What Doesn't Kill You, Might Make You Dumber, But You Also Get Some Good Stories

Much has been written about the inspirational power and profound consequences of having a good teacher-- but there's a dearth of information on the importance of having a few bad teachers along the way: truly mean people (like my fourth grade teacher) and incompetents and weirdos may not put us pedagogically ahead of Finland and Japan, but these folks do make our kids tougher, more jaded, and provide them with loads of entertaining stories that they can pass along to their own children (I lost twenty-five points once on a test because I didn't have the proper heading . . . and if you had a certain gym teacher in our high school, it was pretty much a forty-minute free-for-all melee with the floor hockey sticks, day in day out . . . and then there was the guy who made the high school kids race around on those little scooters . . . etcetera, etcetera).

There By The Grace of God, Goes My Snowboard

I'm glad I showed some compassion towards a mom and her son who were rudely blocking a main thoroughfare on the ski mountain-- my first impulse was to tell them they were sitting in a horrible location (and it was a horrible location, they were blocking a long flat narrow cruiser trail which you need to ride through with some speed in order to get up the incline to make it to the trailhead) but I saw that she was dealing with a meltdown: her son-- approximately six years old-- had taken off his snowboard and appeared to be done for the day, even though there was a LONG way to the base lodge, so his mom told him to walk down and stay to the side of the trail, and then she turned away so she could see her phone better, in order to call her husband, and in that moment her son dropped his snowboard and it went rocketing down the hill and he went running after it, screaming and wailing and crying, and the mom missed all of it, including the climax, when the board shot over the lip of the trail, catching some air before it plummeted over a cliff and into the woods . . . and I had to be the bearer of bad news-- "Miss! Miss!" I yelled, and then I told her what happened and by this time she was actually on the phone with her husband and she launched into an expletive laced description of what happened, and my kids, who got to watch the whole thing, and really enjoyed it, especially all the F-bombs, but on the way home, we stopped at the ski store and bought a pair of snowboard leashes (which I had gotten out of the habit of using) so that Alex and I would never have to endure that particular humiliation (and not only is it humiliating to have your snowboard race down the mountain without you, but it can also really hurt someone).

Bosch vs. Rebus

I think I've reached the end of my detective fiction binge-- in a New Yorker article, Joyce Carol Oates recommended Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin as masters of the genre, so I read a few Connelly books and an Ian Rankin (Standing in Another Man's Grave) and I liked both authors and will read more of them . . . here is my breakdown of Harry Bosch (Connelly) and John Rebus (Rankin) . . . they are both no longer married and each has a daughter, but Bosch's daughter is a chip off the old block (a chip off the old Bosch?) and wants to be a detective like her dad, while Rebus is almost estranged from his daughter; both detectives are old school and willing to bend some rules to get their man, but while neither are corrupt like Vic Mackey, Rebus seems more willing to associate with the underbelly of society to get what he needs; Bosch seems more obsessive and unrelenting (although Rebus can be a bit obsessive as well) while Rebus is more willing to down a few pints or some Highland Park scotch to unwind; both men like music, but Bosch loves jazz while Rebus likes classic rock (and is prone to making Led Zeppelin jokes) and though it's hard to tell, because I read random books in each series instead of starting at the beginning, both men seem to be surrounded by women that they have history with . . . anyway, thanks Joyce Carol Oates . . . if you have any other recommendations, just leave them in the comments.

Do You Drive Your Car, or Does It Drive You?

I drive my Toyota minivan like a 1993 Jeep Cherokee Sport (because that's what I drove for the twenty years before I got the van) but I saw a lady in the high school parking lot with a brand new sporty Jeep with a jacked up frame and removable doors, gingerly poking in and out of her parking spot to avoid rolling one of her giant tires over a low concrete lip (not even a curb).

Nemesis

My dog, who is normally friendly and good-natured, absolutely despises the black poodle that lives on our block . . . it's worse than Maggie and the baby with one eyebrow (and far more embarrassing, this neighbor must hate our dog and hate us as well, he must think we've trained him to be a wild and vicious killer).

