THIS Is The Person Responsible For My Child's Education?
It's Not Easy Seeing Brown
My nose is dry, my lips are cracked, and this long streak of unseasonably dry, hot weather has made me realize that New Mexico might be a nice place to visit, but I do not want to retire there.
Life Is Too Short to Look Both Ways When You Cross?
Last week, while I was driving to work, I saw a dead deer on the side of the road and that deer carcass projected the message that life is short, life is transitory and fleeting and ephemeral-- you're here and then you're gone-- so you don't have time to screw around, you don't have time to dawdle-- there's no time to look both ways before you cross the street, you've got to just make your move-- that dead deer symbolized the transitory nature of life . . . but at the same time, IF that deer had looked both ways, if that deer had been a bit more cautious, delayed and looked both ways, if that deer took its time crossing Route 18, then that deer might still be roaming around-- most likely chowing on everyone's hostas-- so the deer simultaneously symbolized the transitory nature of life AND poor choices leading to tragic consequences-- the dead deer symbolized two things at once, both negating each and augmenting each other, the juxtaposition of the symbols overlaying the bloody carcass (the dead deer probably also symbolized something about technology and nature not dovetailing together very well, but life is too short to think about things like this).
More Adventures in Education (and Growing Old)
Last week, in my senior English classes, we read the last page of Joan Didion's masterpiece about the counterculture in San Francisco in the late 1960s: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" -- I was showing them an excellent example of descriptive writing with minimal intrusion from the author-- the subtext of the scenarios are enough to get the point across-- and I learned something: the vast majority of my students know NOTHING about the counterculture movement in San Francisco in the late 1960s . . . when I got the feeling that this passage needed more context, I asked them what was going on in San Francisco back then and one kid said, "The gold rush?" and I had to explain he was a century late and reminded him of the name of the football team and all that-- and the students had never heard of The Grateful Dead and hadn't heard the term "acid" for LSD . . . it was eye-opening because back in the day, high school students knew about the Grateful Dead because it had something to do with marijuana-- but now marijuana is legal and the Grateful Dead are no longer in this generation's popular mythology-- a few kids vaguely knew the term "hippies" but they did NOT know about communes and acid parties and jam bands and orgies and the Summer of Love or any of that . . . and when I asked what band was associated with this time period, from two classes I got the same answer: The Beatles . . . and then we went over that the Beatles were from England and there was one girl (I taught this girl's mom) that was able to name three of the Beatles (she couldn't recall George Harrison) and when I asked if anyone knew the fourth Beatle, a senior boy said, confidently, "Michael Jackson" and I had to more stuff . . . and the moral of the story is that I am getting old (but I was pleased to learn that Ariana Grande has a music video that is a tribute to my favorite movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
Dave Dreams of Sophomores Past
I recently heard the phrase "row forward looking back" as a metaphorical attitude for heading into the unknown-- and that's how I feel about teaching this year: I have a sophomore class for the first time in many many years, so all my sophomore lesson plans are in manila folders, handwritten-- and while I head into a pedagogical future featuring computer-driven, AI-powered, digital learning models, I am reminded of the school days long ago when I used to teach the sophomores-- when we read novels and out of thick anthologies, took our tests on paper, and relied on human connection and the occasional VHS tape for entertainment-- and I'm trying to instill some of that in my current classroom as I pull on the oars, against the current, the prow of my dinghy headed who knows where, into some technological morass, my gaze searching over the waters I have traveled, my mind borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Useless Podcast Trivia
The largest banana port in the United States is in Wilmington, Delaware and once they arrive there, the bananas are loaded into gigantic ripening rooms, which are pumped full of the highly flammable gas ethylene, which makes the bananas ripen faster so they can be shipped out to grocery stores and restaurants?
Bring da Noize
I was glad to see the back of our old ironing board-- which hung on a hook, folded flat, on the back of our bedroom door-- because whenever my wife opened this contraption (no matter how much WD-40 I used) the hinged legs would produce a piercing "sssskkkrreeeeeek!" sound that perforated my eardrums and penetrated deep into my synapses, tearing loose and deleting core memories, impeding fine motor functions, and generally disrupting my consciousness-- so we put it to the curb and some unlucky soul grabbed it and it will now be screeching in some other house . . . but yesterday my wife opened our brand new ironing board and it produced the same "ssskkkreeeeek" so I'm going try a tip I read on the internet and spray the legs with PAM or some other cooking spray-- or try to convince my wife that wrinkles are fine (and always shake out because of the Jersey humidity).
Typical Tuesday Butt-kicking
Go To Hell (Novelistically)
Old Friends, OLD Friends
Think It Off, Think It Off
The Students Take ONE of My Suggestions
The Coffee Is Coming From Inside the Cup!
