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Wednesday, March 26, 2003 ( 3/26/2003 04:44:00 PM ) DN Pre-war mood: gloom-filled at the thought of a big, ugly conflict & our weapons of mass destruction wreaking havoc on people's lives. Beginning of war: shamefully giddy. Now: gloom-filled at the sight of the big, ugly conflict & our weapons of mass destruction wreaking havoc on people's lives. Iraq's WOMD & their threat to the world were distant, abstract concerns. Thanks, GWB, for making it real and immediate to the quarter million Americans now in the Middle East. # ( 3/26/2003 04:20:00 PM ) DN Hey, you American war protesters! People fought & died so you could enjoy the freedom you've got today. So if you think you can just go around criticizing the U.S. of A. whenever you feel like it, you better think again. I don't think the founding fathers intended free speech to include criticism of our fine government, do you? (satire) # Monday, March 24, 2003 ( 3/24/2003 03:29:00 PM ) DN Met me a good ole hillbilly yesterday. My work van's battery died completely while I was parked at a self-serve gas station. I went by on Sunday to get some stuff out of it & tell the cashier I'd send somebody to fix it on Monday. Now, I think I could change a battery in a car, though I try to avoid car repair in practice (it's amazing how much alike some of those fluid caps look). But L. & I had tried to jump it with some lite jumper cables Saturday, & it wouldn't even try to turn over. So, the hillbilly heard me saying I would take care of it tomorrow & followed me outside. He just couldn't stand it that I was going to call somebody just to get it started. He kept saying he didn't want me to have it towed. He pulled out some masculine looking homemade cables (look at that solid copper inside 'em!), & sure enough, after 10 minutes of charge, we got it started. Then he followed me to the auto parts store & stood around while the clerk tested the old battery, freely dispensing advice to us both. He finally left when it seemed I was being taken care of. He was grinning the entire 20 minutes. I didn't even have to put on any girl act--he just jumped right in. Crankshafts & come-alongs. It's a man's world. I looked pretty scruffy but I was bra-less & wearing a tight, fairly dirty t-shirt. It could've helped. It just makes my day to meet a person like that. Also, it makes me wonder about random acts of kindness. It's somehow both easier & better to perform one for a stranger. They appreciate it more & are less likely to take advantage of it. # Wednesday, March 19, 2003 ( 3/19/2003 08:43:00 AM ) DN Tuesday's Buffet Yesterday, in the absence of paying work, I wandered for hours on the internet. I browsed for photographs & articles on training a hibiscus (rose of sharon) into a tree form. Last year I split the one I had started into two, both about 18 inches tall. I also looked for perennial companions for daylilies & found some good ideas at the national gardening association website. I found printable graph paper & sketched a raised bed, then found a store at Yahoo selling the hinged corners for raised beds & bought some. The bed I'm planning is going to have only yellow & red lilies, so if any peach or pink ones show up this year, I'll tag them & move them. I'm going to put some sort of red perennial into the bed with them. Wow, are there a lot of daylily fanatics Out There. Wonder what a dip bed is? Also on the web, I read two reviews of British travel books about Verona, although I'll probably never go to Verona or read those books. Also, I spent 20 minutes drawing my living room & moving its virtual furniture around, using an online shockwave applet at BHG. I now know that I can fit the sofa crosswise at the back of the living room & rearrange things so that all the chairs are at a good TV viewing angle. The time was pretty much wasted because I had an old sofa in just that position several years ago, so I already knew the arrangement would work. Let's see. I looked up some mail house production management software, bid on a spare battery for my digital camera at Ebay, read no blogs, cleaned up my bookmarks, browsed some cool Hawaiian stuff at a place called First Hawaii mall, read some editorials at the Charleston Gazette, and maybe some other things. I closed at least 56 pop up windows. Oh, and I did at least two hours of real work, the kind that perhaps will lead to a few dollars of income. Then I left at 2:30 & picked up the kids from the bus. They were vastly excited to see me! # Tuesday, March 18, 2003 ( 3/18/2003 10:27:00 AM ) DN Go, 3rd Infantry! Okay, I confess, I want a war just so our economy will pick up. I was planning to