becomes teaching students to pass a vital, standards-based, focused assessment each week, isn't that just teaching with a test?
- from the t.f.a. trenches Blog

I do not mean to set these two articles up as mutually exclusive. Instead, I have noticed in my own teaching experience that I struggle to strike a balance between the ideas of giving character and life type education and more formal skill and knowledge type education. There is a finite amount of time in the classroom, and every decision I make moves my students toward some end. With data in front of me and always at the forefront of my mind, I tend to get caught up in how far my students have to go, and how much we need to focus on skills. I forget that there is more to life, more that my students need to experience to be successful.

This is especially true in middle school. I guess my conclusion is that we need national assessments. We need the accountability. Our students are supposed to be receiving a service, a product, and only assessment gives the nation or the public or the consumer/student feedback on what that service actually amounts to. In this push to provide an excellent product, an excellent education however, we educators cannot lose sight of the fact that an excellent education is more than just making a growth goal or making a mastery number for the year or passing an exit exam. We educators must also make choices that provide opportunities for providing decision making abilities, ethics, communication, social structures. We must make instructional decisions that make life possible in our classrooms.

Music

2008-02-09T08:51:00.001-06:00

I have been inspired by Haywood and all his music posting. First, I have been slowly listening to his music recommendations. But that is not the important part of this post.

The important part is Pandora.

Pandora is a website that lets you create radio stations. The site creators spent three or four years characterizing music by lots of different attributes or genes, and then formed a 'music genome' that allows comparisons between different musicians. So you go, type in a band you want to listen to, and it creates a station that has other artists that have similar qualities.

I have had huge success with the station. I type in something I feel like listening to, and I get a whole station of new music, mostly artists I have never heard of, and all of it is really good.

You can even give feedback on the other songs they are playing so that you can stream-line the station.

The only drawbacks to the site is that you can't control the music flow. You can advance to the next track, but you can't choose a specific artist or track at a particular time. You also can't go back and replay a song. It will come up again, but it is random.

So the lack of control is kind of lame. Okay, it is really lame. But, as far as giving exposure to new music, the site is awesome. So use the tool for what it is meant for. Go discover some new music. Then download it, buy it, or whatever you do so that you can listen at your convenience.

Pandora Station Recommendation: The Fugees

GourMAN, Mark III

2008-02-09T08:43:00.002-06:00

News on the GourMAN front.

The movement is building. I have independent confirmations from Michigan, Indiana and Texas that the word is getting play.

In an effort to build the cause for widespread use of "gourman", I created an Urban dictionary entry for it. Ha! Go check it out and click the thumbs up to give it more credibility. Grassroots is the way to go. (I accidentally created two copies because I am an idiot. And I can't delete one yet. I'm working on that.)

Here is an account from my buddy in Holland, MI:
"i used the word gourman last night. :) people received it well!"

Here is a picture of the GourMAN meal that we made last weekend.

We had grilled pork chops, seasoned vegetables (mushrooms, yellow squash, zucchini, and red onions), and sweet potato wedge fries. Serious shout out to Ms. T for the sweet potato fries idea. I had them at her house, and have since incorporated them into my arsenal. They are a solid performer.

Balancing Act in Action

2008-02-01T17:26:00.001-06:00

This post is wrapping up my teacher-talk on planning and NCLB. When last mentioned, a question about "What Ought to be Taught" loomed on our collective horizon.

This question has two sides, as I see it. The first, I shall term Accountability. The Accountability side of the debate centers on, well, accountability. "We need accountability for students, for teachers, for administrators and for schools, and shoot, while we're at it, we need accountability on the policy-makers and politicians setting this whole system up too," might be the call to arms for the Accountability Camp. They might take issue with what exactly should be assessed, but some assessment is better than no assessment, and let's be honest, this is a work-in-progress folks, so they will take the TAKS test, they will take the NY Regents, they will take the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, they will call for greater state-to-state alignment and national standards. They will call for merit pay because we should reward teachers who actually, well, teach...well. They will call for high expectations; high expectations for student learning, high expectations for teacher performance. The end game for Accountability is an excellent product; in this case, graduates that are capable of doing anything and everything and contributing to society (I assume.)

The somewhat-opposing view I will label as holistic (Note: I am completely making this stuff up. I am trying to put to words the sense I have of how things work, and I don't know how well it conveys the true nature of things.). This view is that students are Individuals, people. They have desires, needs, dreams, and education should lead them to self-actualization so that they can choose for themselves the path for their lives. As a teacher then, my role would be to help students to understand the world and their place in it, to help them learn to ask and answer questions that they themselves pose, to give the skills they need to relate to the world. Testing does not really fit into this structure.

I don't know that I have ironed out exactly what my view on the role of education is, but I know that Pure Accountability makes me feel empty when I teach, while Pure Holistic denies the reality of the system and gatekeepers that students must pass to advance into college or whatever.

A couple of weeks ago I had a lesson that did a pretty good job of balancing these competing purposes.

The lesson was the first of three or four dealing with the equivalence of rational numbers; this idea that fractions, percents and decimals all communicate the same amounts, parts of a whole, but are written in different forms. The objective for the lesson was for my students to see that all the numbers work the same way, and that we can compare them.

The lesson started with a situation.

"You just got a graduation gift of money. How much money do we have?"
Answers would range from $100 to $600. Surprisingly not one class went crazy on this.
"Okay, we have $500 dollars. We are going to put it in a bank account. Does anybody know why we might want to do this?"
Answers included so that we can write checks, to get a credit card, to save it for later. Roughly 20% of my students knew that bank accounts actually pay interest.
"Well, banks actually pay us to put our money there. If we leave our money in the bank, it will get more money for us and we don't have to do anything. So we have three banks to choose from. They have different savings rates. Which one should we choose?"
Kids knew that they wanted the most money possible. That was easy.

So, I conveniently changed the savings rates to easier numbers (none of this 0.32% crap), and made each bank use a different form of the rational numbers. As a class we went through and computed the first banks interest. As a table (group of 3ish), students did the second bank. As individuals, students computed the third bank. This took about 20 minutes.

"So which bank should we put our money in? Oh yea, Bank 3 gave us the most money! Cool. So let's review. We had a fraction a decimal and a percent, but they all gave us about the same amount of money. Hmm. We just spent 20 minutes figuring that out. Do you know we could have figured it out in 2 minutes?"

Groans echoed through the room. "Mister!" came the call from exasperated students.

I now introduce the idea of comparing rational numbers by changing them to the same form. We change them all to percents in 50 seconds, and have the best account in 70.

It was an early release day, so class was over at this point, but my students left knowing something real about the world (saving money in a financial institution helps me not to spend it AND it pays me money) and the saw something true about problem solving (there are many different ways to solve problems, just some are faster than others) and something content-wise (to compare rational numbers I need to have them all in the same form).

I felt extremely satisfied at the end of that lesson.

GourMAN Additions

2008-01-28T20:57:00.001-06:00

I am slowly but surely developing a GourMAN MANifesto. We already have categories for presentation and serving size (hence forth called Amplitude, because that is a sweet word), but some new categories that are edging in are Cost to Awesomeness ratio and Food Group Diversity.

I received a heart-warming email from my buddy K on this topic, which is the epitome of GourMAN:

Hey Man, I wanted to let you know that I made a GourMAN meal Friday night in your honor. First, I made a pasta dish with tortellini in a goat cheese cream sauce with peas and cherry tomatoes. Secondly, this is where the GourMAN part comes in, I made pheasant. This isn't store bought pheasant. My good friend Rick shot it, that's right shot it with a gun and brought it to my house. During the preparation process we found a few leftover pellets lodged in the meat and a couple more during mastication. Anyway, I wanted to let you know that your new cooking style has inspired me. I would like to author a chapter in your upcoming book "GourMAN: A Man's Guide to Gourmet". Chapter 9: GourMAN goes Organic!

K has it right. Anything that has been shot, trapped, caught, grown, harvested etc by your own hands immediately gains huge GourMAN points.

We also had a GourMAN meal this evening, but sadly, we destroyed it before any pictures could be taken. In fact, I think I ate so fast that I didn't even breathe. We had two pounds of Atlantic Salmon, a pot full of Royal Blend organic rice, two pounds of steamed broccoli and a large bowl of salad. Bam. Top that Emiril.

A Landscape

2008-01-26T07:37:00.001-06:00

Nick wrote:

"Which begs the question, should that be the goal of teaching? A standardized test. Or should it be about "learning". In practice, very few students would learn just because that is what education is about. Those are probably already the top students, such as a Mr. Blair as a child. Do the standardized tests help the laggards though? Probably not, nothing probably helps. So you have this middle group. Does it help the middle group? This is not a simple question, and one that I think we can all have opinions to but no right answers. I have teacher friends who loath No Child Left Behind (I have not discussed with Mr. Blair). I don't have a real opinion about it, but I can say with confidence that there was a reason it was created."

I feel so lucky! I have had people actually posting comments on here, and not only that, but the comments are actually thought provoking and interesting and the beginning of a conversation. Granted, pretty much all the comments are coming from one person, who just happens to be a friend of mine, so really I could take this as a sign that we don't talk enough about "important" things...or I could just be glad I have comments.

So. The Goal. Of teaching. I think Nick has been pretty perceptive already with his breakdown of standardized testing; Standardized testing is not (IMO) meant to focus/motivate/assess individual students. It is meant to compare bodies of students. It is like any data metric; an average cannot tell us what is wrong in particular, but it can show the symptoms. I would view standardized testing's role as accountability and information; the tests hold teachers, schools, districts, states, and yes students, accountable for the materials that is 'supposed to be taught' in a given time period. It also gives information about student groups that are being under-served, specific weaknesses in content.

The problem is not that the tests exist. The tests ought to exist. The problem is in their use. First, they are used as a control device by the federal government. Schools are not a federal power, so the only way that the federal government can meddle, or attempt to meddle, is through money, whether bribes or threats. So the tests are attached to money. And this is where the problem comes in; as a teacher in a Title I school, our autonomy and our jobs hang in the balance if our students to do not perform well. If they do poorly, the government brings in oversight, pays for a program that we are forced to follow (this is how you raise your hand, this is what you say at 12:31.4 this is what you should ask, this is your homework), and then they will eventually cut all positions and restaff if it gets bad enough.

That creates a culture of fear and gives power to the test. Also incorporated in this is the very real nature of the tests as an individual gatekeeper; if the tests are being used for accountability, the students should feel some of that accountability as well. Hence we now have pass to advance in (I think) 3rd, 5th, 8th, 11th. Our kids are tracked (somewhat) based on results. More power for the test. More fear.

These are the things that are going on. I know the things my kids and I are accountable for. I know the level of depth we must reach. I also know where my students enter my class; they enter behind. We need to catch up.

As a result I am always balancing competing desires as I write a lesson:

The desire for my kids to know the material
The desire to honor and dignify my students as people
The desire to not bore myself
The desire for my students to do well on the TAKS test

I might also include on this list "the desire to not spend 100 years planning each lesson", which is something that I feel is both justified and at the same time somewhat lamentable.

There are times when I focus too much on TAKS, and I get fed up, because I am doing a disservice to my kids. And there are times when I focus too much on just knowing the material and having real-life applicability (honoring my kids status as People) and then we have a TAKS question and it is worded weird and my kids can't answer it.

What should teaching be about? Probably 90% the first three and 10% the last one. But my kids just do not cross-apply knowledge well. I don't know why. I can't remember if I had trouble with that or not. So I have to teach TAKS to some degree. The degree is always varying.

Next time: An example of this balancing act in action.

Backwards Design - Planning

2008-01-21T10:58:00.001-06:00

Since Nick got me going on Test Creation, I thought I would continue to unleash all of my incomplete knowledge of planning. I aspire to be a cautionary tale, so hopefully this ends up helping somebody.

Here is my current planning cycle:

Beginning of the year: Look at all of the objectives that the State of Texas suggests 7th graders ought to know. These are found in the list of TEKS.

I then group these objectives into thematic units based on synergistic skills. So I put percents operations together with proportions because I plan on teaching percent operations using proportions.
Next I organize the units into a general order so that most basic skills are taught first. This insures that students have all the prior knowledge necessary for whatever unit they are starting. This is called my (cue theme music) "Long Term Plan".

During the year: Before each unit I read through all of the test materials and book materials for the learning objectives contained in that unit.

I go through the test creation cycle described in my other post.
I create quizzes that are very similar to the tests, differing only in their length and scope. They still scaffold from ground up to TAKS, but they will only cover 1 or 2 skills, and be limited to 4 or 5 questions total.
I look at my Long Term Plan to figure out how long I have to teach the unit. I break out my calendar and fit my test and quizzes onto it.
Before I put the rest of my lessons on the calendar, I break down the objectives into all of the skills and knowledge that my students will need to obtain in order to be successful on the tests and quizzes that I wrote.
Using this list of skills and knowledge, I fit them into general lessons and assign them to the remaining days on the calendar.

During the week: For each day I review what my students need to learn to be on track for the upcoming test/quiz, and review practice materials, previous lesson plans, exceptional lessons (from NCTM or other EduBloggers for example), and textbooks.

Knowing what my students need to know for a given day, I write some sort of assessment for that day. Sometimes it is the homework, sometimes it is just a question at the end of the class. Whatever it is, that is the daily progress to goal measurement.
With the daily 'assessment' written, the rest comes out in whatever it comes. Sometimes I will have a good idea of the practice I want to use. Others I will have an idea of the Introduction of New Material (the actual teaching) section. The important thing here is that I build gatekeepers into the lesson between INM and guided practice, guided practice and independent practice so that I know my kids will be able to handle the next step of autonomy without wasting a bunch of time.

So that's the process I've been running with this year. I definitely don't stick to it all the time, even though I should. Some units don't get all of the Unit Plan completed before we start; learning suffers as a result. I didn't start adding quizzes into my up-front planning until the end of November, so that would have helped earlier units. I didn't planning the INM to GP to IP gatekeepers until the end of October, so that definitely hurt instruction.

Backwards Design - Test Creation

2008-01-20T20:09:00.001-06:00

Nick asked about assessment. He opened Pandora's Proverbial Box of Everything, so blame him when you start reading this and get bored. In an effort to save all you poor souls from reading, I will give the short answer here, and the long answer in a second post.

"This is interesting. How did you create a target quiz/test score from a needed score on what I expect is a different type of test entirely. Unless these test/quizzes are in the same format as the TAKS examine. Not questioning your methodology. I just wanna know how it was done, so I can use it in other applications." - Nick

There are four released TAKS tests. I also have textbook materials from 4 different publishers that are supposed to be aligned with the TAKS test, although any given learning objective has many interpretations, so there is a fair amount of variability between publishers. With these examples, I know what a specific learning objective looks like (in terms of assessment) for any of the 34 or so that my kids are supposed to know by the end of the year.

For any instructional unit, my assessment will have questions that scaffold from basic knowledge based questions up to the level that TAKS requires. I will have usually 4 questions per learning objective, with at least half of them being TAKS (literally off the TAKS test) or TAKS equivalent questions.

An example:
I have an objective: 7.1A compare and order integers and positive rational numbers.

My students need to be able to compare:

Fractions with fractions
Decimals with decimals
Percents with percents
Integers with integers
Fractions with decimals
Fractions with percents
Decimals with fractions
All 3 at the same time
All 3 with integers

So I might ask 1 greater than/less than question for the first 7 items. These will be easy, low-level. Then I will ask maybe four questions with #8 and four questions with #9. Probably 6 of the 8 questions would be TAKS or TAKS equivalent, with 2 being "put these in order from greatest to least".

The end grade doesn't exactly match with the TAKS test because of the easy questions, but it does give an accurate view of how well the student knows that particular learning objective. And really, the goal is not, necessarily, to predict how the student will do, since the type of questions on the test change almost every year. The point is to see what areas the student knows and doesn't know so that I can give targeted remediation to sub-groups of students so that they have the tools to be able to pass regardless of questions.

Tutorial Groups

2008-01-19T08:14:00.002-06:00

Yes this is another education post. Be warned.

The second nine weeks ended on Friday. My kids have a four day weekend, so they did not have to come in while the teachers rolled up their grades and made plans for the third nine weeks.

The third nine weeks is pivotal as it leads into the most dreaded time for students: Standardized Testing. Last year did not go so well for my kids (read: "sucked"), and almost all of my efforts this year in planning, in organization and in instruction have been focused on having my students prepared to stomp the TAKS test on April 29th.

Since I want as many kids to pass as possible, and to do well as possible, at some point it becomes necessary to offer some extra practice to certain students that just aren't making it in the regular class time. Therefore, I welcome, tutorials (cue ominous music).

Grouping for tutorials has been particularly hard. I have about 30 kids who are currently not on pace to pass the test, but of that 30, I have 10 who even with the most intense help won't be able to do it this year. Based on where they came in to my class, even if they grew by roughly 10% (I made a growth goal for each of my students this year, based on standardized tests, and then backed out a target percentage for each quiz/test) they still would not pass. So what do I do with them? I decide not to use tutorial time with these students.

Then there is a group of kids who are supposed to make Commended (90%) on the test this year, and for whatever reason (read: boys/girls, sex, hormones, drugs, gangs, home-life, personality clash, boredom) they are not on track to get close. Should I offer them tutorials? They will probably pass already, but I don't want to just leave smart kids behind where they should be either? I decide to make one-day a week a Challenge Group.

I also have a group of kids that are right on the bubble of passing. They will probably pass, but I don't want any surprises. I could take kids that are just below the cut-off or just above. I decide to take just below, which is another 10 out of the original group of 30. This group will also be once a week.

Finally, the last 10 out of the original 30 are shown by their performance this year to be really low, but based on their goal, should be passing. This is my final group. They will need tutorials twice a week.

So how I broke it down:
Monday and Thursday: Remediation Group
Wednesday: Bubble Group
Friday: Challenge Group

Then I have to decide which kids actually get in. There are a lot of kids who could use it. There are a lot of kids who will hate it. Should I take the ones who need it most, even if we don't get along? Will I hate my life if I put one of these kids in the group?