Clash of the Titans: Sheryl Crow vs. Maroon 5

We had a heated musical debate in the English office Wednesday, and it wasn't typical (Beatles vs. Stones) or elitist (which Radiohead album is the best?) or hip (I'm too old to make an allusion here) and I'm happy to say I precipitated the discussion, first by bringing up a new singer I like (Courtney Barnett) and then comparing her to Sheryl Crow, and then revealing that while I was cooking the night before, I drank too much beer while listening to Sheryl Crow, because her music-- a guilty pleasure of mine-- always makes me feel a bit giddy . . . one of the younger teachers enjoyed the image of me bopping around the kitchen, slightly tipsy, singing "Soak Up the Sun" (although she wished I was drinking a Leinenkugel Summer Shandy instead of beer) and I was able to fully satisfy the role-reversal because I was also texting my wife and reminding her that dinner would be ready soon and she needed to get home . . . anyway this led to an odd debate where the older folks in the office were lauding the merits of Sheryl Crow, and Kristen the youngster was defending Maroon 5 . . . I'm not sure why she chose to pit Maroon 5 against Sheryl Crow, but it resulted in everyone pulling up songs on their phones and Chromebooks and playing them at once (especially "Move Like Jagger," which even Kristen detests) and while we couldn't convince her that Maroon 5 was awful (she kept defending these hypothetical and unnamed deep tracks . . . "the ones they never play on the radio") everyone else united in the defense of Sheryl Crow, and I think it comes down to this: neither one is Led Zeppelin, but Sheryl Crow has more good songs that Maroon 5, and less awful songs than Maroon 5, and it's way more fun to drink beer and cook while listening to The Very Best of Sheryl Crow (which doesn't even have Steve McQueen on it) but Kristen will never understand this because she associates Sheryl Crow with her mom and light FM, not Lilith Fair.

Let Them Eat Two Pieces of Cake

I'm hoping my wife skips this sentence, because I don't want her to revisit this event and the emotions surrounding it, but I'd like to make a full confession to my readers, for the sake of honest self-reflection; last Tuesday, after a very cold and windy soccer practice, I got home, ate some dinner, and then noticed that there was some leftover chocolate cake on the counter (my grandmother ate dinner with us the previous night and she baked a chocolate cake) and it was very cold and windy at soccer practice, so I had really worked up an appetite and I saw the cake -- two pieces of cake-- and without really thinking, I ate both of them . . . then I sat down to watch some TV with my wife, and when I got up to get a drink, she said "Can you get me a piece of cake?" and I turned and said, "Uh, there isn't any more cake . . . I ate the last piece" and she said, "There were two pieces! And I told you to save one for me!" and, though I didn't hear her say this, apparently she did indeed ask me to save her some cake (she roused Alex out of bed to confirm) and it didn't really matter if I heard her or not because -- as she pointed out-- there were TWO pieces of cake, one for each of us-- and she also didn't buy my story that the cake was dry and she wouldn't have liked it anyway and I did her a favor by getting rid of it, because she had eaten a piece the night before and knew the cake was delicious . . . and the event became a metaphor for my entire self-centered existence and I had to buy her some good chocolate from the expensive chocolate store to make up for my transgression, and then -- the icing on the cake-- the  next day in Creative Writing class, purely by coincidence, we read the William Carlos Williams poem "This Is Just to Say" and I had a perfect anecdote for my class (but it wasn't worth the lambasting . . . next time, I'll leave a piece of cake . . . I swear).

Dave Wins the Powerball! And Quits Writing Sentences!

Actually, not quite . . . April Fools . . . neither you nor I are quite so lucky-- I will continue to write this drivel (and I hope you will continue to read it) because I did NOT win the Powerball (and it's not like I'm doing this for the money, anyway, so even if I did win the Powerball, I would continue writing this thing, because the Dalai Lama told me there will be no money, but on my deathbed, I will receive total consciousness . . . so I've got that going for me) but something very, very statistically unlikely happened and I had the perspicacity to notice and the mathematical acumen to figure out just how unlikely this event was . . . I teach Creative Writing, which is an elective that is open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors and I usually have an equal mix of the three grades in each class-- no particular grade is favored, but this year I have a thirty person class which contain zero juniors, and the chance of this happening is highly unlikely . . . there is a 66% chance for a class of one person to have zero juniors in it, and a 43% chance for a class of two to have no juniors in it (2/3 multiplied by 2/3) and a 29% chance that a class of three has no juniors in it, and if you continue in this fashion for a class of thirty, you have to calculate 2/3 to the 30th power, which comes out to 0.0000038576077564 (that's a 1 in 259,228 chance . . . which is pretty tiny, statistically speaking, but not quite as small as your chance of winning the Powerball lottery, which is 0.0000000057142857 or a 1 in 175,000,000 chance) and I'm wondering if there is some other explanation . . . perhaps junior schedules this year somehow prohibit them from taking electives period 7/8 . . . or maybe I should run out and buy a lottery ticket and strike while the iron is hot.