quit my second job this spring, but it looks as if our perpetual homeland security alerts have depressed even the direct mail business. And to think I risked anthrax all last year by handling mail trays every day . . . . # Friday, March 14, 2003 ( 3/14/2003 03:09:00 PM ) DN Tom told me today is Pi Day (3.14). It also appears to be Einstein's birthday. Did everyone already know of this coincidence but me? I am addicted to CNN & the BBC online now. The war news is like a, well, a war waiting to happen. My question is why would anyone fight with the US? We make bigger bombs than anyone. "Tis wonderful to have the strength of a giant..." # Monday, March 10, 2003 ( 3/10/2003 08:13:00 PM ) DN On the Other Hand What the hell do I know? I'm familiar with the high school equivalency curriculum, and my chemistry is a little rusty. Tom asked me if I knew what the Buddhist monk said to the hot dog vendor? "Make me one with everything." Here's how to really Be Ready. # Saturday, March 08, 2003 ( 3/08/2003 04:45:00 PM ) DN Hee hee. Click this for a cynical, yet not too angry blog.... Today's post is hilarious. Also on this site, there's a link to the despair.com site, which I had to check out, because I thought I remembered what it was. Yes. It's the demotivational print & poster site. Even funnier. # Friday, March 07, 2003 ( 3/07/2003 09:06:00 PM ) DN There are two males in this house. One never raises the toilet seat. The other always raises it, but never puts it down. Which one do I need to retrain? Bizarre website I spent 30 seconds at & decided was way too angry for us normal atheistic/agnostic types: Religion is Bullshit # ( 3/07/2003 02:48:00 PM ) DN There is a new thing I have learned about teaching. I've begun to realize the dangers to the ego of being the smartest one in a room. Perhaps it's different when you're teaching children, but I don't teach children. Last week, during our current events discussion, I was asked by the other teacher if I had anything interesting to pass on to the class. I had just read an article on CNN.com, or somewhere like it, of how the Gulf War costs were spread among UN nations. The writer pointed out the much heavier costs that the US would bear (i.e., most of them) if it went to war with Iraq without UN sanction. I had not given much thought to this issue, despite the war cost figures being tossed out regularly here in the US press, so I thought it was unlikely that anyone else in the class had considered it either. A young woman in her mid-twenties spoke up to ask, "Why do we have to pay for anything?" I paused to consider several responses, and finally said, "Well, if we invade their country, we sort of have an obligation to help repair things afterward." And she said in challenge, "Did they help us pay to rebuild the Twin Towers?" Two people I mentioned this story to said they hoped I set her straight, but where could I begin? (Rapping with a ruler on her desk: "Try to keep up, please. We've moved on to a new war.") I just said that it wasn't a state that bombed the Twin Towers, but a terrorist from Afghanistan, and left her completely unconvinced. Because of Bush's focus on Iraq as the one of the axes of evil, at least some uninformed people in the US have completely blended the September 11 attacks and our proposed war. That was an attack on the US; this is our response. Aside from this, I find I am increasingly obsessed with giving parenting advice to my students. I am frightened by how many of them have children who, in terms of school success, are something between misfits and failures. They report to me that teachers are threatening to hold their children back, or to put them in "special classes": LD or BD, I don't want to ask. In our school system these letters stand for Learning Disabled or Behaviorally Disabled. Or they tell me their pre-school children are mean & bad, only half-joking. One 20-year-old mother was upset that Head Start wasn't teaching her son, age 5, any pre-reading skills. "Shouldn't they at least be teaching him his letters?" I check out - well, borrow - parenting books from the library shelves (the classroom is inside the downtown public library) and offer them. Baby books are popular but I think the parents have given up by the time their child is school age. I suppose I am qualified to offer advice on parenting, relationships, and anger management, if you consider that many of my students don't have anyone else giving them useful advice. Why not me? I'm not sure I'm doing things right, but I'm very sure I'm not doing them as badly as my students. I work every day with people who rarely surprise me with insights; many things I tell them are a surprise to