I haven't decided what to do about that yet. Maybe this weekend will bring some clarity. For now, I need to go fix my Xbox360. My life satisfaction has dropped significantly without Guitar Hero 3.

Is that Gray Poupon? No, it's GourMAN.

2008-01-15T22:36:00.001-06:00

I've created some extraordinary meals of late.

Normally, I shy away from anything (or anybody) that would label my cooking as gourmet. I feel like the word gourmet, and really, a person who might be called a gourmet (yea you can use it like that, I checked) usually connotes a general priggishness, and a large case of stick-up-the-butt-itis in particular.

I don't really know what turned me off to that whole side of the culinary spectrum. I would say the emphasis on presentation, but I know from my teaching experience that presentation is crucial to any sort of digestion. I mean, take Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, put it in a wood bowl with a wood spoon and you could charge $14 for it at some inn in New England. Shoot, I'd pay the $14 bucks, and not even feel bad about it, because of the presentation.

Okay that was a lie. I'd feel bad about it. But I would pay $8. And that's my point. Presentation gets you to all the way to that $8.

I think part of the problem is the small portions. Maybe I am uncultured (not much maybe about that one), but if I leave the meal and want to go make a sandwich because I'm hungry, I get upset.

So I am going to coin a new term, right here in this post. The term is "GourMan". Basically, I took the word Gourmet, cut off the end, and added the word Man. Oh. You got that part?

Well, then the meaning must be somewhat obvious. You take all the good stuff about Gourmet food; the presentation, the complex yet subtle flavors, the variety, the love. Then you take away the weak-at-the-knees, I-can't-finish-this-bowl-of-chili-because-it's-too-hot-ness and add "Give me another bowl of chili, I'm going to go cut down a tree because I can, and then use it to build a baseball bat to hit a home run with (even though I don't like baseball)".

That's Gourman.

My meals are all, by definition, Gourman. Feel free to spread that term around.

Tonight, we ate Bison Burgers, macaroni and cheeses and steamed green beans. Ms. A brought over no-bake cookies. That is a Gourman meal.

Below is a picture of a Gourman meal the men of Essex shared a couple weeks back. Here we have Sirloin Steak, Boiled Red Skin Potatoes and Baked Vegetables (squash, onions, mushrooms).

I So Fly: A Guide

2008-01-09T21:04:00.001-06:00

So a student tells me today, “Mister. You need to get a grill.”

Naturally, I can’t understand this student clearly. And I want to play coy, so I respond, “I need to get a girl or a grill?”

Student: “Well, both. But first the grill. And a new look.”

Me: “I need a new look? I changed my hair this week!”

Student: “And you need some rocawear jeans.”

Me: “What’s that?”

Falling out of seat with laughter
Student: “You don’t know Rocawear? You haven’t seen this symbol?”

Shows me symbol
Me: “Nope.”

Student: “Oh man, you need those.”

Me: “Well, make me a list of all the things I need.”

Student: “Okay, I will.”

On the way to lunch the student drafted a list of improvements to the Mr. Blair persona. What follows is the actual contents of the list. The only changes are spelling. (he spelled Mohawk mohak for example).
Here’s the list:

Get a Mohawk
Get a chain that hangs low
Find a posse
get a girlfriend or buy one
get a grill
get a new look
buy new Jordan's
get a belt with your name on the buckle
get bigger pants that’s Rocawear
get a polo shirt
QUIT BEING A NERD!!!

I don't know whether to be pleased that I am so far from being cool or disappointed. I know that #11 is simply not possible, so I guess super-flydom is simply unattainable, but still, I could pull the rest of this off for less than $300. That's a small price to pay for street-cred via fashion.

I think I am somehow going to use this list to my advantage. Something along the lines of "I will do all of these things if we average an 80% on the TAKS test" might be in order.

More on the Wire

2008-01-06T13:39:00.001-06:00

I was reading Pop Candy, a USA Today blog about pop culture, and stumbled across this interview with the head-writer for The Wire.

The interview is pretty long, but I found it very interesting where all the material came from, and the history of the show.

I also liked how he explained the structure of the show:
" But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think."

Amazing how he puts words to the desperation, the tunnel vision, the tightness in my chest that I feel at the culmination of every season, and nearly every episode. These structures feel omnipotent in their reach, directorless in their decisions, and uncaring in their affects.

Guitar Hero 3 and The Wire

2008-01-05T22:30:00.001-06:00

I purchased Guitar Hero 3 on Friday. I had a gift card, so the $108 price tag was reduced to a reasonable amount, but after playing it for about 10 hours since purchase, I think that I will at least get $108 worth of enjoyment from it.

First, there is a new wireless guitar with GH3. The wireless guitar is a huge step up. The range is very good, the buttons are more responsive than the GH2 guitar, and it comes with stickers. So now I have some flaming monkey heads on my guitar. Sweet huh?

After the guitar, and really, the whole reason for the game, is the set list; the set list for GH3 is excellent. There are selections from lots of big names such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Who and Guns N Roses, as well as lots of classic songs that everyone knows the words to.

We now have 2 guitars, after purchasing GH2 and GH3, so we also have the opportunity to play co-op songs. This is a lot of fun, and a ridiculous show for any other people that are not playing. I always do my best to have a solid rock pose, make good facial expressions, and generally make a fool out of myself.

I just finished watching season 4 of The Wire. If you have not heard about or seen The Wire yet, you owe it to yourself to check this show out. Basically, the show is about the American Inner-City and all the forces that converge there for money, power, fame, influence, life, love, whatever. Season 1 followed an individual drug crew, season 2 focused on the docks, season 3 focused on politics, season 4 on the education system. Season 5 starts tomorrow on HBO, and focuses on the newspaper.

A small group of police officers form the central characters to the show across all the season, with a couple other floater characters that consistently pop up. Basically, I think that the Wire is the best television show I have ever seen. It has deep characters, great writing, and lots of moral ambiguity. All the 'good guys' make mistakes or have demons in their closets. They are faced with no-win decisions and just try to make the best of them. The 'bad guys' generally hold to some code of ethics that in many times trumps that of the police or politicians. Throughout, I find myself reevaluating concepts of right and wrong, and thinking about what I would do in similar situations.

Post #55

2007-12-31T13:51:00.001-06:00

There was this game, you know, advertised on TV when I was a kid, with all of these sticks and marbles and you tried not to have the marbles fall. My brother tells me that the game was called Kerplunk. I'm currently too lazy to confirm this. The point however, is that my Christmas break is best represented by the game Kerplunk. Well, maybe a backwards Kerplunk.

In this analogy, my sanity, my life, is represented by marbles. Novel, right? Well, in normal standing, there are like, I don't know, 20 little sticks holding up all the marbles, and depending on the day, sticks are being removed, sticks are being added, whatever. Well, this Christmas break has brought an influx of fully operational sticks. Sticks have come in and buttressed the crap outta everything that's already there.

It's like all of these different pieces are coming together and either supporting existing structures that were weak (propping up a sagging cross-beam) or completely replacing/removing structures that were decaying (replacing a cross-beam, removing that wing of a house).

Hmm. I guess you know that an analogy doesn't work if you need another analogy to explain it, but whatever. So I don't think I am making any sense. But I want post 55. Again, I the point is that pieces just keep coming together.

Or maybe they are falling apart. Yesterday I tried to take my parents to a movie. We drove to the wrong theater. The movie only shows on one screen, in one theater, at one time each day. We missed it. I read the internet incorrectly.

Today I missed my flight. Well, I was in time to catch my connection; if I had been in Memphis, TN. I wasn't. So yea, I missed it. Because I couldn't read the internet correctly. But, I seized the opportunity and went to see the movie I missed yesterday. Bella is powerful. I recommend it.

I don't know what that's about, but I still feel like things are coming together. Happy New Year. Happy 2008. Happy post #55.

N. Y. C.

2007-12-29T19:41:00.001-06:00

"We're not scaremongering / This is really happening / Happening / We're not scaremongering / This is really happening / Happening / Mobiles skwerking / Mobiles chirping / Take the money and run / Take the money and run / Take the money / Here I'm allowed / Everything all of the time / Here I'm allowed / Everything all of the time"
- Idiotheque from Kid A by Radiohead.

Radiohead plays. Shouts. It is the soundtrack of my exploration and discovery. The subway plunges into and through portals of clinical light back into darkness. This is my soundtrack for the exploration and discovery of New York City.

I flew up to NYC on a Thursday. My sub plans were in order, complete with contact information in case of emergency, referrals for the bad students, and an excess of work for all of my wonderful kiddos. It is harder to get into trouble when you are drowning in worksheets. Of course, sometimes you get into trouble because you are drowning in worksheets. So with sub plans in order, I left school at 3 pm to make it to the airport for my 5:30 flight to Newark International (EWR). I normally get out of school at 4:15, but since I had this flight I skipped my planning period, conveniently located during last period.

I made it to Bush in plenty of time to wait for 2 hours of flight delays. There was freezing rain in New Jersey. Planes couldn't land.

We eventually took off. I arrived at 12. I waited for the train. It came at 1.

The train from EWR is nondescript. There is nothing notable about it. It has seats. It has windows. In fact, the trip into NYC would lead one to believe, if one did not know better, that the train merely passed through some minor industrial and residential areas before continuing into some unknown countryside. This is managed by way of tunnels; it is very hard to tell that you are entering the most populous city in the US if you are underground. Underground there are no signs of millions of inhabitants. There are just walls. And lights. And the rushing wind as the train plows through then artificial (and in my case, actual) night.

No, the first signs of New York come after I disembark at Penn Station. I step out of the train, drag rolling luggage after me, and climb 2 flights of stairs. I see ticket booths. Changing boards of arrival and departure times. Some people. I climb another flight of stairs. To 8th Ave and 31st St. The city punches me in the face.

Buildings tear into the sky, tear at the sky. At 1:15 am Friday morning, the cacophony of taxis, people, assaults me. The city is alive, it is a living, breathing, moving thing, which demands action, and will continue to do so until I depart. But first I must sleep.

See, I am in New York City because Teach For America has its national office there. I need to be at TFA's national office so that I can interview to be a program director in Denver. Or Memphis. Every winter and early spring, for the past I don't know how long, TFA site managers converge on NYC so they can screen candidates for PD and RD jobs, jobs which basically amount to managing corps members (that's a PD) or recruiting college seniors (that's an RD). I am here because I might want to be a Program Director. I think I would be good at it. Turns out, either TFA doesn't think so, or the openings did not line up with my abilities. Cuz I didn't get an offer.

Interviews were Friday. They were fun. I thought I conducted myself well, giving a fair showing of my abilities and my faults. I do not like to mislead.

After the interviews, I called my buddy Ajay who lives in Manhattan. Hey Man, what should I do? Maybe go to the museums. Go here, catch this train, get off, take this shuttle, take this other train, get off, turn around, walk, click your heels.

The instructions continue. I botch em. I ride the subway, listening to Radiohead. Radiohead is my anthem for NYC. Its sounds perfectly fit the forced proximity, the spiritual, emotional, psychological detachment. You have to cope somehow when you ride the subway, packed into a car with no room to move, to sit, to breathe. Radiohead anthems.

I walk through Central Park. Miles to and fro. It's cold. There's snow. I see rock shear out of the ground. I think about climbing it. I walk to the Guggenheim. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the museum. It has a 4 floor spiral staircase. With a 50 foot diameter. Approximately. I didn't measure it or anything. I look at Richard Prince's art work. There are lots of prints of trashy romance novels. With nurses. There are some pictures of cowboys. I'd like to be a cowboy. Someday. There are silk screens of Found Jokes. They are all dirty. I laugh at some.

After leaving, I retrace my steps. I pick up my bag at the hotel. I walk across Manhattan pulling my suitcase. To Ajay's. We go out. We are looking for the Art Bar. Apparently it's close, but we walk for 30 minutes with no luck. We find the Village Vanguard. The greats played here; Coltrane, Dizzy, Davis, Marsalis. I stumble across it while looking for the Art Bar.

We decide we are lost. We get ready to call a cab. We see the Art bar. I'm starving. It's 10. I haven't eaten since noon. I meet his friends. I destroy my hamburger. We leave and go to some other bar. There is a birthday party for some friend of Ajay's. Some other people show up. We walk across the street to some German bar. They sell Liter Beers. Liter Beers are consumed.

We leave. We go back across the street to the birthday party. Dancing is happening. It's crowded. I dance around. No one is paying attention. I can't hear anyone. We pack up and head to the Beauty Bar. In a cab.

At the Beauty Bar, they are playing 50s music. Some early 60s. It's bop. It's On the Road. It's perfect. I dance. We dance. There are little chairs around the room, where ladies used to get their hair done. Those ones with the space helmet looking things on em. That go over your head. Over your curls. I dance some more. Some ladies prowl on me. I laugh. I dance. I ignore them.

We leave at 3:30. Ajay and I cab it to his place. I pass out in minutes.

Saturday comes, and passes at a steady but lethargic pace. We wake after noon, and make plans to eat brunch, even though I thought brunch was between breakfast and lunch, not after lunch, but maybe it is all about your intentions, and we definitely intend to eat brunch. We talk. Ajay and I. Dreams, jobs, traveling. Where could we go? Where couldn't we go? What could we do? Would they pay us to do that?

I pack my stuff, even though it is pretty much packed, and take a cab to Penn Station. I leave the city in the same nondescript way I entered. The city backs out of view through the windows of Penn Station as I descend the steps to the main concourse. A guy gives me his train ticket. He had purchased the wrong one. Thanks man. You don't have to pay me or nothing, I just don't want it to go to waste. Oh, um, okay.

"Everyone / Everyone around here / Everyone is so near / It's holding on / It's holding on / Everyone / Everyone is so near / Everyone has got the fear / It's holding on / It's holding on."
- National Anthem from Kid A by Radiohead.

The Laziness Aroma

2007-12-22T21:04:00.002-06:00

I love tracking.

There I said it. Sometimes people look at me slightly askance when I talk about my myriad tracking systems, which range from the huge wall chart that takes up the entire south wall of my class, to individual student tracking for objectives, Critical Thinking Problems, and Mad Minutes, my own tracking of objectives and CTAs, and most recently, surveys.

Tracking is so great! I mean, I can open up my 12 mb Excel file and tell you exactly who did not understand how to solve percent problems when the problem was arranged such that we were finding the "whole" as opposed to the "part" or the "percent". I get pretty geeked about it. And actually, the "slightly askance" is more like the look at me like I need to be committed.

But this is not a post about tracking. This is a post about the survey.

I give a survey out at least once a marking period (9 weeks) because I want to give my kids a forum for voicing any needs that I am not meeting, and I also want to measure some more vague, non-academic things. I want to know if my kids think math is more or less important after 15 weeks in my tutelage. I want to know if they can tell that I care about their success. I want to know if they are willing to take risks. I want to know if they think they are working hard.

With the data in, I can tell you conclusively that students like my class a great deal more than they did at the end of the first marking period. There was an increase from 57% approval rating to a brisk 66%. On the downside, the "How much do I care about your success?" question dropped from 79% to 76%. And actually, all the rest of the categories saw a decline or no-change. So there was only the one bright-spot.

Well, almost.

One of my students in third period wrote that "What she likes most about this class" was "the laziness aroma."

Now I don't know what this is, but I am fairly confident that this student is not on drugs. That is the first consideration. Since no other students mentioned this aroma, I am guessing that she might have an over-active olfactory sense. Or not.

Any ideas?

I'm just not doing work today

2007-12-02T07:59:00.001-06:00

"What are you doing Susan?" I asked.
"Nothing Mister."
"What are we supposed to be doing right now?" I always try and draw the correct behavior out of my students like this. I wonder if they get sick of it.
"Oh I know we are supposed to be doing this Problem, and then working on this quiz. But I'm not doing work today."
At this point any sane person would pause, and continue very carefully. This student is very sure of herself. And she is alternating between sucking in her belly and pinching her belly fat and pushing it out and rubbing it.
I choose the safe route. "Really? Well, why not?"
"Look Mister. I'm fat. I look pregnant."
Again, any sane person would pause. I tread on shaky ground.
"Nope, you don't. That's just your belly. But we are talking about the Problem. We have to choose one of the stores. You did a really good job on this on Wednesday and Thursday. Let's do it once more and then you get to go home for the weekend."
"No Mister, I'm not doing any work today. I'm tired."

Her resolution was apparent. The blank stare, the eye contact, the lazy way she played with her belly fat (she is an extremely petite 13 year old) all confirmed that she was not going to be doing anything, whether through bribes or threats or prosecution or act of God.

And being that it was Friday afternoon, my last class of the day, I decided that I didn't care. She *had* worked really hard all week. She answered all my questions all week long. She knew the material as well as anyone in the class. So I didn't push.

I feel like Susan right now. Not so much with the playing with the belly fat, although I do a little of that, but with the "I'm not doing any work today. I'm tired."

I came back from Thanksgiving with energy and a renewed compassion (and patience) for my kids, but that lasted a whopping 3 days. I have only had 2 days so far this year that began with the thought "I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to go to work. I don't want to deal with my kids today." Two days of that nature is far fewer than whatever number I had at the same time last year, so that is good. But I can't exactly say I have been excited on the other days, you know? There are some days, when I am excited, but normally, I am just on auto-pilot.

I wonder if that is normal. I wonder if this feeling is telling me that I ought to do something else. And really, I don't know. What I do know is that right now I am tired, and I don't want to do any work. So I'm not gonna. I'm gonna play with my belly fat.

On Food Poisoning

2007-11-15T22:03:00.001-06:00

Really, I feel guilty for not posting on here. 2 posts in October. That is just weak sauce. And I just read this sweet post by my buddy whose getting his MBA. It was witty and well written and had psychic weight (in the words of my creative writing professor). I was put to shame. This post enters to salve my wounds.

There are a few simple rules to live by if you want to avoid food poisoning. First, avoid all-you-can eat-oriental-buffets. This rule actually extends to sketchy restaurants in general, but General Tso and his chicken have been responsible for such numerous bouts of FP that I think it actually has become a verb, as in "I got General Tso'd this weekend." Thus, the rule lends itself more in the oriental direction.