One of the most satisfying moments of Tuesday morning 6:30 AM basketball-- especially after a miserable shooting performance-- is drinking the morning coffee that I forego before the game (so as not to defecate in my shorts) which I leave on my desk in my classroom and I enjoy while I teach my first-period class-- the coffee tastes good, of course, and the caffeine keeps me from getting a headache . . . but this morning my Contigo brand coffee mug was giving me problems, and I couldn't figure out why-- it was leaking from the top . . . coffee was oozing out from under the lid for no apparent reason-- and I tried taping some paper around it, but-- much to the amusement of my Creative Writing class-- this did not work (as evidenced by the photo) and so I gulped down what I could and then after a short discussion, the class convinced me to throw it out . . . normally I would bring something like this home and put it back in the cabinet and avoid that cup for a month or so, then forget what happened, or watch my wife suffer the same problem and then think: oh yeah, that cup leaks . . . but not today . . . today, in a much more accurate manner than I shot my morning threes, I tossed the leaking cup into the garbage-- good riddance!-- and next week I will bring the new mug that my wife bought me and things will be less damp.
Ce vin est splendide, formidable, merveilleux !
Choices, choices . . . Neither Palatable
I'm Talking 'Bout Mexican Jell-O, Jell-O o o
Who knew that Mexican jello is far superior-- more rigid, firm, and flavorful-- than American Jell-O?
Can't Get There From Here
If you're looking for podcasts about strange stuff happening in small towns (and you've already listened to S-Town and taken an audio tour of Woodstock, Alabama) then you can't do better than these two:
1) Hysterical . . . this one investigates a spate of oddball symptoms-- tics, verbal outbursts, twitching, spasms-- that spread virally through the girls in an upstate New York high school in the town of LeRoy-- and the question is: was this mass hysteria, otherwise known as conversion disorder? or was it due to toxic chemicals or something environmental? a great one if you love The Crucible and the Salem Witch trials;
2) Cement City . . . two journalists stumble into a dying Pennsylvania town-- Donara, home to the Donara Smog Museum, which memorializes the Donora Smog of 1948, an air inversion containing fluorine that killed twenty people-- and they buy a house? a house made completely of concrete? and they get caught up in town politics and what it's like to live in a place with no bank, no grocery store, and no school, but a whole lot of camaraderie;
and while I recognize that these podcasts are presenting a very thin sliver of what it's like to live in a place that does NOT feel like it's the center of the world, and these podcasters have cherry-picked extremely interesting narratives of truly oddball events and these small towns just happen to be the setting, it's still really interesting to inhabit places like these, places that I will probably never truly understand, because I live in a fast-paced, densely populated, and expensive region of the country, with all the amenities and conveniences and ethnic restaurants and parks and high-end grocery stores and sky-high real-estate prices and even if I were to move to an out of the way rural kind of place, I'd never be able to pass as a local . . . you can take the guy out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the guy.
A Head Full of Choices (and Ghosts)
Dave Does Holden Caulfield Doing Dave on Selling Sunset
Today in my sophomore honors English class, we are having an "emulate Holden Caulfield's voice but write about something modern" but I don't think anyone will write anything as perfect as my model-- in fact, the kids might be so dazzled by it that they might not write anything at all, for fear of not living up to the high standard that I have set-- anyway, my wife likes to watch a reality TV show called Selling Sunset, wherein a bunch of hot ditzy real estate agents flirt and drink and occasionally sell multi-millionaire dollar homes-- and even though I know the show is totally stupid, sometimes I sit down and watch it with her, fully realizing that the tactic used by the agency-- using sex to sell-- is not only working on the people buying houses inside the show, but it is also working on me . . . so here is this topic, from Holden Caulfield's perspective:
The thing that gives me a real pain in the ass is reality TV. If you weren’t aware, it’s not real. It’s phony. But people pretend like it’s real. And if you tell them it’s phony, then they get all touchy and offended, even though deep down they know it’s phony. So if you want to stay alive, you can’t tell people that. And all summer, my mom sat on the couch and smoked cigarettes and watched this show Selling Sunset. My mom has been very nervous since Allie died, and the cigarettes and the TV calm her down. Selling Sunset is about two brothers, twins, Jason and Brett and they run a very high-class real estate agency in Hollywood. They sell very expensive houses to very rich people. It would make you sick to see these houses. Some people don’t have a house at all, or even an apartment, but other people get to live in a mansion. It’s not fair, for chrissakes, but these people don’t seem to realize that state of affairs when they pay twenty million dollars for a house.
But that’s not even the worst part of the show. The phoniest part of the show is that these twin brothers, they employ very sexy women to do their selling. I have to admit, they are very sexy– and very flirtatious too. But they’re kind of stupid, or maybe worse, they’re pretending to be stupid. But people like to buy houses from these women because they act stupid and flirtatious and wear very tight dresses. They dress like burlesque dancers, because they’re always on camera, but they work in a professional office. And the two brothers, Jason and Brett, they treat this as normal business. And the worst part is that their method works. It works on the guys buying houses and it even worked on me. I’d see my mom watching this show, flicking her ashes into the glass ashtray on the end table, and I would sit down and watch it with her, even though I knew it was stupid and phony, but I’d watch because the women were so good-looking and they were wearing such tight outfits. The only good thing is I think my mother liked having me there, watching the show, even though she knew it was stupid. That was part of the reason I would watch it with her. But it wasn't the only reason, it was also for those women showing off in their tight dresses, good-looking women kill me, they really do.