them. Really, this is ordinarily a lot of fun, but I suspect I am becoming overbearing in my superiority, and tending to deny the under-intelligent &/or under-educated their dignity. (We have a very animated, class-clown type in the classroom now, who never hesitates to express her opinion, no matter how thoughtless. She gets a lot of attention when she controls the room during open discussions. The other day I wanted to say something and decided to interrupt her rant, thinking to myself, Hey, I'm the alpha female in this room!) Here's Stephen Maturin, in "The Ionian Mission" advising a young parson not to take to the teaching profession. "It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over his pupils: he often beats them and insensibly he loses the sense of respect due to them as fellow human beings." He goes on to talk about how insufferable teachers become as a result of always being right. If I have any urges to beat them, I'll let you know. # Wednesday, March 05, 2003 ( 3/05/2003 04:48:00 PM ) DN Click this! For better war news, esp. since I don't watch much TV news, I've been reading the BBC news online. Their site has things like timelines (20th century), so if you're like me & are Middle East history-challenged, you can get capsule information on the spot. # Sunday, March 02, 2003 ( 3/02/2003 04:56:00 PM ) DN Re the Kinetic Park dispute, I wasn't the only one who thought Midkiff might be sabotaging the whole project. The documents from the breach of contract suit filed by the city development authority accuse him of that very thing. Their argument is that he wanted to prevent any hotel from being built there. First he pushed out the Ashland developer and now is trying to sow doubt about the fitness of the site. Can it be? Bad faith and ill will here in the River City? I think the consensus of the editors at the huntingtonnews.net site is that the city is so lame that the site must be substandard, being a city project. Which might also be true. # ( 3/02/2003 04:34:00 PM ) DN Another Sunday I am in the throes of creative expression and a foul mood. Fourth day & counting. I haven't written anything complete in at least a year and a half--not even a 200 word essay, even though I explain how to do it at least weekly to the students in my GED class. Friday I kept trying to get some ideas down and, absurdly, kept dozing off. Yesterday it was 45 degrees, very mild, and I cleaned up the yard for a while, then poured all the potting soil from last summer's flower pots into the wheelbarrow. I enjoyed a very satisfying hour crumbling the soil and pulling out the rocks and dead plant stuff. I read a book called "Guerrilla Learning, or How to Give Your Kids an Education With or Without School." The ideas in the book are pretty useful, in particular, about seeing your children's school time within a larger context--school can't teach them everything you'd like them to know about life. What they learn in school is probably a very small part of their actual education. One of the biggest lessons I learned, and a prescription that appears in this book, is that I must be an advocate for my own child. Whether a teacher, or the system, or the other kids, is the source of problems, I need to always be on his side. Every year that Evan has been in school, his teachers have told us about his daydreaming, inattention, and slow work. Sometimes they were worried, sometimes angry. For the first couple years, we assumed they were right and that he wasn’t behaving properly (thereby alternately being worried and angry ourselves). We assumed they were right, even while explaining repeatedly to each teacher that he was a little unusual, marched to a different drummer, had some minor speech/articulation issues, etc. And why didn't we ask about his learning--was he mastering some, most, or all of the material? We allowed the teachers to change our focus from learning to behavior. Anyway. The day we began to be suspicious of the teachers, part way through first grade, and began to assume that he was fine, although not their ideal student, things began to improve. I've since realized he'll never be any teacher's ideal student, and I find this very amusing. He is a good person, thoughtful without talking about it, and enthusiastic. He likes to learn, he likes to think, and he's going to be an independent kind of guy. His teachers will have to live with it. There's a lot more to the book than what I've mentioned. Most of it isn't revolutionary, but it's inspiring. Their theme is in the Twain quote that appears in the book: "I tried never to let school get in the way of my education." # |
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