Once you are avoiding the sketchtastic restaurants, the next line of defense involves your drinking water. Everyone knows not to drink the water in most South American countries, Mexico etc etc. But few give much pause to the water around them here in the US. There is nothing quite so sweet as an iced glass of fertilizer water pumped out of your neighborhood well. Fertilizer is great; it makes fruits and vegetables grow quickly and to a great size, and it also will leave you heaving your lungs out for three days. Just ask my brother.

With the water under control, now comes the the third, and truly revolutionary rule for avoiding FP. Throw away your old-ass-food. Yep. That's it. An example will probably help:
"Oh look, here's some yogurt. I want some yogurt. Hmmm. It says Expired 6 days ago (yea, yogurt containers say that. shut up)"
What should our test dummy do? That's right! Throw it away!

Now, the difficulty lies in the foods that don't have expiration dates. What about leftovers? What about other crazy things? I suggest playing it safe.

Let's look at another example.
"Hmm. I want some eggs with my bagel. How long have these been in here? I don't know. At least a month. Oh well, I don't think eggs go bad. I'll eat them."

So what did this person do wrong? Yep. They made the poor assumption that "I don't think eggs go bad." That's just plain stupid. The result of that kind of stupidity? Let me tell you. You end up feeling kinda funny around 12:30, but think "Maybe I'm just hungry" and eat a peanut butter sandwich. You feel a little better. You still feel bad, but you go for a bike ride anyway. For 2 hours. When you get back, you feel horrible and lay on the floor. But then you remember you have a date that you *can not* miss, so you shower and feel a little better. Maybe you're just hungry you think hopefully. You will go to Central Market on your date, and feel light headed the entire time. You will be kind of spacey but still witty and charming (again, hopefully). You will eat your yogurt covered pretzels and fruit with your date and feel a little bit better. You will get the false sense of security that "It was just hunger". Then, after an hour, you will feel the looming VOM. You will say "I think I have to go." You will kind of sketch out of your date, still managing to walk her home, but having no idea what you said, because you are so focused on not VOMING all over the place. Then you will get home. You will have a disastrous but oh so pivotal decision to make; which end first?

You will not be able to keep down anything. Even water will make you yak. Your ribs and back will be sore. You will sweat. You will curse. You will hate your life. Then you will feel better. You will sleep. You will yak some more. And so will go the next 12 hours. At this point, you will chance some water because you fear dehydration. You will keep it down and sleep for 3 straight hours. You will wake up sore. You will move to the couch. You will eat a Popsicle. And another.

And you will never eat old eggs again. The End.

More on reconciliation

2007-10-22T20:41:00.001-05:00

I find my self in the midst of reconciliation. Reconciliation is something that happens every day, with students, with friends, with God, but this Period of Reconciliation is entirely different. This is a full-fledged, “I don’t ever want to talk to you again, much less see you, think about you, know about you” kind of brokenness leading to a wide gulf for reconciliation to bridge.

A couple nights ago I was talking to my friend from Cincinnati, the one who was my crying shoulder during the formation of this chasm, and we were wondering what this Period has in store for me. I think this is an important question, what lies ahead, but I think that the question I should be asking, is why did this reconciliation become necessary. If I believe the things that I say I believe on Sundays, or at Bible Studies or when I am praying, then there are things about God that I need some serious review on. Specifically, and I think this is true for Christians in general, I think that my generation has a lot of head knowledge, and not a lot of heart knowledge. We think about God, but we don’t know God. I guess I would say it is the difference between reading travel brochures about a place you have dreamed of going and then actually being there. It is something that has to be experienced.

Anyway, I think God is pretty similar. I tend to get bogged down in thinking about “What would Jesus do?” or “what is God’s will for my life?” or “what should I do next when TFA is over?” I mean, don’t get me wrong, these are good questions to be thinking about, but with me, these questions take over and they block my vision of almost everything else around me. The symphony of the world gets muted to dull whispers behind these questions. And I think the thing that I forget, is that if I am knowing God and living in God and thinking God and breathing God and loving God, then all those other questions will be taken care of.

It’s like the calling of Simon Peter. There he was, doing his thing in his fishing boats, and Jesus shows up on the scene and invades his work space. Peter experiences this amazing, miraculous blessing in his work place, but, Christ is using this for his in-road. He follows this up with “How would you like to be a fisher of men?” Now, Peter could have gotten all hung up on the blessing part. “Wow, I am just starting to make headway in this business. If I kept on, I could be such a huge influence, sending missionaries all over, building temples, helping the poor….I could run my own business and my own charity! It would be so amazing!” he could have thought. But with that thinking, he would have missed the calling that Jesus himself placed before him, to just go.

Coming back to the reconciliation. There is this passage in the Bible that I think sounds really beautiful, but in all honesty doesn’t mean all that much to me. I love reading it, because I think it is kind of comforting or whatever, but when it all gets down to it, I don’t know this to be true. It’s from Romans 8:37-39

“8For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^[a] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So I think this reconciliation is God’s way of showing me that this is true. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, and the evidence is that this broken and ugly and painful thing in my life is being redeemed at this very moment. It’s like God is saying “Hey, look here. If I can fix this, don’t you think that I can take care of you? That I can fix anything? That I will always be with you?” And I respond by not paying attention or saying “Yea but…” or something. Really though, I think that the pain and awkwardness makes me overlook the redemption for most of the time.

This makes it all the more amazing that anybody follows God though. I mean, if I can come out of my self-centered, selfish, obsessive behavior long enough to notice that God is actually doing this thing and calling me to some beautiful place, then I am becoming more in tune with how God works, and that means that anybody can do it. With God’s help of course.

Ramble On

2007-10-12T21:20:00.001-05:00

Good Led Zeppelin song.

I've been...uh...reconciling this week. It's as if I suddenly found the loose ends of a sweater that I thought was completely unraveled, only to find that the ends lead to a large hole in an otherwise complete garment. On the one hand, I am very used to my wardrobe without these holy garments (to continue this awkward analogy), but on the other hand, I remember the glory days of their association. I loved them. I still love them. But I am a completely different person, and I wonder if/how they will fit.

I've also been reading Thomas Merton's "No Man is an Island". It has some interesting thoughts on friendship that have challenged me this past week.

"In order to love others with perfect charity I must be true to them, to myself, and to God. The true interests of a person are at once perfectly his own and common to the whole Kingdom of God. That is because these interests are all centered in God's designs for his soul the destiny of each one of us is intended, by the Lord, to enter into the destiny of His entire Kingdom. And the more perfectly we are ourselves the more we are able to contribute to the good of the whole Church of God. For each person is perfected by the virtues of a child of God, and these virtues show themselves differently in everyone, since they come to light in the lives of each one of the saints under a different set of providential circumstances. If we love one another truly, our love will be graced with a clear-sighted prudences which sees and respects the designs of God upon each separate soul. Our love for one another must be rooted in a deep devotion Divine Providence, a devotion that abandons our own limited plans into the hands of God and seeks only to enter int the invisible work that builds His Kingdom. Only a love that senses the designs of Providence can unite itself perfectly to God's providential action upon souls. Faithful submission to God's secret working in the world will fill our love with piety, that is to say with supernatural awe and respect. This respect, this piety, gives our love the character of worship, without which our charity can never be quite complete. For love must not only seek the truth in the lives of those around us; it must find it there. But when we find the truth that shapes our lives we have found more than an idea. We have found a Person. WE have come upon the actions of One Who is still hidden, but Whose work proclaims Him holy and worthy do be adored. And in Him we also find ourselves."

Donuts and a Dog

2007-09-29T16:07:00.001-05:00

On Monday I had my students read the following story. Then they had to find any "math problems" in the story and write expressions for them. An example is shown below.

One day, Michael and three more people decided that they were bored. For the past week, all they had done was watch the new Soldier Boy video and learn the dance. First they thought they should get a snack. They bought three packs of eight donuts. While they were eating their donuts, two fewer than the total number of boys decided to throw their donuts at a dog. They threw one-third of the total number of donuts and hit the dog in the face. The dog was upset for two more than three minutes, but then it realized “Hey! Those are donuts!” and so it ate them.

While the dog was eating the donuts, one less than the total number of boys thought it would be a good idea to get something to drink. They bought a twelve pack and divided it evenly among the whole group. They drank their Mountain Dew while they watched the dog. The dog decided that it liked Mountain Dew, so it stole two out of the total number of sodas. Unfortunately, the dog doesn’t have any hands, and its teeth were really weak, so it couldn’t get the bottles open. It went home and cried.

1. Expression for total number of people, p = 1+3 =4

Confirmations

2007-09-29T16:05:00.001-05:00

This week I have been blessed by two independent forms of confirmation. Actually, come to think of it, there have been more than two, so I will put the total at 4, but I only will speak of two in this post. How's that for useless information.

On Monday, I taught a rocking lesson. There is no way around it. Basically, I had my kids read the story in the post above, and then we talked about changing words into numbers etc etc. What was even better though, is that my district math specialist, district math interventionist and school math specialist all visited my classroom on a walk through. And they came during my second best class. And they were rocking hard core.

My district math specialist said "This is awesome. I want to clone you."
me: "What?"
Her: "I want to clone you and put you in every school in the district. This is exactly the kind of stuff we need to be doing in our classrooms."

So...yea. That's a pretty glowing review.

The second confirmation was second hand, so that tempers it slightly. Basically, someone who's opinion I respect in TFA told my roommate and I that "It would be a shame if you do not go on staff next year. You might not be AMAZING teachers, but the things you are thinking about, the work you are doing, this is what this organization needs."

To temper these moral boosters, are three independent confirmations that I am a secret-selfish-jackass. What happens is that my default personality is such that I meet 95% of expectations (for personal interaction) placed upon me, but once the friendships/relationships become more important, I inevitably do a sabotage maneuver by not really thinking about the other person. I don't really have an explanation other than, "I don't think I have been challenged before." Which I think is true.

So the thoughts running through my head currently are "what does it look like if I really focus on something?"

Yet another reasons clubs suck

2007-09-23T09:41:00.001-05:00

So you are probably thinking "Yea right. There is no way that this guy goes to clubs."

I understand this thought. But it's simply not true. See, here's what happened.
First, I realized that I enjoy dancing quite a bit. Second, I moved to Houston. Third, I decided "I'm gonna dance like crazy and not even care what anybody thinks."

Well steps 1 thru 3 worked perfectly. I know go dancing regularly, and might even be considered above average. I still, however, have a problem with a few things, in general.

To begin with, I am not a huge fan of grinding. I mean, I can do it, I can keep the rhythm whatever. But what happens, is I will be dancing with some girl and then I will get to thinking "This is boring. I keep doing the same motion over and over and over. I need variety." And it's true. In general, guys who are grinding just...uh...thrust. (i just wrote thrust. this is a ridiculous topic). The girl might do some other stuff, but the guy...nope. And yes, I can, and do, change the from side to side to other junk, but really, the options are limited because of the grinding necessities. The point being, it's just kind of boring.

And then comes the random people at the club. I have no idea what most of the people at the club want to do, but normally, I go out with a group of friends, and as long as a couple of them are willing to dance, I have no problem dancing around like a crazy person for hours on end. Sometimes, ladies will come over and then be dancing around near me, and I think "I don't want to freak her, (b/c i don't want to freak at all)." So that's awkward.

Now, enter last night. Most of my friends were out of town this weekend, but me, two other guys and a female friend of ours decided to check out this new club we heard about. It's pretty cool, with all these different rooms with different atmospheres, but since we didn't bring girls to dance around with, my roommate and I had to go walking through the dance floor trying to find girls to dance with. Now I am not interested in taking any of these females home with me. Really, I do not even want to freak them. I just want to dance with/next to them.

We were shot down at least 5 separate times. It was ridiculous. I mean, I do not think I will win any fashion modeling tryouts or anything, but I am not an ugly person. I have been described as attractive. Same goes for my roommate. WTF. Maybe I just need a sign that says, "IASANSKWJWTD "- I am a single, attractive, non-serial killer who just wants to dance.

I guess the acronym needs some work.

Yea i'm late

2007-09-22T07:57:00.001-05:00

sorry i haven't posted all month. school is cranking and i find that any energy i have when i get home i want to siphon (why is this not spelled with a y? can anyone tell me this?) into other outlets. pathetic i know. Of course, at this point, who really reads these things anyway? :^)

Lot's of updates, so I am going to brush over them all, and then, hopefully, just start posting regularly. That's the plan anyway.

I joined an ultimate team! I played at sectionals this past weekend in Austin with Red Angus, a club team in Houston. They are pretty good, but definitely not Machine caliber.
Austin is awesome. It beats Houston in every single possible category. If anyone is thinking of a move to Texas, Austin is my recommendation. And, the fields at UT were pillow soft. I layed out a lot.
I caught a lay out huck for a score at sectionals. Go me. I also THREW a scoober score! Hah! And of course, I had the requisite "I'm tall and going to D you" action. Those are the highlights.
This summer I hung out with this girl who is awesome. There was mutual attraction. But she was in GR. I left. Now she's dating some one else. Figures. :^)
I started a Bible Study. Actually, I was prompted to start a Bible study after attending a small group from my church and being thoroughly disappointed and thinking "I could do at least 8.354 times better than this myself! And I will!" And I did.
Our fourth roommate finally moved in! We now have 4 guys living in the most fly house ever possessed by TFA members in the history of the world. Seriously. Our place should be on cribs. We have a pool. It's a three story townhouse. We have a gourmet kitchen with a two level dish washer, wine fridge, double ovens, industrial gas range, and custom cabinetry. Not to mention the chandelier that hangs over the third floor bath tub!
School is going sooo much better this year. Really there is no comparison with last year. It's like going from T-ball against 2nd graders to playing 1AA (I'm definitely not in the pros yet). Still, extremely good.
I still don't know if teaching is for me. A friend of mine told me that she did not really start loving teaching until her 3rd year. That baffles me. Who knows.
I am currently eying Denver, CO and Portland, OR as my next likely stops. They both rock, and they both have a Big Picture School. Assuming I want to teach. They also have engineering of some sort, since they are big, with Lockheed being in Denver, and I have no idea what, in Portland.
I am still 6'7"
I bought a mountain bike. I love to ride it.
We are throwing kickin parties at our place fairly frequently.

Yea, that's about it, I guess. Umm...more later.

People Who Should Be Replaced by Elmos and Litepros

2007-09-04T21:05:00.001-05:00

Oh man. The title was just suggested by my roommate and my eyes are watering. But seriously. I am talking about a large group of...um...teachers? at my school.

I am starting year 2, and there are individuals who I am still not sure what function they actually serve. Really, when you think about it, if it is not immediately apparent what you do in your place of employ, you are either A) so awesome that you are used only on an as-needed basis or B) you are so useless no one wants to use you for anything.

I have some personal exposure to some of the individuals to whom I am referring, so I know that if they fall into category A, they must be hiding it pretty darn well.

In other news, Mr. F and I want to write some grants for Elmos and Litepros. We feel like these two items will really bring our teaching to the cutting edge of technology. Or in other words, they will help us to do less work. And yea, our teaching will probably be more entertaining for our students, but really, it's to do less work.

As a result, we reach the natural next step: they should just fire the useless people and replace them with the Elmos and Litepros that we want.

Coincidences

2007-08-26T21:06:00.002-05:00

I love coincidences. Maybe I read to much into them, but I feel like they are the microscopic pushes of God.

It's like the quote I love from C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters."

You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creatures to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.

(Sorry that was so long.) So last night I was watching this Nooma video and Rob Bell gets ends with this amazing benediction. I love his benedictions because they feel like the Holy Spirit is being breathed out onto the congregation, like a balloon is getting filled. He always begins with "And May You..." I am getting chill bumps right now just imagining it.

After hearing this amazing benediction, I talked with my friend Michelle about how these blessings are just so powerful. Then I thought, "I want to bless like that."

Now fast forward to church tonight. Chris Seay spoke on the meaning of living well in community. The first part of this was blessing. We ought to bless.

I guess, then, that I ought to be a blessing. I'll see what I can do.

Ready

2007-08-25T15:33:00.002-05:00

I finished setting up room 1107 in preparation for Teaching: Year 2. I am very excited to see how all of the classes and trainings and planning work out for my kids this year. I think that my new focus on problem solving will be a great thing, but I don't really know yet.

On the positive side, I am not nervous. Teaching summer school gave me a dry-run on first day of school stuff, so I feel like I know what I want to do, where it will go. I feel prepared. Of course this is a huge shift from last year.

In other news, my quest to become environmentally aware and friendly is growing; I am now recycling. I even put up signs over the garbage to remind my roommates that they too have an obligation to recycle. They were forgetting.

I finished Serve God, Save the Planet, and highly recommend it to anybody who is interested in environmental or health issues. Even if you are not of the Christian persuasion, the author is well spoken (or written, I guess) with a lot of sound advise for everybody out there.

Bureaucracy

2007-08-24T17:55:00.001-05:00

This week marked my first week back at Alief Middle School. Last week was full of professional development opportunities (oh yes, opportunities) through TFA or the Alief district, and while some of that time actually proved to be quite useful, it is just not the same as being on campus, in your classroom, getting things ready for Day 1. Which is the 27th.

In preparation for this week of in-service training, planning and copying, Mr. F and I rolled over to AMS on Wednesday afternoon of last week. Our goal was simple: pilfer as many tables and chairs as possible.

See, last year, we came in as wet-behind-the-ears-newbies, with grand aspirations for the 'group concept', only to be greeted by a room full of desks on our first day. After submitting furniture requests and even begging at one point last year for tables, we now know, being the grizzled veterans (of one measly campaign!), that if we want tables, we have to do it ourselves.

Luckily, we knew where we could acquire said merchandise without offending too many folks. A teacher left the math department, who just so happened to have a room full of tables.

Mr. F and I arrived on Wednesday during a deluge and began moving desks out of his room, swapping tables back in. I was waiting on final word for a potential room swap (thankfully, I managed to remain in the same room this year), so we piled all the chairs into Mr. F's room, and most of the tables.

