BONUS Post at Gheorghe:The Blog

Terry and I made a pilgrimage to the new Red Bulls Arena in Harrison . . . read all about it at Gheorghe: The Blog.

We Were at (the educational Trenton version of) Woodstock!

Last Saturday, Terry, Stacey, Mike and I attended the educational version of Woodstock-- the NJEA rally in Trenton-- and we are assuming that in the future, everyone and their brother will claim that they were there, but we were there and Stacey has the pictures to prove it; we took the train because we didn't want to be beholden to the NJEA bus schedule (and so we could drink-- we were hungry but elected to purchase beers instead of food for the train ride-- we assumed all the teachers on the train would be partying, but we were wrong, in fact, to our knowledge, we were the only teachers at the event to smuggle in alcohol-- beer for the train, and wine and Sprite in water bottles-- we were in Trenton, after all) and the event was packed with teachers, cops, and firemen . . . attendance estimates ranged from 30,000 to 35,000-- despite the crowds, the event was very well organized and there were plenty of Port-a-Johns and tons of great food . . . gyros and sausage-and-pepper sandwiches and crab cakes and grilled burgers and dogs, which made my rash culinary decision even more ridiculous, I was waiting in line to get a chicken gyro, which looked delicious, and I saw a lonely stand that was advertising "Pork Roll Sandwiches" and-- after feeling a sudden burst of Jersey pride-- I said, "This is New Jersey-- I'm getting pork roll" and then I regretted my choice for the rest of the day, but maybe not as much as Terry regretted his conversation with some cab drivers: "Hey, are you guys African? No? Oh, Haitian . . . well you're better off here than there," and when he was asked to explain that comment,  he claimed he just wanted to "talk some World Cup" with them, but then he got thrown off when they said they were from Haiti . . . and Terry wondered: what do you say to someone when they say thay are from Haiti?

Young at Heart/ Old at Heart

Once again I got mixed up in assessing people's mental age (a concept my friend Whitney invented, where you assign someone an abstract age, which they usually remain for the bulk of their life . . . he says he will always be 19, partying and trying to drink under-age, like it's getting away with something, and I will always be 90, seen it all, crotchety, going to bed early, don't really care how I dress or what people think of me) and first I was doing it in class, because it is great to do for characters in fiction, but of course the students wanted me to assess them, so I would assign them arbitrary ages (two silly girls: I say: "You're three," and "You're four," one asks, "Can I be five?" and I say "Sure," and the other says, "Then I want to be five too, if she gets to be five!" and I say, "No, you really are three") and some of them get upset ("Do I have to be twelve?" "Yes you do," "I want to be twenty one!" "That's just what a twelve year old would say") and I got borderline insulting, calling Liz a bit "snotty" and Laura "passive aggressive" and then assigning them random ages, such as 24, 114, 55, 62, 13, but the funny thing is, everyone listens to you very intently when you do this, because you are talking exclusively about them, and we love it when someone talks about us exclusively, even if the opinions are unfounded and stupid.

5/26/10

You may have tried some of the awareness tests that are available on-line, and hopefully, like me, you failed them miserably-- that's what FUN about them-- but I had my wife do a few of them (and I have read more books than my wife, so you'd think I would be smarter than her) but she kept passing the tests, which is no fun at all . . . she'd start watching and then she'd yell out the fun thing they reveal at the end of the test that normal people have to replay the video to see . . . and she guesses the end of movies too.

5/25/10

I'm working my way through Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, by conservative British historian Paul Johnson (who lost his footing on the moral high ground when Gloria Stewart, the writer with whom he had an eleven year affair, revealed that he enjoyed erotic spankings) and despite the fact that I don't agree with some of his political stances, he is a vivid and entertaining writer . . . if only my history textbooks from high school had prose like this: "The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary phase in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German body politic; the German state was huge creature with a small and limited brain."

5/24/10

So my boss asked me if I knew what "febrile" meant and I said, "feverish" and he said,"no, it means weak" and then a colleague agreed-- she said, "yeah, like feeble" and I took their word for it, although my one skill in life is that I can define nearly any word-- if I say a definition it's usually correct, and if I don't know the word then I know I don't know the word, but this was a clear example of Solomon Asch's experiments in social pressure-- all it took was two people agreeing to make me question my brain, but luckily, I had to look up the word "exiguous"-- which means diminutive-- and I remembered about "febrile" and so I looked it up and then I got to say the best three words in the English language: I WAS RIGHT!

5/23/10

Alex lost his sticker again at school, and he said it was "just for giving Leukey a high-five," and I said, "Just for that?" and he said, "Yeah, it was nonsense."

Five Circus Facts

We took the kids to Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus last week, and here are some things to remember: 1) the music is really LOUD, and in the genre of New Age Yanni, and so you should bring ear-plugs 2) you can fit seven racing motorcycles in a steel ball 3) they have updated the clowns so that they are not sad, weird, and spooky 4) go to the pre-show where you get to walk out on the floor and get close to the jugglers, men on stilts, elephants, and hat throwers 5) circus chicks are really hot and when you get bored during the trampoline act you can fantasize about running away with the circus and fornicating with all the super fit and sexy circus chicks, because the guys in the circus are kind of goofy, so you can convince yourself without too much work, that you actually might have a shot with these incredibly flexible, athletic, and lovely women from far flung portions of the globe, even though they would laugh at you because you can't even do two flips on the trapeze.