Curves and Blocks

We went to Philadelphia over the weekend and took in two excellent exhibits at The Franklin Institute; the first is called Body World: Animal Inside Out . . . it's an impressive collection of plasticized animals in various states of assembly: a giant squids split in half, cross-sections of a giraffe, a massive bull made entirely of musculature, the circulatory system of an ostrich, the innards of a dromedary (one hump) camel, etcetera . . . it's a wild and gross tour of an astounding variety of animal bodies; the second exhibit is called The Art of the Brick and it is lowbrow modern art at its finest . . . the exhibit features many, many pieces of Nathan Sawaya's Lego sculptures, and while the three minute film featuring Sawaya is pure cheese-- he was a corporate lawyer before he dedicated his life to Lego sculptures and he speaks in corny aphorisms, stuff like "my art is a reenactment of my personal feelings" and "everything is creativity"-- the exhibit itself was surprisingly excellent (and packed with people) and Sawaya's representations of past masterpieces (classic and modern) are suggestive and surreal, while his large sculptures are fascinating to look at because of his use of rectangular blocks to make rounded, complex figures (plus, it's fun to guess how many pieces he used for each sculpture, as there is a piece count for each . . . but I wonder if these counts are accurate . . . did he count every piece he used as he used it, or just approximate at the end?)

None Shall Pass

Last Tuesday, Alex and I went to soccer practice without Ian, because he pulled his quad; practice was a bit chaotic because everyone was sharing the turf-- Donaldson Park is a swamp-- and so once Alex and I arrived back home, at ten of eight, all I was hoping for was some warm food and and some quiet times, but this was not the case; we entered the house and Alex went into the kitchen, where my wife immediately called upon him to recite the months of the year . . . and he failed-- perhaps because he was tired and surprised by the question-- and then he was in deep trouble too, because a few minutes previous my wife had discovered a glaring hole in Ian's general knowledge-- he ddin't know the months of the year-- and so after Alex failed she yelled "he doesn't know them either! this is ridiculous . . . a fourth and fifth grader don't know the months of the year!" but it turned out Alex did know them, he just panicked in the heat of the moment . . . Ian, on the other hand, could not recite them, even with some time to think, and so there is a new house rule: before the boys get any screen time, they have to pass a "life quiz" on some basic knowledge . . . the months of the year, the location of Canada and Mexico in relation to the United States, the air-speed velocity of an unladen sparrow . . . something along those lines (and I lucked out, because my wife also demanded that they know each month's corresponding number and I'm a bit shaky on this, but my wife didn't quiz me, and so I got to watch Parks and Rec).

Fitbit Fit

The English Department has gotten a bit neurotic with their eating and exercise habits (this was mainly fueled by a school-wide "Biggest Loser" contest . . . the English teachers lost 113 collective pounds and swept the pot) and the obsessiveness culminated with a bought of Fitbit Mania; instead of working out, my friend and colleague Stacey spent forty-five minutes on the phone with Nike, trying to get them to retrieve some missing data from her Tuesday workout, because the Fitbit line graph was only showing "3000" and she definitely got "7000" . . . I'm not sure what the numbers mean, but I think even Ted Cruz can see the irony and humor in skipping a workout to retrieve digital information for exercise that you know you did, just to fill in a computer graph generated by an electronic wristband that can't be all that accurate in the first place (and I am holding out on getting one of these gadgets for this reason, and still using my low-tech analog method of measuring my work-outs . . . I call it the PantsFit and this is the way it works: I put my pants on, and if they fit, then I know I've been working out enough).

Funny How? Like a Clown? I Amuse You?

I have no problem with Constitutional textualist Ted Cruz enrolling in an Obamacare health plan-- though he staunchly disapproves of the Affordable Care Act and has argued that the plan should be repealed in its entirety--  because his wife is leaving her full time job at Goldman Sachs and and it's the financially practical thing to do: Cruz receives a subsidy for the health care . . . so it makes perfect sense . . . but I do have a problem with him seeing no humor or irony in his actions . . . it's got to strike him as just a little bit funny-- slightly amusing-- that he's willingly participating in the program that he's spoken so vehemently against (but maybe people who interpret the Constitution literally have trouble with tone, symbolism, and subtext . . . I hope he doesn't have to take the PARCC test).

Small Victories

Now that the snow and ice is gone, my dog Sirius and I are totally in the groove-- every morning, I walk him in a loop and he defecates right by the little park on Felton Avenue, which has a garbage can, so I can bag his feces and immediately toss them, thus avoiding the shame of carrying around a warm bag of dogshit.

Is This Blurry? We Might Be Able to Help . . .

My wife found three pairs of prescription glasses in my son's desk drawer-- he claims to have found them "in the middle of the road" and "on the path in the woods," which makes sense, since both of my children will pick up anything they find on the ground (last week, my son picked up someone's mouthpiece off the turf . . . yuck) and so if anyone on the South Side of Highland Park has lost a pair of glasses, we might have them (my wife was annoyed with the two of them and said they should have knocked on doors near where they found them in an attempt to return them, but I definitely couldn't see my kids ever doing something that compassionate and logical).