But at this stage of the exchange, two important things happen. First, my assistant principal catches us in the act, asks what we are doing, and then says "Oh, well, keep up the good work" in response to our explanation. Second, we realize that we know have 2 rooms worth of desks, but only one room to store them in.

An executive decision prompts us to stash all of my desks, all 24, under the stairs to the second floor, in the "Cub Reading Den". It ends up looking quite ridiculous. Imagine row upon row of desks with about a 2 foot clearance above them. Bring on the wee people! (I do not know the DCA term for people of abnormally small stature)

Our job done, we left.

This week, we meet our new teachers and find out that Lo, the school hired an interventionist to occupy the pilfered room. She is a first year teacher, and in a eerie turn of events, strolls in with a sketch for a grand group concept, of course necessitating tables. She asks me "I wanted to do lots of group work, where could I find some tables?"

I of course feign ignorance, and (laughingly) bring her to Mr. F. "Hey Mr. F, she needs tables. Do you know who to ask?"

Mr. F nearly dies.

New teacher gives up on tables. Shifts focus to getting uniform desks. At least if they are all the same color, type etc, things will be manageable right? Well, there is a classroom worth of yellow desks under the stairs. Whose are those? Nobody knows.

New teacher goes to ask the Math Department head. "Whose are those?" "I don't know. Ask the assistant principal."

New teacher goes to ask AP. "Can I have those yellow desks?" "What yellow desks? Oh those. Well, yea you can have them. But if anybody comes asking for them you have to return them."

So let me summarize (that's a higher level thinking skill.)

Mr. F and I decide we want tables. We take tables. We dump desks.
New Teacher wants tables. She has our dumped desks. She can't find tables. She then asks for more of our dumped desks. She has to get permission. Then she has to get more permission. For our dumped desks.

Should I feel bad about this?

The Future - Or More Accurately, Thinking Too Much

2007-07-15T20:19:00.001-05:00

School is right around the corner, as much as it pains me to write that. YES summer school is great, and I love teaching there, but since it's culmination directly correlates with a week of vacation followed by a week of professional development and then school starts, it is basically like school starts tomorrow. Or something.

Anyway, a bi-product of my rapidly depleting summer is an intense focus on what I will be doing *next* summer. I already have grandiose ideas about traveling the world, or more accurately (yea it's the second time I've used that now) going to some far-away land and staying there all summer, there are other options and perhaps other necessities.

Here are the thoughts running around, pellmell through my brain.

I could go teach at YES prep next year. This would be a minimum 2 year commitment. It would keep me in Houston. It would be an awesome teaching environment. I would be 27 when I could forseeably leave. I would continue to get summers off. Do I really want to stay in Houston for 2 more years? Is 4 years away from engineering too much? Which leads to...
I could go work at some engineering company. I could go anywhere to do this. There are some social activist type companies out on the west coast that make products specifically to combat injustice (like clean drinking water), and that would be cool. I could go to Seattle (which I love) and work for Boeing. But do I really want a corporate job again? Would my conscious let me go? I think I'd feel like I was selling out.
I could go to grad school for engineering. I think it would be great to be a professor, and always be learning and teaching in a subject that I like. I also like school, and am good at it. I always felt vaguely impatient at school though, as if I was waiting for real-life to start. Whatever.
I could go teach somewhere else entirely. I love the concept of the Big Picture company. That would be a 4 year commitment. I could go all over with those schools; they have schools in Detroit or Chicago or Portland or Denver. All of those would have benefits.

I was talking with a friend of mine today on the phone. She was telling me that I just need to figure out what I love and do that. I said I didn't feel like I was serving anybody if I did engineering or something like that. Her response was that if you don't love what you are doing you can't serve anybody anyway.

I think this is an interesting point. I am not sure if I love teaching. I am sure that I did not love corporate engineering. I could love teaching at YES prep. Who knows.

I guess the thing to do is to go sit on the beach and rock climb and run and swim and watch movies and cook great meals because those are the things I love doing.

YES! Summer school!

2007-07-11T14:59:00.002-05:00

Oh yea, summer school started today. I am teaching summer school at YES! prep, and I love it already. Even though I have no idea what is going on. And I didn't even have a lesson for today. And it is a billion degrees outside. And the following situation occurred:

student - "Mister, do we eat with the 7th graders?"
me - "Uh, I don't know."
student - "Mister, do we have to pay for lunch?"
me - "Uh, I don't know that either."
student - "Mister, can we sit anywhere we want at lunch?"
me - "Uh, I don't know that either. But I can find out the answers to all of your questions."
student - "Mister, you sure don't know what's going on."
me - "Uh huh."

Anyway, the first day went well. My kids were good, and we worked on a big math problem for the entire period. It was quite successful. Somehow, this math problem segued into the following exchange:

student - "Mister, would a pig spider freak you out?"
me - "So...uh...you're asking if I would be freaked out by seeing a spider. That was a pig."
student - "Yea. A pig spider."
me - "Yep. That would definitely freak me out."

yea I have no idea. But it *would* be freaky.

Loose Ends 4 - Now I have a job

2007-07-08T20:55:00.003-05:00

This whole 'unemployed teacher' situation actually worked itself out a couple of weeks ago, but I forgot to post it. I think that I wasn't too flustered about the whole situation so when it was resolved, it did not seem like that big of a change. I guess it was though. Maybe.

So here is the sequence of events:

In February I got the flu, and had a meeting where a bunch of bosses told me to shape up or find another job.

In March, my principal told me that Alief Middle School currently did not have room for me, but I wasn't being fired. Instead I was being put into a teacher pool. I need disinfectant.

In May, I left school and Texas under the impression that there was approximately a 5% chance of having a math job at AMS.

In the middle of June, the TFA placement coordinator called to tell me that "Alief no longer feels confident about placing you. You can now go wherever you want." She brought up an engineering position at an HISD middle school. I give her the green light to pass along my resume and stuff.

I get a call from the principal of the HISD middle school. Turns out the position is not engineering. It's eighth grade math. But it has one or two robotics electives tacked on. I do a phone interview. There is no further contact for 2 weeks.

I talk with TFA placement coordinator again. She tells me that YES prep has an opening. Would I be interested. "Hell yes!"

I get a call from YES prep. I talk. We talk. We keep talking. We try and set up a live interview. I was going to FLY DOWN for an interview. It cost too much. Principal asks for material to show my skills as a teacher. I email him a bunch of stuff.

We keep talking. He asks for a sample lesson. I remember I have a dvd of a lesson I gave in Feb (around there anyway). I think the dvd is on my desk. I have my roommate deliver it to YES prep. It is the wrong dvd. The dvd is actually an advertisement for YES prep. Ha.

We keep talking. He asks how confident I feel moving to high school. I tell him that after initial misgivings, I am totally psyched for the position. He tells me that we are going to have a couple more conversations and then he will get an offer formalized. "At this point I don't want either of us backing away from this, because this is the direction we want to go". The direction he means is hiring me.

The next day Alief Middle School calls. Apparently, the 7th grade teacher who thought she was staying decided she was leaving. My job is now available. If I want it. Dangit.

After debating, I decide that even though TFA specifically told me I do not have to take the job, and that my duty to Alief is done, I feel like I ought to go there. And I am excited too. Well, sort of. I call AMS and accept the job.

I call YES prep and give them the bad news. He is very understanding. He says that the "quick hiring has turned into a more long-term process". I smile. Looks like I might get to work at YES prep HS someday anyway.

Oh and guess what. The YES prep HS is the only school in Houston to be ranked on Newsweek's top 100 schools nationwide. It's number 37 or something.

Environmental Activism - Another Soapbox?

2007-07-08T20:55:00.002-05:00

That questions is targeted at me. I wonder if I soapbox. Or rather if I soapbox too much. But then I realize that this is my blog and while readership (oooooh so snooty! I might have people who read this, but definitely no readership) is great, well, I'm talking here.

So anyway. I've loved the outdoors for a while now. My family went camping every summer since I can remember, and while I did not really take to the fishing aspects that well (they were kind of boring, and usually really hot), I loved the tent part and the playing part and the trees part and definitely the hammock part. My passion for the outdoors continued in Boy Scouts, where I eventually found myself doing "High Adventures" to places like the Adirondacks and Boundary Waters, and loving every minute of it. I now would describe myself as a backpacker, who aspires to be a rock climber, mountaineer, mountain biker, canoer and maybe kayaker (that's lowest on the list of priorities).

Thus, in the current debate about climate change, I have a vested interest: I want to continue to play outdoors. I can't say however, that I have done anything in particular to *be* an environmentally aware person. I mean this past year I started walking to the grocery occasionally, and using my backpack instead of grocery bags occasionally, and I rode my bike to church once, but that was because I wanted to ride a bike, so that doesn't really count. I have also carpooled somewhat frequently, but again that doesn't count because I did it to save on toll money. But I've wanted to recycle. And I've felt guilty for not.

So it was interesting when, as I sat in my last day of Curriculum Theory & Development class on Friday, one of the groups presented on recycling and called it "Solely a moral decision." I expected them to say it was a stewardship issue, or an ethical issue (as in 'you should recycle unless you have shoddy ethics'), but it wasn't. It was a personal moral issue. So they said. And their reasoning went something like this. First, there are hidden costs in recycling. More trucks come to pick it up. More roads break down because of the heavy trucks. More tires are wasted. More gas is consumed. Then the recycling begins. Well it might begin if someone wants the materials, otherwise it just gets shipped to the landfill anyway. But if someone wants it then the recycling begins. Well sort of. Because only parts of the material can be recycled. It is not a 100% yield enterprise. You don't get all of the material back as useful new stuff. There is waste. And to top it off, the process is very energy expensive. This means it burns more coal or whatever to power the transformation that doesn't even recycle *all* of the junk.

So, one *could* argue, that in the current environmental and ecological landscape, the ethical thing to do is trash everything. Well, everything that can't be composted. Everyone should have a compost pile. That *was* agreed upon.

The recycling bit was news to me. I hadn't really thought about it before. Although, it is somewhat incomplete, because processes only improve if there is an incentive to improve them. It is almost impossible for the process to improve if no one is recycling at all. So having recycling around might spur more efficient recycling centers. Hopefully. So that is a reason to recycle.

But that's not really the point. The point then, is that the other 2 "R"s of the 3Rs - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, are that much more important, and if you notice, they come first. So, as an individual, I can choose to purchase a huge tub of Gatorade powder instead of the 36 individually packaged Gatorade bottles because that reduces my waste. And then I can reuse the huge tub for...uh...something. Okay, I would still throw it away, but there would be less trash. The point is, people are starting to be environmentally conscious about food production (organic and whatnot) but the packaging is just overlooked.

Then, adding to all that, church today had the author of the book "Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action". The author, J. M. Sleeth, talks about how conservation is a Biblical imperative and that every person can do their part to help preserve the world around us. Then there is the website for his organization, called "Serve God, Save the Planet." It has lots of information, from religious textual examinations to church statements to next steps. Here is a list of questions and hints that he provides concerning a lot of the things that an individual could do to help cut down on their own environmental impact.

Blah blah

2007-07-03T14:11:00.001-05:00

My class has two days left.

It feels odd, sitting on the ending side of this thing, the class and even this first half of the summer, that the results could be so vastly different than my expectations.

I mean, I was coming to Michigan largely because I did not have anything 'better' to do; no one was willing to take me up on a grand adventure to the far reaches of imagination and travel. So I did not expect my time to be occupied with people that I will miss, and with thoughts that will change my teaching and relationships and life.

Next summer however, I am definitely leaving the country. So here is the open invitation: I am planning on doing a study abroad for all of June and July next summer. I want to go to a Spanish speaking country. If you are interested, let me know.

In other news, I am pumped for the return to Houston. My place is awesome and I am unabashedly planning on sleeping in my roommates huge bed while he's gone (I only have a twin).

More Curriculum...and other stuff

2007-06-30T18:15:00.002-05:00

This class is mind-blowing.

Seriously. My mind is blown apart.

The articles and ideas that we discuss just come through as true to me; ideas that make education into a mutual journey, that make it relational, that make it a search for truth, that give such dignity to the student.

An amazing quote that I came across today will explain some what I mean.

"The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."
- Diane Ackerman

So as an educator, my job is not as some conduit of knowledge, pouring the things I know out like water into the gaping mouths of open, unblinking vessels. The vessels being the students. Instead, I am challenging my students to take risk, to become aware of the beauty that is around them, to challenge them to move in it and through it and become part of it.

This weekend I am up in Traverse City. One of my TFA friends comes up here every summer. I currently sit, watching the wind whip small whitecaps across Elk Lake, feeling the old dry sun warm my face and move the wind's crispness off of my arms, listening to the trees dance some ancient chant and call as they shake shake shake.

Or...

I currently sit
watching the wind whip
small whitecaps across Elk Lake, feeling the old
dry sun warm my face and move
the wind's crispness off of my arms,
listening
to the trees dance
some ancient chant
and call as they shake
shake
shake.

Curriculum Class

2007-06-25T14:46:00.004-05:00

I am currently enrolled in, and have now completed my second day of a course at Calvin College titled (why do I want to say entitled? does that even mean anything?) EDUC 580 - Curriculum Theory & Development. I have posted the course description for your perusal.

Participate in a study of theories and development of curricula for pre-school through grade 12 students in all content areas. In this course, you will become more aware of theories that inform curricula choices and contextual curricular issues, with special consideration of the more practical side of implementing curricular change. Discussions will be grounded in the integration of faith and learning including issues of social justice. (3 sem. hrs.)

So a couple of things jump out, which actual course experience has borne out as well; "Discussions will be grounded in the integration of faith and learning including issues of social justice."

!! Well. The integration of faith and learning bit is not quite up Teach For America's metaphorical alley, but issues of social justice? Come on! Can I guy get an Amen? (Amen. Thanks you in the back).

Furthermore, let's look at "with special consideration of the more practical side of implementing curricular change." Wow. That sounds suspiciously like "The education system is all #$%& up so reform is necessary, but we need to figure out what reforms would be good and how to get them going."

And sure enough, both of these things have formed a vital component to the class so far. It has been amazing! Who would have thought that I would ever write that about an Education course?!

I think the most influential aspect so far has been the reading of One Kid at a Time, by Eliot Levine. This book describes the development, operation and results of a new school model in Providence, RI organized by The Big Picture Company. This organization is starting schools across the country with a truly innovative educational approach that is all based on experiential, interest-based learning. You should check it out.

Wedding #2

2007-06-25T14:46:00.003-05:00

Last night I got back from my second wedding of the summer, having now upped my Wedding Index to a pretty strong 9 points.

For those of you scoring at home, the Wedding Index expresses your value to your friend circle as a whole, as well as giving a small commentary on the ages of your friends. For the Wedding Index you get points for various roles as follows:
3 points - maid of honor or best man
2 points - brides maid or groomsman
1 point - usher, flower arranger, photographer, singer, scripture reader etc (these must be for a friends wedding, NOT as a profession)

The value of being the bride or the groom is yet to be determined. On the one hand you could argue that its value should be higher than 3 because as a bride or groom you permit everyone else to score points at all. On the other hand, you are out of the game and so maybe you don't score points. I am not sure yet. I need input.

Anyway, the wedding went really well. I liked the locations for the wedding and the reception, which were both nature/outdoors themed. And before you go "What? That sounds hideous" I will explain that this theme just means that the wedding itself was outside, including lots of outdoor pictures, and then the reception was at this nature center auditorium. See, not so ugly right?

The wedding ceremony was conducted by my pastor (and the bride and groom's pastor more importantly) from Purdue. I thought he did a great job, making a very good explanation of the sanctity of marriage from a Biblical perspective, and tying in many of the great anecdotes you would want to hear from a college pastor who knows the participants intimately.

Wedding #1 was similarly officiated by a college pastor of the bride and groom, to good results. I feel like having there be a strong connection between the couple to be wed and the pastor makes for a more significant wedding ceremony for the couple (all though I do not know this from personal experience) and from the guest's pov as well. Maybe I'll do that for my wedding.

Or, there is the other option. My buddy Nick and were talking about how ridiculous the planning has been for Wedding #2 and the idea of a destination wedding was broached. I feel like this is an awesome option for a couple of reasons:

It seems like the bride and groom don't even get to enjoy their party that much! I mean you are getting married! I want to party! I want to dance like a maniac with my wife and family and all my friends. It's going to be epic! I don't want to be running out of there to go get it on with my wife (although that will be nice I'm sure), or feel like I can't really enjoy myself because I have this way uncomfortable formal wear on. I feel like the party aspect is increased by about a factor of 1000 if you do a destination wedding followed by a reception afterward.
While the wedding ceremony is beautiful, and I love seeing my friends look into each others eyes and say the words and smooch, I mean come on. Most people are in it for the party! Go back to number 1. Think about the weddings you have been to. Wouldn't they have been way more fun if everyone was dressed just a little more casually and the bride and groom were getting down until the wee hours of the night? Exactly.
Destinations are cool. That's why it is called a destination. It's where you want to go! So you know that you and your immediate family would have a smashing time in Hawaii or Italy or wherever. And just try and tell me that you would not become hopelessly romantic if you were getting married by the sea in Italy. I'm falling in love just thinking about it.
Cost. Weddings are EXPENSIVE. By having a destination wedding you are diverting huge amounts of capital into a much tangible payout. Instead of bouquets, you have tropical plants. Instead of a huge cake, you have dinner by the sea. Instead of a reception you have...a party. Okay that's pretty much the same thing. But all the other things are good!

Later.

Summer Reading

2007-06-20T10:21:00.001-05:00

If you are looking for some books to occupy your summer, here are two different lists that I found interesting.

Faculty of University of Texas summer reading list - This is pretty self explanatory. I like having lists like these because I never know what current novels are crap and what might be interesting.
This course by Orson Scott Card made use of different genres of current american literature, with the intent being to give a true accounting of what american literature actually is, without all of the fluffy 'I want to sound super smart' junk.
For what ever reason, one of the books I want to read this summer is called On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, which as far as I can tell, is *the* novel from the Beat Generation. And while I was at it, I looked up some Chuck Klosterman stuff, and this guy called Tom Wolfe. I guess the theme for this list is "Hippie drug culture", which I cannot explain my interest in, but let all be comforted that I do not plan on partaking in LSD any time soon.

