Three Reasons Dave Will Be Remembered For Eternity

In no particular order, here are my three greatest contributions to society:

1) The "Don't Eat It" Psychological Mind Trick 

2) The Zombie Soccer Drill

3) The Year as a Week Metaphor . . .

and while I've explained the first two ideas here at Sentence of Dave, I've never bothered to write about the "Year as a Week" Metaphor because it's only applicable if you're a teacher . . . but because of recent developments, I feel obligated to set the record straight; fifteen years ago, in the infancy of my teaching career, I developed a metaphor to help the staff make it through the grind of the school year, and it works like this: the first day of school is also the start of a monumental, macro-cosmic year-long school week, so the first day of school is simultaneously the first minutes of the macro-cosmic first period . . . and once we've made it to mid-terms-- the exact center of the school year-- then we are smack in the middle of Wednesday in the macro-cosmic Year as a Week metaphor-- and once there are thirty-five days left in the year (slightly less than 20% of 180) then we have entered the Friday of the the Year as a Week . . . this metaphor is motivational for both students and teachers alike, and I often calculate "convergences," or when the Year as a Week and the actual school week coincide-- this is very exciting, because then the way you feel about the microcosmic week mirrors the way you feel about the macro-cosmic week-- for instance, we just had a Friday convergence at the start of second period and we all felt pretty good about that-- anyone can make it through Friday; the summer, of course, represents the weekend, and it's the reason the metaphor works well for teachers and students . . . perhaps workers with less time off could create a Career as a Week metaphor, with summer being retirement; it usually takes students a while to "get" the metaphor, but most of them eventually grasp the concept (although there are always a few students who just can't think analogously, and when I say things like "It's finally Friday!" on a Tuesday, they stare at me in confusion) but this year, for the first time ever in my career, when I explained the metaphor, a student raised her hand and said, "I do that too!" and she explained that she had developed the exact same metaphor as me, and I thought that was cute and funny until last Friday, when I was explaining to a different class that we were having a convergence and a student said, "Where'd you get that from?" and I told him that I invented The Year as a Week Metaphor many years ago, and he said, "You know Student X does that? Are you sure you didn't get it from her?" and I told him that I invented the Year as a Week Metaphor before Student X could talk, so though I admired her creativity, the credit still had to go to me for the invention of the metaphor, and there's no way I'm doing a Darwin/ Wallace thing with this as I thought of this way before this girl, and so hopefully now I have set the record straight.