5/21/10

I bought a kid's electric guitar for Ian at a garage sale, and put two coated strings on it-- my theory being, when you teach kids chess you just use a couple pieces at a time, and when you teach kids soccer, you start small sided-- so I would start slow with the guitar, and I put a strap on it and gave him a guitar stand so that it is his guitar, up in his room, and I showed him how to alternate pick and told him if he practiced for a month, I would get him a little amplifier (which is a terrible idea, considering he's going to be five in a month and still doesn't know how to tell time, so he'll be waking us up at 5:15 with it) and he put it on and practiced several times, which was impressive, and then we put them to bed and watched an episode of Madmen and when we went upstairs, Catherine called me into his room-- he was sleeping with his guitar.

One Way to Earn a Buck

Last Saturday after my work-out at the gym I went to pick up my kids from the Kids Klub supervised play area, and the girl-- a new girl-- said that my kids "earned a dollar" and she really wanted me to take this dollar and split it between Alex and Ian but I refused, of course . . . but she insisted that they deserved it for some game they were playing and I just wanted to get out of there so I said fine, I'd make change in the car, but as we were walking across the parking lot Alex told me the whole story: he was drawing on the computer and Ian was pestering him so much that he punched Ian in the eye and they got into some kind of hysterical fight and she essentially paid them to be good, so I made them march back in and tell the lady that they didn't deserve the dollar and then give the dollar back, which they did (while crying hysterically) and this truly makes me wonder just what the fuck is going on with my kids when I'm not watching.

5/19/10

So at my work-place it has become something of an honor to appear in a Sentence of Dave, when someone says or does something interesting or unusual, occasionally they turn to me and say, "That should be in a sentence," and I always say, "Yes it should!" because what they don't realize it that when you write a sentence every single day, you are often short on material . . . so when Stacey said to Audrey, "You're still using that pen?" and she said, "Yes, it won't dry up-- I told my class it was like the miracle of Hanukkah, you know, when the oil that was only supposed to light the flame in the menorah for one night lit the temple for eight nights . . ." and then she turned to me and said, "Now that should be in a sentence," and now it is.

More World Cup Analysis at Gheorghe!

If you didn't get enough World Cup analysis in my first post, then you can read Part II today over at Gheorghe: The Blog-- it's even longer and equally as absurd as my first effort.

5/18/10

At work the other day Stacey was not looking so good and I said, "hey, you don't look so good" and she said, "yeah, I feel terrible, I'm sick" and then-- before my filter kicked in-- I said, "Well don't get me sick!" but then I apologized and told her that was rude and said I hoped she felt better soon.

Campbell's Law and The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Diane Ravitch's book The Death and Life of the Great American School System asserts two ideas, and supports them with comprehensive detail: 1) a market system is fine if you want to create consumers, but it does not work for public schools-- as they are one of the last places where community, democracy, and local citizens can have an influence-- and 2) using testing as a measure of accountability for teachers and schools is illogical (she cites Campbell's law-- "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor") because it is essentially putting the cart before the horse; Ravitch speaks from a position of great perspective, she worked in the administrations of George Bush Sr., Clinton, and George W. and she is one of the most credible educational historians in America; book is something of a reflection on how she fell for some of these fads before she fully analyzed the evidence, and her change of heart is in notable opposition to President Obama's continuation of Bush's war on our education system . . . a must read if you have kids: ten charter schools out of a possible ten.

Shouldn't Canadian Geese Live in Canada?

I thought I was going for a relaxing bike ride on the towpath, and in some respects it was-- I saw lots of wildlife: a muskrat, a scarlet tanager, several goldfinches, a heron, and some turtles-- but also had a run in with several Canadian geese, their chicks have just hatched and their nests are right on the side of the path, so the adults-- in order to protect their young-- would block the path when I approached, and so I had to whip stones at them and shove my bike at them and hit them with sticks in order to get them out of the way . . . I saw one jogger do an about face and head back the way she came, her pleasant run truncated by an ornery bird.

You Are Special!

David Shenk's new book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong gives an overview of the newest research on nature, nurture and talent-- he is covering some of the same ground as Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers and Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code-- but he has new examples and goes more in depth about genetics, which is far more plastic than what was once though (even Lamarckian at times . . . the section on epigenetics is really interesting) and in the end the lesson is this: if you want to do something, don't worry about if you have an innate talent for it, just start practicing, but make sure you practice, often, obsessively, and under the best tutelage you can . . . and if this happens, you don't have to worry too much about genes . . . if you want to read more, especially on the sporting aspects of the book, head to here to my post at Gheorghe: The Blog.

5/14/10

So if you're a fan of this blog, you know that I invented the word "entertaintment" a few weeks ago, although I simply coined the word, I didn't actually use it-- but my dream came true, while we were talking about "sexting" and how it's not for guys, especially with the kind of angle you'd get on a cell phone held down low and Stacy blurted out my new word . . . she said, "That's entertaintment!" and I was so pleased.

5/13/10

Yesterday, WRSU played "Living After Midnight" by Judas Priest . . . the lyrics are so much better now that I know Rob Halford is gay.

5/12/10

My work is over at Gheorghe today; I finally completed my completely biased, totally definitive, and not so comprehensive 2010 World Cup Preview . . . you might find it enlightening, even if you don't like soccer.

5/11/10

Alex and Ian invented a game called "Hear the Car" and it is a great example of the power of your senses: one player closes their eyes and the other one chucks the Matchbox car as far as he can (they were playing on the playground) and then the player opens his eyes and runs and finds the car . . . and you can do it every time, even if it doesn't hit metal, even if it just rustles in the grass-- our ears are remarkable (I played a few rounds.)