Locations & Musings

2007-06-20T09:07:00.001-05:00

I am not one that usually spends a lot of time thinking about what could be, but I recently have thought quite a bit about the affect that location has played in my current position in TFA, my career trajectory, interests, friends, etc.

Right now I wonder if I would be teaching if I had not joined the co-op program at Purdue (and you can see right away the futility of this line of thinking, and yet, I am currently deep in it). I think that co-op and its unique mix of meaningful work experiences combined with inane absurdities and general drudgery is at least 50% responsible for motivating me to apply to Teach for America in the first place. If I didn't know that corporate engineering was lame, would I now be working at some engineering firm in Seattle, WA or Greenville, SC? Would the added responsibility and work-load of a full-time position make it actually enjoyable? I don't know, but it is interesting to think about.

Another affect of the co-op program was to move me every 3 to 4 months from one place to another (that's usually what moving does). I went from school to work, from work to school, and only my first year (fall '01) and fifth year (fall '05) did I complete a normal academic school year. My friends became concentrated in the co-op program. There were about 4 guys who rotated together, took ME classes together, did the house stuff together. Later on I took more advantage of enjoying the church community of which I was a part, but how did these relationships get stunted by leaving? Would I have different friends? Would I be married (good question since so many of my college friends are checking that box this summer or last)? Again, I don't know, but it is interesting to think about.

For a moment. And then I look up and around at this summer that is here and now, and the realities of the friendships that currently exist, of the work that I am currently doing, of the summer school that is starting in 3 weeks, and I am moving again.

Activity Update

2007-06-18T11:04:00.001-05:00

What follows is a non-chronological list of activities performed by me or people who look remarkably similar to me in dim lighting.

Making use of the driving range to discover that swinging a wood as hard as you can usually yields approximately 19 feet of forward progress while hitting irons in repeatable rhythmic motions churns balls into the 220s on the fly.
Sprinting full speed into the shallows at Muskegon to bid (that means 'to dive head first') for the discs thrown by Hunt or Miller. Realizing that jumping from the shore drastically increases your likelihood of hitting bottom.
Crawling on the floor and under coffee tables.
Discovering that spider webs usually congregate in the northeast corner of coffee tables. By usually, I mean on this one, unconfirmed occasion.
Watched "Prairie Home Companion". Discovered that woman was created first, she had 3 boobs, decided that was excessive and cut the middle one off, asked "What should be done with this useless boob?" and decided to make man. Ha!
Went climbing. Loved that guy who had no volume control AS HE SHOUTED THAT WE WERE DOING A GREAT JOB!
Went running. Running in Michigan in the summer is great. There is a breeze and there are trees and it is beautiful. I remember running in Houston. It was loud and humid and miserable.
Scrabble. I played. I lost. I made up words.
Cribbage. I played. I won. I did not make up any words.
Cooking! Pasta salad, pizza, enchiladas, brownies (out of a box), Kool-aid (does that even count?), egg sandwiches, brats and dogs on the grill. Mmm summer foods.
Ice cream eating has almost become a daily event. I have hit East Grand Rapids, Grand Haven, Muskegon, Forest Hill Foods, Meijer...
I read "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls". Very...interesting. Yep. Interesting. Don't judge.
Threw the disc again and again and again.
Threw a bachelor party. DJ Haywood spun some mad hits including the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye and Christmas songs. Believe me, you wish you were there.

I have one more week of the true summer experience. I am proud to say I have proven my meddle as a summer experiencer because I have not been bored, nor complained about not having enough to do, but instead been gleeful occupied for approximately 95% of these past 3 weeks. While my "I have all day to goof off and enjoy myself" ends next monday when my Curriculum Development class starts, after a week of 7 hours of class per day, I drop back to 3 hours per day and hope that 8 hours of play time will be sufficient. I would not want to get too used to this schedule, right?

Summatime

2007-06-07T08:36:00.002-05:00

Not much is going on in Michigan these days.

But really, that's just the affects of having the semblance of a routine and no extraordinary things breaking it. I have actually been busy, living this summer for play.

I am no playing basketball and ultimate regularly (2 to 3 times a week). Last night was my first night back at ultimate since final semester at Purdue. I was nervous (I always get nervous before unknown competitions), but ended playing pretty well. Since it was pick up and not a club team, summer league or college team, the offense was pretty selfish, and defense was one dimensional, but it was still fun. I played third handler which is definitely not a typical position for me. I handled at sectionals during my last year at Purdue, but that was only because no one else was there who could do it. And with our offensive stack moving all over the place, I took it upon myself to be the anchor for lining up and setting up our O. As a result, I did not have any huge catches for scores, but I did throw some hucks. Granted they were in general pretty floaty, but for the first time back, very solid.

I also got a climbing membership for the month that I am back. Apparently, Houston has pampered me in this regard, because the Texas Rock Gym is *significantly* better than Higher Ground. Really, higher ground has a much cooler location, but the location's limitations dictate a three room layout, each room being the size of my living room. Its tiny. The size makes me very self-conscious if I am there late in the evening, when it is busy. Because of the nature of the climbing sport, there usually are large numbers of really experienced climbers and not that many newbies. So while there is not any judging going on (I have never heard "man you suck!" or anything akin), I am watching what other people are doing, and they are watching me and everyone (I assume) is mentally grading themselves in respect to everyone else. Maybe this doesn't happen, but I imagine it happens.

Speaking of imagining things into reality, I started reading this book called "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls". My aunt lent me the book last summer after she found out I would be teaching middle school. Accompanying the book was some disclaimer about how crazy adolescent girls are. Well, I decided to start reading the book, finally. One of the things that really struck me, and explains a lot of the behavior I noticed over the past year, is that adolescents (specifically girls, but probably boys as well) are developmentally just beginning to be able to think critically/abstractly. As a result, they generate countless faulty syllogisms that originate from "I feel so therefore its true" or from "Here's one example so it must be true".

Let me give you an example. Students in my class say to me things like "You never call on me for ______". This is a case of the first faulty syllogism. The student has one example, or maybe even a couple examples of me calling on other students instead of him/her. They *feel* like I am purposely ignoring them. Since the feel it, it must be true. I *am* ignoring them. This state of disregard on my part then necessarily stretches infinitely backward and forward in time. I have *never* called on them and I *never* will. Which really, if you think about that feeling, is pretty serious, albeit completely based on falsehood.

Students in my class also say things like "Other math classes don't get homework every day! Why do we?" This is the second faulty syllogism. The student usually has one friend who doesn't have homework. They then extrapolate that to everyone. For a more concrete example of this mistake think: "That famous actor bought his 16 year old daughter a brand new Mercedes CLK for her birthday. Therefore ALL parents buy brand new Mercedes for their children's' 16th birthday. Therefore I should get a brand new Mercedes for my 16th birthday."

Ahhh, youth.

Cell Phone Hell

2007-06-02T18:01:00.001-05:00

This past month I have existed in a state of cell phone hell.

Anyone who has tried to get a hold of me probably has experienced some side-effects of my purgatory; dropped calls, disconnected phone line, fuzziness. I was basically a living, breathing cell phone commercial.

Here's how it all played out.

For the past two years I subscribed to At&t wireless. I was very satisfied with their service. My phone was great, the rates were extremely reasonable (I got a discount by purchasing the plan through a previous intern employer), the online website was easy to navigate, and the coverage was consistent.

The problem that eventually developed was the time that I had to talk changed; I needed to go to bed by 10 so that I did not scream unconditionally at my students and average 3 aneurysms a day. If I was going to bed by 10, that meant I was talking to people from like 8 until 9:30. If I wanted to talk to anybody. Which I did. Because I like people.

So I'm sure you see where this is going. Huge cell phone bills resulted. In March my bill was $180 or so. That was a painful bill, so I resolved to monitor my usage and buckle down and some more cliches about paying attention to stuff and meaning business. I went over in April.

My bill was like $150.

The system was broken. I started researching cell phone companies. My roommate had Verizon. I checked it out. I liked the motorola Q, especially because I wanted to get a smartphone this time around, but the per month fees were really high (he was paying 90 a month or some such nonsense). I just could not justify the jumped from 40 to 90 plus tax.

Then I saw sprint had 7 to 7. It had the Q. It was inexpensive. It was oh so seductive. I overlooked the fact that ever single person said that "Sprint drops calls left and right" and "their coverage sucks". And it dropped calls left and right. It had shoddy coverage. I hated my life. But the final straw was when they made me put a 250$ security deposit down AND would not let me pay with a credit card. I mean, come on. Join the 21st century. I want to pay online. Your service already sucks and inconveniences me to the point I have to go to my car in the parking lot just to carry a normal conversation but then I have to write checks every month?

I started looking at cell phone service again.

Then I found a Motorola Q on bestbuy.com. It was 50$. It was Verizon. Bam. I ordered it. And they proceeded to botch my order in ways that I did not even know were possible. My phone would not activate when it arrived. Then the port did not work. Then the port did work, but Verizon did not have any record of my request for service.

I talked with at least 20 different help desk people, spent 4 hours on the phone and eventually spent 2 hours in bestbuy before the Verizon people got my stuff working again.

I love text messaging.

TFA Year One - Recap

2007-05-29T08:08:00.001-05:00

No writing occurred for the past three weeks on this blog. This is self-evident. All you have to do is scroll down and see for yourself that the last date posted was May 6th or something.

One of my friends told me the other day that he thought maybe some freak hurricane washed me out to sea and since I was the only fatality of this otherwise innocuous natural disaster, there was no press coverage. What else could explain, he continued, your lack of postings *and* non-existent cell phone?

In truth, there was no natural disaster. I was ruminating. And I my phone stopped working.

I struggled, during this past month, to put this year in prospective. I knew that I would be returning to the Midwest for June, and with that return would come many friends, family and just acquaintances that would call me to give an account of my toil.

And my struggle revolved around a couple of questions:

How do I explain the impact that I had when all of my hard data shows that I had no real measurable affect on my students? For that matter, *did* I have an impact? What was it?
How do I explain the reality of schools like mine, where students are driven by the test and not much else? How do I explain the youth addicted to entertainment, with no focus for anything that does not involve BET, a movie or video games?
How do I explain the administrators and teachers that are on the ground, working for the best for the students, but at the same time, trying to preserve their jobs? How do I explain their decisions?
How do I talk about Teach For America, when I do not see 'solvency' in my classroom, when I see progress yes, but not solvency in my school, when I don't know what solvency even looks like in the broad scheme of things?

I think I struggle with these questions because they are hard questions and deep questions. I want to write that maybe they don't have answers, but as part of this movement, as a member of this movement fighting for educational equality, I *have* to believe that solvency is possible in some form. Maybe I am just not smart enough, experienced enough, creative enough, something enough to think up a solution that could work. I don't know.

The reality of this year though, is that by the numbers, I did not really make an impact. Yes, 7 of my students passed the standardized test, where no one passed last year. But there are quite a few students who passed 2 years ago or 3 years ago, and did not pass this year. In terms of net improvement, I had 50% of my students increase their scores. That means 50% decreased. The actual number of questions increased was also balanced by the number of questions decreased. So statistically, numerically, I am a wash for year one.

Yes, I still had an impact on my students. One of my students wrote me a letter talking about how she did not know how to divide before this year (a 7th grader) and now she does, how she was bored and ignored the teacher and she found herself being interested in fractions (!). This is a real impact. And so many of my students come to spend time in my room before school or during advisory saying "I don't want to go to so and so, they don't like me". Time and again the tough students come to me.

And while this *is* important, I cannot stop looking at the numbers. I cannot stop looking at one student who will come and engage me in conversation and then sit and do literally nothing during all of my class, regardless of my pleadings. If they don't *learn* anything from me, any math...well, did I alter there course? Did I change their life options? Who knows.

Despite these things, I can honestly say that I loved this year. I am returning next year. I recommend Teach For America to anyone and everyone. While I think it is not the end-all-be-all of educational solutions, I am reminded of a quote that TFA espouses, that really struck me by Mahatma Gandhi; "Be the change you want to see in the world."

TFA is *doing* something. I am *doing* something. And the something is not sand in the wind. The something lives and breathes and dreams and fears and grows up and changes the world.

Vacation

2007-05-29T08:00:00.001-05:00

I am officially on vacation.

There are many projects going on at my house, but I feel I have no duty or obligation to involve myself with these mere trivialities.

For I am the seasoned (tasty!), accomplished (more on the accomplishments later) warrior back from battle in far-away-lands. And by battle I mean, sword fighting. With swords.

So while my brothers toil on re-tiling our laundry room, I am sitting back and healing from the mental and physical afflictions that now accost me.

For example, I am still recovering from the two severe scrapes I received by diving for a volleyball a couple of weekends ago.

But then on a more serious note, I am forgetting and remembering this year, so that hopefully I can approach this coming one with a little more wisdom, a little less tentativeness and a lot more sandwiches.

Year 1 - Nearly Complete

2007-05-06T18:08:00.001-05:00

I have 14 days left of class.
I have 19 calendar days until I am flying to Grand Rapids.

It is so close. And yet I cannot seem to find an accurate description or summary or whatever to neatly wrap this up.

Maybe this can't be wrapped up neatly. Well, probably.

But still.

One thing I can say; after the TAKS test, the pressure is definitely off. There is much less urgency everywhere. This is sad, but on the other hand, everyone is tired. I can see it. Shoot, I can feel it.

I for one, have been leaving at 4 pm almost every day. It is a revelation. Mr. F relates it to being in college - it's like we finished class and we don't have any homework until next week, so everyone is looking for something to do.

To occupy this new-found free-time I have been playing very hard.

I found a new game, Settlers of Catan, which many people have recommended over the past couple years. It is awesome.

I also play basketball, and go climbing 2 or 3 times a week.

I'm watching the Wire season 3.

I am cooking a lot.

Good things. I'm ready for Michigan.

Bobby

2007-04-23T19:48:00.001-05:00

Last night I watched the movie by Emilio Estevez (Emeeeeeeeeeeeelioooooooo!) "Bobby". It is about the days leading up to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

It is important to note that this movie is *not* about John F. Kennedy. Nope, this is about his little brother.

So I didn't really know anything about lil' bro until I watched this movie, but I must say, he is a captivating personality. My friend F told me that while the Republicans point to Reagan as the ultimate representation of the conservative mindset in action, Robert was the embodiment of the Democratic or liberal persuasion.

The movie was really well done, in my opinion. It was somewhat in the vein of Crash, with seemingly unrelated parallel story lines all converging (I know parallel lines can't converge) in the final scene.

While the movie was well done, or maybe because, it really messed me up. I don't know what it is about movies like this, where there is such a charismatic personality, or not even that positive - a personality that is empathetic but flawed, who is trying to do good and is stopped by palpable forces of hatred, but I just get all worked up.

It was the same thing with American History X. I see this hate, this hate that we (I am extrapolating here) can put in the back of our minds or let our eyes hop over in real life, and the hate like slaps me in the face and then goes on to kill all of the good and noble and beautiful things in the movie. Like when that kid got his brains blown across the bathroom wall in AHX. I mean what was that for anyway? What did that accomplish? It was over nothing, proved nothing, and the kid had made this huge turn and had so much potential.

That is what I saw and heard in Bobby. I saw this man, who in 1968, embodied so much that was good and right and beautiful about the civil rights movement, and yet had the backing of the powerful (whites). He had reconciliation on the mind in a way that strikes me as more progressive than many that are on the front lines of civil rights today.

It made me so angry that he was killed.

It made me so angry that we are still fighting the same kind of hate and division that existed in 1968.

I really liked Lawrence Fishburne's line in the movie though. He is talking about these two Mexican immigrants, one who is riddled with hate, who bemoans the unfair treatment, and says "No one is going to look at you and say I want some of what he's got" and then the other who is humble and good natured but yearns for fullness, saying, "You sir are a King. King Arthur was not always a king. But he had nobility. You sir are the Once and future king."

Who will I be?

Who will you be?

Who will we be?

TAKS Week

2007-04-21T01:13:00.001-05:00

I am all in favor of accountability through testing. It is a good thing.

Students should be held accountable for the materials they are expected to learn in a grade, and if they fail to meet those expectations, they ought to be retained and *supported* so that on the second go-around they *are* successful. Of course, this comes with the caveat that the education system should be equipping every single student to have the choice of attending a 4-year university, and it that end goal, every decision (like, "You aren't ready for the 9th grade because you failed 8th grade math, and we want you to go to college, so you need to know this before you go on") should be made.

And not only students should be held accountable. The schools themselves ought to be held accountable for the product (education) that they are delivering, as well as the environment (safety, cultural exposure etc) they provide. So too should the teachers themselves be held accountable. If you are a disinterested, uncaring curmudgeon who is killing time, picking up a pay check, and terrorizing kids, you shouldn't be teaching.

Again, however, this accountability should come from a place of "We want our children to have the life options of attending a 4 year college, what do we need to offer to get them there?" Good teachers, good staff, and a good, safe environment are all important factors in this goal.

Just to re-emphasize, I think accountability/testing is good.

I think that NCLB (No Child Left Behind) and our state "high stakes" TAKS tests are stupid. I just survived a week of testing.

I do not know quite yet what would be a solution, but I know that the system we have now is broken and sucks. Just ask my students. Just ask teachers at my school.

To document, these are the things I did during the 6 hours that I was not allowed to do anything except "Actively Monitor" my classroom on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Oh yea, I was trained on what that meant.

Read Philippians 1
Read Philippians 2
Read Philippians 1 over and over
Read Philippians 2 over and over
Walked around the room
Walked around the room over and over
Took 15 second sit breaks at the back of the room where no one in the hallway could see me.
Took 15 second sit breaks over and over
Counted steps as I walked around the room
Counted steps over and over
Did a crossword (this was on the second day, when I got bold)
Folded paper cranes.
Planned the remaining weeks of school.
Thought about a project I am going to have my kids do
Thought about ice cream
Thought about ice cream over and over
Thought about injuring myself
Thought about injuring myself over and over
Prayed my students would do well.
Prayed my students would do well over and over.