Fortnight of Health

On Monday, I started my fortnight of health: no weekday beer drinking, no junk food, and -- paradoxically-- no sports or heavy exercise . . . I'm trying to get in shape for Spring Break, as we are going to Vermont to do some snowboarding and skiing, and if I'm sporting a gut, then it's hard to bend over and latch in . . . and I'm also trying to stay uninjured between now and then, so no soccer or basketball . . . my Achilles tendon is sore from playing hoops, and my hip is sore from making a kick save (and a beauty) last week at indoor soccer; but, hopefully, in two short weeks, I'll be slimmer and my muscles will have regenerated, so that I can re-injure myself on the slopes and re-gain the weight I lost (in the form of delicious local Vermont beer).

Welcome to the Decline

For the doomsayers, events like 9/11, the latest financial collapse (and the solution to the latest financial collapse . . . three trillion dollars of quantitative easing) and the melting snows of Kilimanjaro indicate the imminent decline and fall, but I believe that God is in the details and for a simpler proof of the apocalypse, they need go no further than the coffee section at QuickChek, where the great minds of chemistry have spent their valuable time designing a drink with the flavor of "layers and layers of moist chocolate cake surrounded by a sweet marshmallow filling" . . . . the great and ominous signifier is "Whoopie Pie" coffee.

Spring Hates Soccer (and Softball and Lacrosse and Tennis and Fishing and Skateboarding)

At soccer practice last week, the wind was so strong that when we took the balls out of the bag, they all blew away and ended up across the track against the fence-- and then the portable goals blew away, and then cones blew over, and then the little discs blew away . . . and then, two days later-- on the first day of Spring, it snowed six inches and it didn't melt . . . so I am proposing that youth basketball season needs to be a month longer.

High Jingo

Harry Bosch investigates two cases at the same time in Michael Connelly's The Drop . . . a cold one involving a sexual predator and a serial killer and a hot one: the possible suicide of a powerful City Council Member's son . . . the hot case leads to political conspiracy and what Bosch calls "high jingo," which is his term for high-level political manipulation and gamesmanship-- something he and I both abhor-- which is why Bosch will remain a detective and I will remain a teacher . . . neither of us wants anything to do with the world of bureaucracy, administration and "high jingo," and while this means you can't have as broad an effect on the system, it also means that you don't have to compromise your values as often (but you can still use violence and intimidation once in a while to coerce a confession . . . that's just good fun).

If You're Not Careful, You Might Learn Something

 Not only did I teach the kids a bunch of stuff at school this week, but I learned three things too:

1) one of my students has a sister with something called Hashimoto's disease . . . I had never heard of this but it has to do with your thyroid;

2) the same student (and a number of other students in this class) experience something called Raynaud's phenomenon . . . this is where your hands turn yellow or white because of an excessive reversal in blood flow due to cold or stress;

3) and then, finally, I learned one thing on the way to school while listening to Gary Walker on WBGO . . . he pointed out that only was Steve Turre a fantastic trombone player, but he was also a "master shellist" and I thought he said "master cellist" but he really did say "shellist," because Turre--  long time trombonist with the SNL band-- can play the shit out of a giant conch shell (check out the video).

Does the PARCC Make Students Puke?

While the PARCC test itself doesn't seem to be too grueling for students (although some kids have been "clicking through" and others have been "napping through" and I heard rumors that one kid wrote his essay in French and another wrote the lyrics to "Bohemian Rhapsody") the actual administering of the test has been a logistical nightmare for my high school-- you've got kids coming and going at all times of day, classes that start with eight kids and then kids return two at a time until you've got a room full of thirty, classes divided by the kids taking the PARCC, the kids opting out, and the kids who don't have to take it because it's not their day-- teachers aren't supposed to give quizzes or tests for the two weeks of testing and then try to "spiral back" over curriculum that test-taking kids missed -- and this could be anyone because there aren't enough computers to administer all the tests at once, so some kids take it in the AM and some kids take it in the PM, sophomores take it one day, and juniors another, and all the different math levels take different tests, many teachers (including myself) have to proctor at times when they normally grade or plan, and many teachers (including myself) have their classrooms changed for the duration of the test, so kids are wandering all over the school, trying to find their classes . . . the loss of instructional time is enormous, everyone-- teachers, students, and administrators-- has been completely disrupted by this thing, so unless the inherent value in taking the test and the data collected from the test (which is getting more and more skewed by the day, as smarter kids decide to opt out so they don't fall behind in their classes) so unless the experience of this test somehow proves more valuable than all the time and education lost, then I don't think it's going to last very long without some major changes (and-- perhaps because of all the anxiety and frustration produced by the major changes in schedule, there have been two hallway puking incidents during the test . . . yuck).