P.S. I was lucky. Mr. F had to monitor on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Sharp Bright Spots

2007-04-12T18:43:00.001-05:00

During third period today, which is the class occupying the hours of 12:40 until 2:10 pm every week day, my students were working in pairs on a TAKS Study Guide. The students were generally on-task and motivated, both by the reality of *the date* looming in the near future (April 17th folks!), and by the anticipation of playing Jeopardy on Monday and winning candy bars.

While the students worked, I milled around the room, moving from group to group, checking progress and answering questions. With about 15 minutes left in class, two of my Latina ladies stopped me. "Mister," one said, "may I ask you a big question?"
"Well that depends," I answered. "How big is the question? Is it *this* big? or only this big?" I asked, as I made two different circles, the first about even with my shoulders and the second about the size of a basketball.
"Oh, a BIG question," she responded.
"Sure." I take a deep breath.
"Have you ever laid your hands on a girl?"
"..." I wait. I replay the question in my mind. Did I hear that right? Lay my hands on a... What does that even mean? Do I dare to ask what that means? So I wait some more.
"Like, have you ever hit a girl."
"No." Phew. I am glad that is the direction that went.
The two of them look at each other and then both exclaim, "You are going be a great father."

So. I laughed. I had no choice. I mean, the absurdity of the situation, two female students, 13 years old, are commenting on my fatherhood potential, is mind boggling. But then to add into the mix that the deciding characteristic is that I don't hit girls?!?

After I laughed, the girls looked at me and said, "We're serious. It's not funny."
I apologized and tried to explain, couldn't make sense of it, and concluded with, "Thank you."

How do I begin to interact with students who look at not hitting girls as an enviable quality? No, that is not correct. How do I begin to interact with students who look at not hitting girls as a question that one *must* ask when considering males? Is this endemic to a sub-culture? Socioeconomic position?

Maybe I am just naive.

In fourth period, some students asked me, "Mister, are you teaching 8A, 8B or what next year?" (8A, 8B etc are the names of our different grade level teams).
"Well, I teach 7th grade."
"Oh man! I want you to teach us next year!"
"Well you can have Mr. Farber, he's really good."
"No, I want you to teach us!"

*smile*

Crazy or Awesome

2007-04-10T21:46:00.001-05:00

I had this awesome conversation with Mr. B today. I was laying out my new-found dissatisfaction with the status quo .

I am going to build the argument backwards, so that it makes more sense, and then loop back to encapsulate it all into a neat little bundle of one-serving bliss that might or might not relate to the title.

I am a first year teacher. As a first year teacher, every day I am at the mercy of numerous devastating youth for multiple hours, while simultaneously at the mercy of far fewer, but equally devastating, adults for multiple minutes. During these periods of entropy (at best, directed craziness), I am certifiably crazy. Insane.

This fact was not known to me until about October. During October I worked 2 weeks of 12 hour days (by choice) and flipped out. I then realized I was crazy, and as a result, physical activity was a *necessity* every day just to protect myself (and all those other people/kids I interact with) from a true crazy episode.

It is important to note that this exercise is not for entertainment purposes; it is for survival.

Now add to this mix the development of relationship. In first semester, I am so busy with survival, and so hopped-up on the adrenaline of running the show and not knowing what's going on at the same time that relationship is an after-thought. When it happens, it happens and is great and I am better for it. When it doesn't, I don't notice because I am surviving and hopped-up on adrenaline.

But this is not entirely true. I know, deep down, that I want, need, relationship. And every time it doesn't happen, I get a little weaker.

By February, this weakness was blooming into fully grown dysfunction. Strange desires and behaviors were cropping up all over the place. I was eating toothpaste and brushing my teeth with pickle juice. I was doing the worm while listening to B.B. King. I was skipping on treadmills, coloring my nails with sharpie markers, and eating tubs of peanut butter.

Okay, none of those were true, but I was acting weird. And now I know: I am in a profession, in an organization, that promotes a selfless masochistic work-ethic, but I am of a religious persuasion that emphasizes community and relationship. Relationship that is sadly lacking.

Mr. B and I decided that there is a Teacher Continuum of Craziness. It hypothesizes that a teacher is always in flux, and you are either becoming more awesome and more balanced and more in-control, or you are becoming more loony, more loner, more unresponsive. You are either developing into Crazy or into Awesome.

TFA subtly emphasizes workoholism as the path to awesome. But I need relationship. It is important. I think it will form an integral part of any path I find that leads to Awesome.

Four Skinny Trees

2007-04-04T06:10:00.001-05:00

"Four Skinny Trees" is an excerpt from the book by Sandra Cisneros entitled The House on Mango Street. "Four Skinny Trees" is found on pages 74 and 75. Copyright Sandra Cisneros, 1984 and published by Vintage Contemporaries, 1991.

"They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here. Four raggedy excuses planted by the city. From our room we can hear them, but Nenny just sleeps and doesn't appreciate these things.
"Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.
"Let one forget his reason for being, they'd all droop like tulips in a glass, each with their arms around the other. Keep, keep, keep, trees say when I sleep. They teach.
"When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be."

Birthday Celebration

2007-04-03T21:21:00.001-05:00

My friends organized a birthday dinner tonight. It was splendid. We had a large round table, with a visage of Pope John Paul II in the middle. He would stare at us and stare at us until we turned the lazy susan and made him stare at someone else.

This was a great ending to an otherwise disappointing day where the following exchanges happened:

"I think I am getting a brain tumor from this." - me
"Hahaha Mr. Blair's getting a brain tumor! He won't teach here anymore!" - girl in advisory

"Everybody treats me like I am stupid. I am not stupid." - student
"When did someone treat you like you were stupid?" - me
"When you tell me to stop talking all the time."
"Well were you talking about the problems, or were you saying I'm a real boy over and over?"
"..."

"Mr. Blair, your hair's falling out." - student in advisory
"... thanks" - mr blair.

YES! College Prep

2007-03-27T14:01:00.001-05:00

Today I visited Yes! college prep. Yes! is a charter school cut from the TFA fabric; high expectations, hard work, lots of support, sights on college.

I was inspired. For I remembered

Students, just like my students, can have a joy of learning.
Students, just like my students, can think critically about topics.
Students, just like my students, can express themselves fluently.
Students, just like my students, can succeed.

So now I am left with a "now what" kind of feeling. How am I going to coalesce my reality, my teaching environment with the culture of accountability, of achievement, of growth represented by the students at Yes! Prep?

It's never to late to make a change.

Play

2007-03-24T11:05:00.001-05:00

On Friday I was really tired. I had stayed up until 2:30 am finishing this book I was reading. It was a good book.

Even though I was tired, I still made plans to have fun on Friday. I heard that my church was having a game night from 7:00 until 10:00, and earlier in the week games sounded theoretically like a good time, so some TFA folks agreed to go.

After school on Friday was a different matter. I had no energy to move, so even though I had some work to do in terms of putting my classroom back together (it's like an explosion went off in there at the end of every day), I just couldn't do it. Hoping that motivation might come, I sat at school for half an hour while I read espn.com. I almost fell asleep.

I made up my mind to leave school at 4:35. I debated between going home and sleeping forever, and following through on my plans. I went rock climbing as a compromise.

I really like rock climbing, but I am not very good at it. My strength to weight ratio is not high enough to make me capable of all the really cool stuff that rock climbers do, like dyno-ing. A dyno is what Tom Cruise does at the beginning of Mission Impossible II, in that part where he jumps from one ledge to another. I'm just not strong enough to do it. Or I weigh to much to do it. Either way.

Another observation, is that rock climbing seems to be gaining acceptance as a trendy spot for youth birthday parties. Maybe kids don't go to arcades anymore since everyone under the sun has some video game platform, but it seems like every time I am over at Texas Rock Gym, there is a herd of 7 year old children running around and screaming their heads off. Part of me laughs and enjoys watching the abandon with which these dervishes approach their play (getting to the point here soon) but another part of me recoils from the screaming, twisting, running, bouncing, here-I-am-but-now-I-want-to-do-that-give-me-a-cookie-now-I'm-done-bathroom-or-else energy. It ruins my controlled, purposeful brainwaves.

Mr. Beuthin, his roommate and I ended up riding bikes over to church. Do you ride bikes? You should. It's grand. We stopped at Pei Wei for dinner, and marvelled at what we currently believe to be free beverages and unlimited free fortune cookies. How do they make money? Seriously. I could probably live (for about 3 minutes) on beverages and fortune cookies. At least I would live a very knowledgeable life right?

Game night was held in the children's area of my church. When we got there I immediately started playing with the blocks. They had all sizes, but there were some 2 by 4 size blocks that I was using to make a giant something awesome. Someone commented that it looked like Jenga, and bam, giant super Jenga was born. We played giant super Jenga for about 20 minutes. It is very satisfying when a 4 foot high tower of 2 by 4s falls crashing to earth. Slightly dangerous though. Luckily, there were no casualties.

After game night, we rode home. We attempted to hold on to the back of this SUV, but that didn't work, so we raced him. He went home and cried to his momma after we smoked him. We rode by this big fountain and decided to climb some trees. At the top of the trees we had a tree shaking contest, an animal noise contest, and a peeing contest. I eventually decided that I was Rafeekee from the Lion King, and started chanting some mumbo jumbo, that unknown to me at the time, was actually the key to turning on the fountain. Marvelling at my power, I attempted to chant the fountain into spitting fire, but sadly, this never panned out.

We continued to ride our bikes around, travelling to this little park. On the way, I rode down a big hill and hit a giant mud puddle, effectively transitioning from clean-but-sweaty-Mr.-Blair to did-you-get-in-a-fight-with-a-wild-boar-Mr.-Blair. At the park we rode around on the basketball court running over cockroaches. They crunch and squish, squish and crunch in a very satisfying way. At the play ground we were secret agents infiltrating a compound, and we were careful not to set off the motion and pressure sensitive floors. Or to fall out the window and land in the lava. Both would have been a sad way to go. Home.

We wrapped up the night by attempting various gymnastic exercises on the crossbeam of the swing set, and by throwing a football in the parking lot.

Apparently, little kids are contagious.

Loose Ends 3 - Spring Break

2007-03-15T16:08:00.001-05:00

I am on spring break. Right now. Right now, I am on spring break. Spring break, right now, is happening for me. It's happening.

Yep.

I went backpacking for the first half of my spring break (did I mention that I was on spring break?). I travelled across the great state of Texas for 9 hours, and arrived at Big Bend National Park.

At first, I was rather skeptical about Big Bend receiving "National Park" status. Yes it seemed wrinkly, yes it seemed big, but was it really worthy of being called a *National* park? I had my doubts. It was all brown and shrub covered.

The first night was an adventure, because we made it to the park just before closing time. All of the traditional campsites were full, and the ranger said that "For your safety and comfort, you should leave the park for tonight." We, of course, thought this joker was full hilarity and nonsensical statements, and decided to backcountry camp the first night. It was the right decision.

As we quickly discovered, Big Bend is dominated by the sun. There are 3 important times for every visitor to be aware of:

Sun Rise - a.k.a. when I can get up and stop pretending to be sleeping in this crazy hot weather.

Sun Set - a.k.a. when I can get in bed and quit pretending that I want to be outside in this crazy hot weather.

2 to 4 pm - a.k.a. when I can (try to) find some shade to escape the crazy hot weather so that I don't suffer heat stroke

After 3 full days, 38 miles, lots and lots of elevation gain and loss and 4 nights, here are some take-aways:
1. Big Bend deserves to be a national park.
2. Cowboy hats are sweet. Especially bent up ones.
3. Sunset, sunrise, and stars make any outdoors experience memorable.
4. Staking out a bluff, for the purposes of gang territory, in the wilderness, does not really pose any realistic benefit.

- Lil' Flapjack, gang leader of SW-4
"This is our bluff."

Loose Ends 2 - Losing my job

2007-03-15T00:20:00.001-05:00

This week, I am on spring break. The glory of being a teacher. I am definitely calling all of my engineering friends tomorrow.

So, everything seemed to be on the mend with my principal, and everything was running smoothly. Well, as smoothly as 6th and 7th grade classes could hope to run with a first year engineering major running the show.

I got an email last week from my principal, asking me to come speak with her during my planning period about employment. She used a different word than employment, but it currently escapes me. Whatever.

So I roll down there, after talking to that other TFA guy (Stockton), who did *not* receive a similar email. I meet the 8th grade intervention math teacher at the office. She is my counterpart for 8th grade math.
"You got the email too?"
Me - "Mmm hmm."
"Someone's in there right now."
Me - "Ahh."

After 15 minutes of nail biting I am in.
"So as you know, the district is switching to traditional schedules next year, so we are going to be cutting units at all of the secondary schools. As an extension of this change, the math intervention role does not exist next year. This program was federally funded, and we don't get the funding next year."

Poleaxed. "Okay."
"But don't worry you are not getting fired. We as a district are putting all of these teachers into a pool, and we will be filling future positions from this pool before we do any job fairs of any sort this summer."

Riping my fingernails out of my hand. "Okay."
"It is important to understand, these are not walking papers. You are not getting fired. We are going to be finding another school for you. Since you are in TFA, we have to find you a school with another TFA corps member, so that might be hard, but you are not getting fired."

Gouging my eyes with my thumbs. "Okay."
"So we are going to sign this paper saying that you understand this process. We are going to be trying to find a spot for you here first, but that comes on the basis of seniority, as determined by contract signing date."

So my job doesn't exist next year.
This means (by my estimation) that I have about a 5% chance of being back at my school next year. I would need 2 math teachers to resign before I would be offered a position, and that just won't happen.

My options are to seek positions at schools my friends work at, by having my friends put a word in with their principals. "You, I know this dude. He teaches math right? And he is way sweet. Get him over here." Well, something like that.

Or I could wait, and maybe my district would run out of slots. Then I might get switched to HISD or to YES!

At least one other TFA math teacher (at a different campus), has received similar papers.

Loose Ends 1 - Almost Getting Fired

2007-03-14T23:59:00.001-05:00

So almost two months ago, I received this email from some guy who works for the district, of whom I had never heard. He said he was in charge of ACP (alternative certification process), and that he had gotten word that I was having trouble with "professionalism". He scheduled a meeting for the following Wednesday, in my room, at 10:35 am. The email was copied to my principal, my PD, and to my PD's boss.

Needless to say, I was shocked. Even more shocking, was another TFA teacher, 2 doors down from me, received an IDENTICAL email, except his meeting was at 10:50 am, and in HIS classroom. WTF indeed. So, much debate ensued. The next week rolled around. Wednesday I came down with the flu. I went to school SOLELY BECAUSE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN UNPROFESSIONAL TO MISS THE MEETING. *grin*. *head shake*. Anyway, at the meeting, the district guy, two of his aides, my PD, and her boss all sat down and discussed the specific nature of my unprofessional behavior.

It started like this:
"So do you know what this is about?"
"No, actually, I have thought about it, and I have no idea."
Awkward waiting.
"Well, let me read you some specific things...blah blah blah blah"

It ended like this:
"I am going to go out on a limb here. I know you are sick, and I don't know you, but I am reading that you are angry. Maybe I'm wrong, but that is not a good position to be in."
"Uh huh."
"Well, if you ever need anything, you can contact me. I'm more than willing to help."
I leave the meeting, and the district guy follows me out. He shakes my hand and then:
"I meant what I said. I think you are angry. And I am willing to listen."
Pause. Trying to decide what to do."Of course I'm angry. I'm furious. This was like a slap in the face. I am working really hard, and this is the first I heard of it?"

Ugly situation. I did not go to school the next two days. Flu. I went back, on Monday, was cooled down some, and scheduled a meeting with my principal to discuss my plan for redemption. *cough* I mean improvement.

So I roll into this meeting with no real idea what I want to talk about. I thought she would dictate the agenda to me. Oh well. So I make up some stuff.
"I didn't think the meeting went well."
"You were sick, it is understandable."
"Still. There were some really good points. I have a few questions."
"That's great. What were they?"
"Umm...Yea...so with the DCA stuff, what is the timetable you want for those things?"
"As soon as you administer the tests, the results should be posted."
"Oh."

This continued for about 10 minutes, followed by 10 minutes where my principal started talking about how we can reach every student if we try hard enough. During this whole period I was trying to think if there was anything I *really* wanted to know. I was paying attention too.

"One thing really kind of upset me about the meeting though. One of the comments was that I was not a 'team player' and that I was hard to work with or something. I feel like I am always going around work with a smile on my face, willing to help, greeting everyone, so I don't understand where this could have come from."
"Well, when you are by yourself you are like that. That is exactly why I wanted to hire you in the first place. But when you are with... hmmm..."

At this point, my principal debates about telling me something, and then goes for it. Basically, when I am hanging out with this other math TFA guy, we become super negative. Jerks. Arrogant.

Well. Look who has egg on their face now.

"Wow. I didn't even know I was doing that."
"Yea. That is why I wanted to bring this up. I know you guys can be great members of our team. So by addressing this now, we can get back to work."
"Sounds great!"

Resolution:
A couple weeks ago, my principal drops by the computer lab, while my kids are working on their tutorial program.
"Could I speak with you for a moment Mr. Blair?"
Ohhhhh no. "Sure."
The district guy is hiding around the corner.
"I hear you have been doing a great job since our chat."
"Yes sir! Things are going very well."

Everyone smiles and rides off into the sunset.

I feel ill.

Smile

2007-02-27T16:56:00.001-06:00

"You like to smile don't you mister?" she asked.
As the question is asked, my heart, my entire being lifts into a grin of contentment.
I smile at her and say, "Yes. Yes I do like to smile."
Picking up his homework, I look at the front, flip it over, and then flash the unfinished back at him along with a smile.
"What mister?" he says.
Turning the page to the front, and then again to the back I ask, "Forget something?"
"Oh Mister!" he says. "You didn't say we had to do both sides."
"Uh huh."
Smile.

A (7th grade) student asked me why I never laugh. Now I am sad.

Sad because I don't smile as much in 7th grade.

I am sad because my students' lives are so hard.

I'm sad because my student's father was shot.

I'm sad because words of hate are used so freely.

I'm sad because they don't succeed.

And I am sad because we are not learning.

Memory Verse 1

2007-02-22T21:47:00.001-06:00

Here is week 1:

"I know, O LORD, that a man's life is not his own;
it is not for man to direct his steps.
Correct me LORD, but only with justice -
not in your anger, lest you reduce me to nothing."
- Jeremiah 10:23-24

Principal

2007-02-21T21:00:00.001-06:00

Oh and news from the firing front.
Which I still haven't talked about.

Today my principal announced she would not be returning next year.

She took a job (promotion) as area superintendent.
Or some such title.

Hmmm.

Lent

2007-02-21T20:44:00.001-06:00

Lent starts today. It is Ash Wednesday.

Last year was the first year I really observed Lent with any noticeable change in habits, even though the changes were not significant.

This year I am going to be doing it for real.

I am going to be giving up sweets and all forms of television.

The emphasis, however, is not on "ohh look at me, i am so righteous cuz i don't watch tv and i'm going to get thin by not eating sweets", but instead it is about freeing ourselves to engage with Christ. So as important as the act of releasing these things is, what I am taking on is just as important.

I am taking on a memory verse per week. This will come from whatever I am reading, and whatever struck my fancy. The goal here is to have my eyes, mind, heart focused on God, and that will happen easier if I am continually recalling the Word.

I am following a daily prayer/reading progression.

Let's get it started.
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."
- Hebrews 1:1-3

Old Man

2007-02-20T18:52:00.001-06:00

I keep having all these things that I feel ought to be talked about and not having the energy to deal with them.

In lieu of all the stories about near firings, being back in the Principal's good graces and being sick, I am going to write about this 'vision' I had at church on Sunday.

First, I use vision very loosely. This is not like a Paul on Damascus Road type of vision, but more just a mental picture representing some figurative reality.

At church on Sunday, there was a new guy leading the worship. I liked his style. We sang this song that he wrote that talked about how Christ helps us to approach the cross, and that we need this help because we are to broken, hurt, whatever to come on our own accord.

So I was thinking about this when I had a vision of myself as an old man. I was probably like 80 something, with a long gaunt body encased in wrinkled skin. I had white hair that was matted on my head, and short curly white hairs for a beard. My eyes carried a far away look of experiencing many days of sorrow, that haunted expression of hopelessness. I moved with an arthritic difficulty, shuffling from bed to kitchen to living room to bed.

Into this picture, moved a cross. The cross inched forward slowly at first, gaining size as it approached, until it loomed over me as it stood about 20 feet away. Then a man approached. The exact image of the man was not clear (I think that I hesitate to put a description on Jesus, even in my imagination, because of all of the white European Jesus portraits that I despise), but a sense of magnanimity surrounded him, of peace.

At this point, I wanted so much to go near to the man, and to the cross. My body however, would not permit it. I could not bend, nor step, nor kneel, nor offer any outward sign that I should desire such movement. The man then stood next to me, and placing his hands on my shoulder and arm, he eased me forward with a gentle urging. At the foot of the cross, he supported my slow descent to the ground, even to the point that I resisted because of the pain (arthritis and all).

So I guess what I got outta this picture was that I am currently resistant to how God is working in my life. The good part is that even with this resistance, even with my unrighteousness, Jesus is still willing to come to me and lay his hands on me, and he will put me in a position where I can know and see God, even if it is painful at first.

I pray that I would be welcoming to His movement in my life, and more than welcoming, that I would seek it. I pray that for you as well. Peace.

Wrap

2007-02-15T23:09:00.002-06:00

I'm not sick anymore.

Actually I haven't been for a while, but I have been really busy.

I had the flu for 5 days basically. I got sick on Tuesday night, Jan 30th, went home early on the 31st, and then missed the 1st and 2nd of February.

I went to school everyday the following week, and my kids were really cute and missed me and I felt good.

This past weekend I went recruiting TFA style to the campus of the Old Gold and Black. I'll talk about that in a forth coming post.

Also, I almost got fired (sort of), got really angry about it, had a meeting about it on the day I was sick, got angry again, forgot about while wanting to die (while I was sick), and then came back and found out it wasn't that big of a deal. More on that later.

I played in my first YMCA basketball game tonight. I think I was definitely eligible for BWS status. That's Big White Stiff for those of you scoring at home. Props to the sports guy.

Conversation of the day:
Oscar - "Fresh cut, Fresh cut! Hey Ivan, Fresh cut! Come here so I can slap you"
Mr. Blair - Hey Oscar, we are going to play "Being a jerk" and everytime you are a jerk to someone I'm going to call out "Being a jerk" and then I get to hit you in the head. You're being a jerk right now.
Oscar - Bending down his head. Come on Mr. Blair, give me a good one.
Mr. Blair - Oscar, I don't want to hit you. Go sit down and quite being mean to Ivan.
JurRonn - laughing hysterically Mr. Blair, that's the funniest thing I have ever heard!

The lesson, as always, kids like hitting things.

The Sickness

2007-02-03T12:33:00.001-06:00

I left school on Wednesday at 12:30 pm. I have not returned yet.

I lay in my bed, experiencing cycles of sweats and chills, all while my joints and muscles groaned.

These were the first days of school I have missed.

Apparently my kids were really worried about me.

Maybe I'm not doing such a bad job after all...

Odds and Ends

2007-01-28T17:48:00.001-06:00

I like cooking.

I like sitting outside when the sun is shining and the temperature is cool and feeling my body be warmed, as if by an embrace, and feeling so content that I never want to move or think about moving, while at that same time knowing that everything will be simply great.

I ended a friendship today. It has caused me so much pain and heart ache that I almost feel like I should be glad that it is so firmly defined. But I can't. I still move to that place by instinct when ever I have dreams of adventure, and now instead of being vibrant, it is broken.

Lord, please make me whole. Help me to believe that every day is new and beautiful and a gift to be taken humbly yet forcefully and that You are still working.

Some times I hate my students. I blame them for not succeeding. And then I look at myself and see a dirty, self-possessed man who cannot break the cycle of conceit and arrogance. I see shit.

I love friends. Tonight we are cooking together. I think this will be good.

This is my verse of the moment. Sometimes I wonder if my faith is truly a by product of weakness, as I have read on various atheist blogs/books. But then I decide I don't care, because I would rather have hope than have nothing at all.

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true."

Horrid Day

2007-01-26T23:01:00.001-06:00

I had a horrid day to put the figurative cherry on the horribly crappy sundae of a week.

When I was leaving school, Farber and I were lamenting the atrocious state of affairs, when he mentioned, "Man, I need a drink. Bad. I don't know what you do when shit gets this bad."
"Yea, I need a drink too," I responded.

But I did not go get a drink. Nope. I basically did the college kid inverse, or the norm for a crazed person such as myself; I went home, ate some chips, and then in lieu of a real dinner, went to Borders and read a book for the next 4 hours.

Then I bought a bunch of stuff that was way on sale, left the book I was reading at Borders, and returned to my apartment. Now I plan on eating my nachos and playing video games.

I'll read the rest of the book tomorrow.

More TFA Stuff

2007-01-20T19:21:00.002-06:00

A brief preface:

A week or two ago I yammered about data. It was exceedingly boring, and after reading it over before posting it, knew that it did not convey what I wanted it to convey. It was sloppy. This will hopefully be a bit more streamlined. No promises.

The real thing:

On Friday I had my Round 2 debrief. For those scoring at home, this was my third one-on-one discussion with my program director. Round 0 occurred before school began, Round 1 went down in September, and now Round 2.

For the actual observation, my PD sat in on about 30 minutes of class and recorded the whole ordeal. The Round 2 was a discussion on what she saw.

When I show up, I'm exhausted. I have gradually become sicker and sicker as the day wore on; so much so that by fourth period I barely left my seat. I arrived unprepared; I left the two items that I was supposed to bring at school in a cold, headache, exhaustion infused-haze.

Brooke starts out with the normal kind of stuff. Brooke's my PD.
Oh you are working really hard.
I can tell you are planning.
I was surprised at your self-grading, I think you are higher than this.

You know, buttering me up so that she can lay on the hard stuff.
And lay she does. She shows me the following cycle, saying "This is what I observed in your classroom. You are the expert there, but going from what you wrote in your reflection and the things I saw, I think it is fairly accurate."

The Cycle:

Looking at the cycle, I was faced with thoughts I had been avoiding since Thanksgiving; I think that I am failing my 7th grade students. I feel like I have tried everything I can think of to try to get my students to be engaged and learn the things that I *know* they can learn. So yea, there is definitely some low teacher motivation in regards to trying to get my students to succeed; everything I have tried hasn't worked! And, when I have asked other teachers at my school about it, they basically answer with "You should have lower expectations."

I wanted to cry. I almost did. I feel overwhelmed by my desire to succeed and the apparent futility of that desire. And the futility is purely born from my student's nonchalance! It is *not* that they cannot learn the material. It *is* that they choose to stare at the wall instead of watch how to do the things they are supposed to know how to do.

But, somehow, the conversations shifted to have a positive ending.

First, I took a walk. For five minutes.

When I returned, we talked about things that contribute towards the depression I feel every time I see/taste/touch/hear/smell or think about my big goal (80% mastery of all grade objectives). We talked about how this number is only that, a number. It is *not* a big goal.

A big goal must inspire. It must be a vision. And for me, 80% is not a vision. It is a big bold red line that I am woefully short of.

So I am going to form a new big goal. One that moves me. Because once I am moved, I can move my students (in theory).

I am also going to look into dealing with my frustration. I get extremely frustrated when my students ask questions saying "I don't get it", when I have seen them asleep at their desks or goofing off. So I am going to read a book that I think will help deal with these situations in a more productive manner.

I guess the point of all this is to say that teaching is really difficult. I am struggling constantly, and feel like a failure a large amount of the time. But the reality is that I am capable of improving and I am capable of reaching my kids (I AM THE INSTRUCTIONAL LEADER OF MY CLASSROOM!), and that will only happen if I am willing to *try* to improve.

I pray that in whatever situation we find ourselves, we would remember these moments, when we have tried and failed. I pray that we would have strength in these moments. And I pray that we might persevere, be picked up (through the help of our friends and God), and end up succeeding.

Target (via Bed Bath and Beyond)

2007-01-15T22:15:00.001-06:00

On Sunday I made plans to go to Bed Bath and Beyond.

I guess 'plans' isn't correct, because there was no real planning involved.

I woke up from a nap at about 6. I couldn't move. Really, I didn't want to move. I didn't want to get out of bed. There was no reason to.

I laid there, in my bed, for about 35 minutes. Then I crawled out (my bed is just a mattress on the floor) of my bed into the living room. Mr. Shisler was playing xbox.

Mr. Shisler and I talked about xbox and the nfl playoff scenario for a little while. We're pretty good at having real firm opinions on stuff like that. Real high-class and all. Yea, I thought that the Patriots were pretty good. Tom Brady sure is a good quarterback. The Colts will get killed by the Chargers if they play. We were regular nfl analysts.

So I sit on the floor in my boxers for about an hour (I am not usually in the habit of doing this, but I feel it is important to this story), when the following exchange occurs:
Me: So, I'm going to go to bed bath and beyond.
Shisler: Yea?
Me: Yea, I'm gonna get a luffa.
Shisler: What? A luffa?
Me: Yea, I'm fed up.
Shisler: Why are you going to Bed bath and beyond? they have luffas at kroger.
Me: I don't know. I looked for one and I couldn't find one. No, I found it, but it looked all tiny and like it was going to fall apart.
Shisler: Oh. So you need a monster luffa?

Ten minutes pass when Ms. Peck calls up. She wants to come over but is tired of driving. Mr. Shisler doesn't want to drive over and get her, but promises to drive the rest of the night.
Me: Dude, just tell her i'll pick her up. I have to get a luffa anyway.
Shisler: (ignoring me and laughing) Yea i'll see you in a little bit (to Peck). No, I'm laughing cuz Jacob is talking about getting a luffa after sitting on the floor for like 2 hours.

So I went to best buy. It was closed. It was 8 pm on sunday.
In protest I drove to target. I bought 2 different kinds of luffas. One is this ball one and the other is this like tower coral thing. I also bought dove soap, cheezit crackers, a cd by the Fray, and the book Eragon.

Don't read Eragon. The writing sucks. Well, maybe read it if you want an easy read with an exciting plot. But not too exciting.

I never went to bed bath and beyond.

But I did get two luffas.

Dinner

2007-01-08T22:43:00.001-06:00

Tonight for dinner
i made bison burgers
that sizzle popped grease
and hearty goodness

and somehow
tied me to an earlier time
when grain and wind and sleet and storm
of shaggy dim-eyed majesty
owned the plains

when green-boxed, prevervative free
maccaroni
and organic
steamed broccoli
empassioned my blood.

so wild am i.

TFA and a Happy New Year to you

2007-01-07T13:28:00.001-06:00

It is January.

In case you haven't checked.

I think resolutions are lame. But if forced to make one, mine would be to blog at a regular rate. I was chastised by countless (2) friends for not updating my blog often enough. Apparently waiting a month between posts is just unacceptable.

My goal will be two a week.

I want to decompress my vacation on here but I am not yet in the mood for that. Instead, here comes some TFA brilliance.

TFA is a data driven organization. Following their mission of making a service organization that is attractive to the top college graduates and can compete with wall street type companies, TFA adopted the business model of these same wall street firms in terms of their goals, operation, processes etc.

What this means for me, as a corps member, is that I have regular performance reviews (called Round X observation) by my program director. Between these reviews, I am continually planning, teaching, assessing, reflecting and improving in a endless cycle.

The data comes from assessments. A master teacher ought to assess students knowledge before a unit/lesson to see what basic knowledge or gaps already exist, during the unit to see how the students are progressing and after the unit to see if the students did indeed learn what they were supposed to learn and to find what areas need to be retaught.

So. I have all of these tests that I have written or acquired or whatever. And I give them to my students, when they have finished a unit. They take the tests, and I record their 'mastery' in this giant excel file that I am somewhat ashamed to say excites me. And I am supposed to use this data to "inform my instruction".

I am good at collecting data. I enjoy it even. I like seeing the progress my students have made, what areas they have done well in, and those that need more work.

What I suck at, is the dissecting of this data. I am supposed to be looking for 'trends'. Do all the students failing sit in one area of the class? Are they all males? Are they all females? Are they all black? Are they all Hispanic? Do they all skip homework? Do they all write left handed?

I am supposed to look at this spreadsheet of numbers and figure this out.

And I can't.

Not only that, but my goal as a teacher (in Teach for America) is to make "Significant Gains" for my students. We are trying to put our students on a different life path, one that is dominated by education and opportunity and not by minimum wage/lack of choice. Because TFA wants this to be a measurable accomplishment (that way we can publish pretty statistics...and we can improve ourselves) there are two choices for achieving these gains: 80% of students master grade objectives (as determined by the state) or 2 years of growth in a specific subject.

And for me, significant gains is impossible.

Rather, *showing* that I have significant gains is impossible.

My school system has no way of assessing years of growth. So I have to use 80% mastery as my significant gains measure.

My students still add with their fingers.

My 7th grade mastery numbers are 29% and 35%.

Half way, Quarter way

2006-12-22T09:38:00.001-06:00

I'm half way
through my first year of teaching. I was thinking about institute the other day, and it still seems so fresh in my mind those days of planning my first lessons, trying to teach reading and writing (shoot me in the face), not sleeping, and generally not knowing what was going on. Now I look around, and so much has changed...or not ;^) Still have no idea what's going on!

I'm a quarter way
through my TFA obligation. It is weird to think about this endeavor as a period of life with a 'definite' end. When I accepted my TFA placement I intended to work at least 3 years, under the reasoning that if I really believe in making a change in the lives of students, I will do at least 2 years at an 'experienced' level. Maybe I can nitpick and say that I should be making an impact this year, or that 'experienced' doesn't come until 5 years (I have heard this from a couple of veteran teachers), but I still look at 3 as a good amount of time. Still, the 2 year obligation makes it seem like going longer is...odd? I don't know.

Summers
are going to be the greatest thing ever. I am so excited for my first *free* summer in...5 years? Yes. My last free summer was the summer of '02. So there were 4 full years of busyness between my times of blissful freedom :^)
Since the prospect of a free summer is *so* amazing, I have been thinking long and hard about what is truly worthy of my time. Here is my list of possibilities currently:

www.Rightnow.org is a mission organization that has mission trips for all lengths of times to all different regions. I would definitely go to central or south america, but do not know what I would do.
Take Spanish classes. This is a variation of the first idea, except I would go to central/south america and enroll in some Spanish classes and otherwise be a bum/partier/find people to help/maybe teach. I looked at buenos aires, and my buddy Max is planning a trip of this sort so I could get on board with that.
Be a park ranger. Just the thought of being in the backcountry in Rainier National Park gives me chills. AND I would get *paid* for it! This would be spectacular.
Stay in Houston. This is a more recent option, and one I had not considered until yesterday when I was recruited to me a mentor teacher to a summer school/training program. Ha! ME a mentor teacher! The concept is laughable. BUT the program is for underprivileged students, so the purpose is good. Right now I can tell you that I think I will need a break and should not teach over the summer.
Get a job. I could try and find an internship doing something. I imagine that some engineering company would not mind having paying a 'real' engineer an interns wages for a summer, but who knows. The only reason to contemplate this would be to get me into some other part of the country with $. For instance if I wanted to be in Seattle for the summer...
Backpack. I could thru hike the Pacific coast trail. Well, not all of it.

Currently, the Spanish classes are tops on my list. I have actually done research into that (a huge step for me). Do you have experience with any of these options? Suggestion? Please let me know.

But now I finish packing my bags. I fly to the great state of Michigan at 1:20pm this afternoon.

If it does not snow I am going to be pissed.

-mr. Blairwheezie

Dance Supervisor

2006-12-01T18:40:00.001-06:00

Today Alief Middle School had a dance.

Yes. That said that a "Middle School had a dance".

Close your eyes and think back to the earliest dance you went to. Middle school preferably.

Okay. Done? Good.

I remember the 1 middle school dance I went to. It was a Halloween dance. I don't remember there being any dancing. ANY. In fact, there were booths with games and food that were the center of attention, not the dancing.

Actually, no, that's not true. There was some moshing. A little. But then we got in trouble and went back to standing on the sides of the gym.

Now, forget all of that, and any experience you had at a middle school dance, because there are a couple of facts that you ought to know about Houston schools.

My students all know every single dance to every single song that is played on The Box (radio station. Can't stop Won't Stop!)
My students watch more MTV and BET than they sleep. I am sure of it.
My students cannot do anything with fractions, but they can rap every lyric from Wanna be a Balla by Lil Troy.
My students live in Houston, TX.

So, given these facts, it is not really *that* surprising that instead of being a dance like anything from the suburbs, it was, well, horrifying and impressive.

Impressive - man, my students can dance. Like really dance. Break dance even. In fact, they break dance in my room. But only when I let them. Ok. Sometimes when I don't let them.

Horrifying - 6th graders are around 11 years old. There was more attempted dry humping by ELEVEN YEAR OLDS this evening then any person should ever see. Then should be legal. THEY ARE ELEVEN!! I can't handle this.

Supposedly, I am a role model or something, so I break up anything that gets to overt, but really, gahhh! I can't even think about it anymore.

There's really only one thing to do.

I think I need to go to a club and freak some hoes.

Rested and eager ambivalence

2006-11-27T19:42:00.001-06:00

I couldn't sleep last night.

Every time I take a break from teaching for longer than the customary 2 day weekend, I get nervous. I don't know why. Maybe I subconsciously think that I will forget what I am doing. Maybe all my kids will come back from break and realize that I don't know what I am doing. Maybe my kids will decide I am boring (too late! Ha!). I don't know.

But, I couldn't sleep last night. So I drugged myself. This is pretty much my standard recourse when I feel sleeping is a mandatory commodity. And actually, this is only the second or third time that I have had *any* trouble sleeping since I have been teaching.

Even though I drugged myself, I woke up at 4:10 am. I couldn't sleep anymore. So I got up.

Surprisingly enough, I felt really rested today. That was awesome. It was a joy to see my kids again, which was also awesome. My patience was back (well sort of). And I loved teaching again.

But, I got done today, and now I don't feel like doing anything. Absolutely nothing. So I am making garlic mashed potatoes from a recipe that I just made up. It's not much of recipe. I boiled potatoes, mashed em up, put in some butter, salt, pepper, garlic (the jar variety), and onion flakes.

I was going to steam vegetables and eat baked chicken too, but then I realized I wasn't hungry.

So I think I am going to go to bed without doing any work and hope for more motivation in the morning. That is my new default reaction to lack of motivation.

And I know I will have that motivation because I haven't written my lesson plans for tomorrow yet. So I will have to get them done.

I can't help but think this is a shoddy way of approaching my job. It is not like I need a break, because I just had one. It is not that I don't care about my kids, because I do.

I need some other possible excuses. Got any?

Thanksgiving Thoughts

2006-11-26T10:41:00.001-06:00

Thanksgiving = awesome
1 week off for Thanksgiving = genius

These two equations pretty well summarize my thoughts on this past 8 days of glorious in activity. I visited just about every person I know who lives in Indiana, ate great food, talked about everything there is to talk about, watched a bunch of movies, ran around, laughed, played tennis, enjoyed wearing a t-shirt in Indiana in NOVEMBER! and altogether had a great time.

Now I am back in Houston, and more pressing thoughts are on my mind.
Like what do I want to do with my hair. This is serious business. I am a supposedly professional person now, and yet I am growing my hair long (it hasn't seen shears since July). It is just entering the putrid state of always ugly, that usually prompts some rash decision making on my part.

And really, what do I even want from it? Am I really going to go hippie-tastic all over Alief Middle School? I kinda don't think so.

I mean I could. Mr. Esparza has his hair in a pony-tail every day. It's long. But getting to that point is so painful.

What sucks is that having my hair in the short, gelled spiky variety that was my staple is so boring now. I just don't even want to contemplate it.

The more I think about it, the more I see that I have only two choices: hippie-tastic longness or buzzed. I just can't deal with anything else. And to top it off, people who tell me things tell me that it doesn't look 'good' in either mode. No, these people are definite fans of the clean cut, professional spiky haired jake. Who is lameo.

So I don't know what I am going to do.

About the hair anyway. I do know I am going to go eat an amazing sandwich today.

2006-11-09T21:17:00.001-06:00

The problem with this "to be continued" crap is that the momentum is now gone. Not to mention all the pressure brought about by certain members of the reading community and their demands.

I read over my previous post and said "Uh huh. So what?" And then didn't really think anything else. I don't know where I was going with this. So I will take this to the conclusion that now appears to be the only logical one, although it doesn't seem all that interesting. Let that be your forwarning.

The question then becomes "Where will I get my 'fix' of spirituality and significant relationships?" When I initially did the interest inventory, I thought that spirituality would be a cinch. In all my past experiences moving to a new place, God has provided a community for spiritual growth in an amazing and powerful way. They all included a new positive spiritual influence and a church, with no planning or foreknowledge by me. So I assumed that God would take care of this again here.

The significant relationships I also thought would be handled easily, partly from the "new positive spiritual influence" referenced above, and then partly from regular communication with the people who already play a significant role in my life.

Both of these assumptions turned out to be pseudo-true.

When I manage weekly communication, I am anchored, but all to often I miss a week or three because of busyness. And then I float off the deep end.

No really. (Maybe this is where I was going with this. A giant unveiling of my weird psyche.) When I miss these 'significant relationships', all the smaller ones, which afford me so much opportunity for fun and stress release suddenly seem burdensome. I sit in on Saturday night and my mind says "You don't want to be out tonight. You're tired. You don't really want to see anybody." And I believe it. But it's not true. My mind will continue this inward spiral until I have a weekend where I don't leave the apartment, have eaten every single consumable I own and feel like death. Then my roommate or someone will say "Hey were going to yadda yadda", I will go because it's so easy, I will have a great time and then be like "What the hell was I doing? I willfully felt like crap for no reason."

And I think my question is very accurate. "What the hell" *was* I doing?

So I really love people. I also really love laughing. But sometimes my mind decides to try and ruin my life by making me think I don't want to see any people. Which is not very funny at all.

Part 1

2006-11-06T20:16:00.001-06:00

During the week of TFA orientation, the week that followed the most intense 5 week period of my life, I was asked to participate in a unassuming personal interest inventory. You have seen them before, filled them out before. They are a variation of those Myers-Briggs type tests. They are made to make us as productive as possible. And that is a good thing. We should be productive.

Generally however, I feel like these type tests are used as levers by the management to increase their bottom line or whatever. As a result I do not take them seriously. TFA changed that somewhat. When I took this inventory, I engaged in the exercise with earnest, and found something not totally surprising: the things that are most important to me are spirituality, physical activity, purposefulness and significant relationships.

TFA put a twist on the investigation. "Now that you have these 'critical' interests, think about what your job can provide. Think about what your job can provide out of the 10 interests you originally chose. The remaining interests are things that you must find outside of your job. You must make time for these, or you will be ultimately unsatisified with your life and your teaching will suffer."

Out of the four, purposefulness is knocked out by work. Exercise will come through work next semester, when I coach soccer and run with my kids for an hour and a half every day. The other two however, those are tougher.

To be continued...

Pieces -> Mosaic

2006-10-15T19:43:00.001-05:00

I just got off the phone with my buddy Kyle (Kyle, you need to read the previous Oct 14th entry).

We were talking about the differences between school and work, the changes in life. You know, reminiscing and subtly lamenting the fact that he is in Ft Wayne and I'm down in Houston.

Anyway, a moment of clarity is upon me. This life I lead, when it is fitting together, is so beautiful and joyful. It makes me want to laugh and dance and weep all at the same time while eating a big hamburger, because hamburgers are a joyful food.

Yes, it is hard to hold on to the perspective of amazement when I am in the midst of all the crap that has been documented here, but it is through those challenges that we are refined right?

Listen (okay, read) Paul's words:
"And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us."
- Romans 2:2-5

This life gives me so much joy. Thank you to everyone who lets me laugh with them.

Life Explosion

2006-10-14T16:13:00.001-05:00

This week my life exploded.

I think this might have been some sort of defense mechanism. Kind of like fruit rotting.

No seriously.

So fruit is one of the ways that plants get hooked up to the plant post office right? They concentrate all this energy into their fruit, hoping some animal will eat it. The trick is that the fruit contains seeds, which will grow a new plant when the animal poops it out on the other side of the mountain or whatever.

Well, if the travel portion fails, and the fruit does not spread, but starts rotting on the branch, something else happens. The plant is like "Dangit. Mission A failed. Move to mission B." So the fruit falls to the ground. This protects the plant from insects (coming to eat the rotten fruit), and gives the seeds a little bath of high energy slop to grow in.

The analogy is like this...Two weeks ago, I was in ambivalence. I was overworked and tired. I was starting to rot on the branch. Last week I was in rebellion. I read 4 books instead of doing work. I was rotting on the ground after the fall. This week, all that rotting exploded into an wash of new material, motivation and growth. I'm back in the figurative saddle (with the hopes that mixed metaphors will enrage my English friends and confuse everyone else).

On a side note, here is a thought I had.

When I get really upset with my job, I start to think about what else I could be doing with my time. Let us suppose, that I accepted a job with The Boeing Co, and the untold riches that would accompany said job. Now let us suppose that I worked as hard as I could possibly work, and develped brilliant solutions to whatever my job asked me to do. What is the net result?

Maybe The Boeing Co makes more money. Result: Moot. The company will lose money some day for no net gain.
Maybe I get promoted/accolades. Result: Moot. I will not gain any sufficient importance or change any significant practices. Accolades are waining.

Now let us suppose that I suck at my job. I suck to the point that I do absolutely nothing, except to get paid. I do not go so far as to actively destroy things, or give wrong answers. What is the net result?

Maybe The Boeing Co loses money. Result: Moot. Someone else will have to do the work I was supposed to do. It still gets done.
Maybe I get fired. Result: Moot. There is so much variability in the engineering profession that I am sure even the worst engineer could survive for a year at an entry level job doing almost nothing, and then get another job at another company and do almost nothing for his/her whole life.

Now let us think about my current position as a middle school math teacher. Let us suppose again that I work as hard as I can and do everything I possibly can do. What is the net result?

Maybe some students are captiviated by the field of mathematics and devote their life to the study. Result: Significant for the student, moot for the world (statistically).
Maybe some students begin to view education as something powerful and useful. Result: Significant for the student, signficant for the community. These people become leaders of change in their own communities.
Maybe some students become empowered to follow what ever their dreams may be. Result: Significant. The world is in need of passion in and for every walk of life, every job and every region.

Now let us suppose that I suck as much as is possible to suck without doing something like physically assaulting a student (that is not even worthy of a thought experiment). The net result?

Maybe some students belief in the education is crushed. Result: The drop out and continue the cycle of poverty in the areas we teach.
Maybe some students hopes of success are dashed. Result: Anger and violence. With no hope for anything better, desperation leads to very unpredictable results.

I have made THE CONTINUUM OF INFLUENCE to display these results. The blue bar is the potential influnece for education. The red bar is the potential influence in the corporate job I could be working. Please think of them as light sabers.

Get you some trainin

2006-10-10T05:34:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was Columbus Day. My students did not have school.

I had professional development.

Here's the thing about professional development. *shh* Come here.
There isn't much development. And it's not very professional.

Although we *did* watch Akeelah and the Bee, which is a splendid movie, in my humble opinion.

No, professional development is not my favorite thing. It seems that it usually is a set of hoops, with some smoke and mirrors designed to make those hoops look like something worthwhile. Oh well.

Today I get to teach again. The first 9 weeks ends on Friday.

I have already taught for 8 weeks. That is amazing!

The Downward Spiral

2006-10-08T17:07:00.001-05:00

During Orientation, Teach for America told us that there is a general trend in emotional and physical health for all first year teachers. It is shown at right.

I think I have already passed through the sharp decline and moved into the slight increase stage. But then again, maybe not.

This weekend I took it upon myself to engage in a luxury that I have not permitted myself in quite a while; I read.

I read three books written by David Brin. His blog I read regularly, but I am just getting into his science fiction work. I thought it was quite excellent. Very strong themes of ecological awareness and conservation, as well as political moderation (but not at the expense of indecisevness).

Today, I read One Day All Children.. by Wendy Kopp. Read it. It's inspiring. And it describes (obliquely) the experiences that I am going through.

More Kids Anyone?

2006-09-30T09:47:00.001-05:00

Crazy week.

I am doing really well on my bi-monthly blog (okay I suck), and as a result of my pure un-filtered suckitude, I have to back-track to make this story make any sense.

**Back track**
It was a dark and stormy night.
I lied. It was a normal Houston morning. I came to school. I worked on stuff. I closed the Gap. Then I had my department meeting. Department meetings are a monthly event where all the math teachers get together and say "Man, this is going well, but *this* sucks balls." We complain about stuff. We also discuss a couple important things. Whatever. So near the end of the meeting, the department head says, "Well, I think that about covers it. Remember to focus on your bubble kids, and if you are doing tutoring that starts this week. Oh and I need to speak with Ms Agim and Mr Blair after the meeting."

I don't know about you, but when the 'boss' needs to speak with you, 2 out of 3 times (that's a ratio!) it's not good.

Sure enough, the conversation goes like this:
Department Head: "The state of Texas is doing away with SDAA (that's the Texas special ed standardized test). As a result, all schools have to phase out self-contained classrooms because all students will be taking TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills). They are all getting moved to inclusion, and since these students are low in math, they are going to be joining your double block classrooms (90 minutes, every day)."
Me: Panic.
Agim: Says something intelligent.
Me: Panic.
DH: Answers Agim.
DH: "Again, the state does not require this until next year, but since our administration likes to be at the front of these changes, we are phasing them out now."
Me: Panic. A couple rational thoughts start taking shape.
DH: "Jacob, you will be getting at 13 new 6th graders and 19 new 7th graders. I know this will put you over the class maximum of 20 students, so you should think about any students that are close enough to proficient that they can be in a normal block math class."
Me: There aren't any students....well maybe one or two. But this would help them *so* much to be in double block. Crap. 32 new students?! "So when is this happening? And oh yea, I just got some new students from Mr. Jow. What is happening with that?"

**End Back Track**

So that was a couple of weeks ago. I kept expecting the new students to show up every day, they never did, so then I kinda forgot they were going to be moving.

Well, they showed up on Thursday. 1st period I had 8 new 6th graders (the rest went to Mr. Jow. I kept the students he sent me). My grand total is now 21. I think I handled it pretty well. I sweated a lot at the beginning though.

3rd period I received 5 new 7th graders. Only 5.

4th period did not change.

The only other change, aside from my classes having 13 new students, is that I am now co-teaching with SpEd certified instructors.

I guess I am still reeling from the changes that rolled through on Thursday. All I really have to say is Cheers to the administration for being on the forefront of the trends. Bleh to you.

Here's a pic of my classroom.

Purpose?

2006-09-16T15:02:00.001-05:00

I joined Teach for America because I needed a purpose for my life. I think that I became discontent very early in my academic career because it felt like such a long wait before I could *do* something, something that mattered. Maybe wanting to 'make your mark' is a normal urge in a 20-something college student or grad, but my discontent grew out of the spiritual direction I had accepted for my life as well.

Genesis tells of a beautiful oneness between man and God. Man would toil in the maintence of garden, good work given to him by God, and God would walk with man. I imagine that God would listen not-unlike a parent who listens with a smile as a very young child tells of some new exploit. The parent already knows what the experience is like, everything about it in fact, but to see the joy and discovery in the eyes and face and words of the child brings some of that same emotion to the parent.

And even after the fall, purpose was something that was intimately tied to all of the patriarchs, the Biblical traditions, a man's interaction with God, and life in general. So it naturally seemed that a Purpose was a thing, or maybe *the* thing, that I needed to make my life a success.

I sought Purpose through engineering, sport, academics, volunteering, friends...and it all was very fleeting. The corporate engineering environment is full of inefficiency and waste. Sport is merely a context for the pursuit of fame or vanity or just the joy of movement, but none of these are sustainable. Academics is purely theoretical, and very rarely has an idea changed the world. No, it was always the application of the ideas that changed the course of human history. Volunteering and friends were very good things, good purposes, but they could not be a Purpose for me. Isaiah says to "Stop trusting in man, who has but a breath in his nostrils, of what account is he."

So Teach For America brought to me a Purpose, when even a purpose was lacking. And it has sustained me. I have never worked as hard or long as during summer institute. Defying my body to fail, my mind to lag and my eyes to droop, I worked to exhaustion, with a smile and joy on my face.

This has continued in my placement, Alief Middle School. Well, the will to work, the desire to succeed, the satisfaction in a effort spent and job well done. It is truly a Purpose.

But the discontentedness remains.

On Friday I went out to eat with some friends. I had a great time. We ate. We laughed. I was witty ;^) And I came home, exhausted. Yet I sat up. Instead of the rest of the laborer, I had...nothing.

I don't know if the fact of my brokenness, or in other words, the fact that sin is here, real and that my relationship with God is not a physical thing of God walking at my side, is the reason for my discontent. Will there ever just be a peace about me?

I don't know.

In the mean time:
"Fan into flames the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline."
May I fan into flames the gifts given to me by God. May they be used for the improvement of this earth. And may your use of your gifts, give me boldness in the use of mine.

Sick

2006-09-10T16:41:00.001-05:00

I got sick on Friday.

Full onset did not occur until Saturday. I basically laid around and drank a lot of water or gatorade all day. Whenever I stood up, my head exploded.

No literally. It's true. Look it up.

Of course whatever I had is basically gone already. So I have nothing to complain about. Mr. Driver has already had cholera like 3 times or something. But then again he is in Morocco.