Youth . . . It's Determined by When You Were Born

Today, one of the morning basketball players said to me: "You're a veteran teacher . . . when did you start teaching?" and I said, "1995? 1994?" and he said, "OK, that's two years before I was born-- so how has teaching changed since then?" and I gave him a rather long-winded answer, which involved living through the digital revolution, starting out with books and paper, ending with computers, on and on and on-- and by the end of my answer, I was ready to retire (but instead I went to my Music and the Arts Class and told them they needed to have more arguable points in their essays—they were being very hesitant to offer their opinions, so I told them, "look, we're not talking about abortion or politics, it's just music" and then we read Carl Wilson's essay "Celine Dion and Me" and I had all the students write some music on the board that would thoroughly embarrass them if other people heard them actively listening to this particular music-- like if they were blasting it out their car windows-- and we all had a good time . . . although several kids wrote 100 Gecs, and I love 100 Gecs—but I still wasn't offended because it's only music).

Heading Out to the Park

Singing "walking the dog, walking the dog" to the tune of Judas Priest's "Breaking the Law" makes taking my dog out in the frigid weather slightly more bearable.

I Live in a "High Brow" Town!

 Highland Park (and my buddy Craig) recently made Fox News-- because Highland Park High School has a "Socialist Club"-- but the best thing about the utterly pointless article isn't that my town is full of radical liberals (although it IS the most liberal town in Middlesex County, yet we still have Turning Point USA Club . . . you can't prohibit a school club for political reasons) but the best part is that our town is referred to as "well-to-do" and "high brow"-- which is absurd, considering close to 40 percent of the school students are on free-and-reduced lunch and our grocery store isn't a Wegman's or a Kings or a Whole Foods or even a Trader Joe's, it's a SuperFresh (nor do we have a Wawa or a 7-11, we have a Fresh Mart) but it's still very nice of Fox News to inflate the worth of our real estate . . . thanks!

Ardnakelty: Things Behind Things Behind Things

In Tana French's thriller, The Hunter, the rural Irish mountain town of Ardnakelty reminds me of the newish Bon Iver tune "Things Behind Things Behind Things"-- and retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper is pulled farther and farther into these rings within rings (this is the second book in the series, the first is The Searcher) and you know what happens once you get pulled in, it's tough to reach escape velocity; an evocative, slow-burn about how gossip and history and small-town mores can sometimes fuel animosity, violence, and worse (and I believe I have now read the complete of ouvre of French, who many conisder our greatest living mystery writer . . . I think I am one of them).

Carbage

After lunch, I walked out to my car because I knew I had some gum there, but when I reached into my little gum pouch, I realized that the thing I felt was a used piece of gum that I had stashed there and never tossed out, not a fresh piece, which was both gross and disappointing.

Common Nothing

Years ago, I would give my students on "life quizzes"-- little fun tests on facts that most of society considered common knowledge . . . and I remember they would always struggle with the boiling point of water (in Fahrenheit) and I could understand why-- 212 is not the most memorable number-- but I recently learned that now the vast majority of high school students also do not know the freezing point of water . . . they were in the ballpark with their guesses, which usually ranged from 16-30 degrees but only about a quarter of them knew that it was exactly 32 degrees Fahrenheit-- so perhaps they are quietly quitting the American system of measurements and adopting the metric system?

Very Short and Cheap Field Trip

Today in my English 12: Music and the Arts class, the kids were diligently reading and taking notes on a chapter from Susan Roger's excellent book on the formation of musical taste, This Is What It Sounds Like: What The Music You Love Says About You, when a student raised her hand and said, "Spotify Wrapped came out today . . . can we get our phones out and look at it? This is a music class!" and I thought for a moment and overcame my aversion to ever letting the children touch their cell-phones and said, "Sure" and we grabbed our phones and went outside into the freezing cold-- because Spotify is blocked on the wifi inside the building and we don't really get cell reception inside (unless you are close to a window) and we stood in the brisk winter air and shared our favorite genres (Jazz Funk for me) and our favorite artists and and our most listened to songs and all that and it was a lovely five-minute field trip (until we all got very cold and went back inside to watch the morning announcements).

Sage Advice from Ferris Bueller and Hamlet

It's twenty years to the day since my youngest brother passed away-- this time frame is shocking to me, but as Ferris Bueller reminds us: "Life goes pretty fast, if you don't slow down and look around once in a while, you could miss it"-- so here's to slowing down and enjoying the time we have, and as Hamlet reminds us (after he survives his pirate adventure and prepares to duel Laertes) sometimes we can't slow things down, they become impending and inevitable so "the readiness is all"-- we don't know what life will throw at us, or when things will happen, so all we can do is enjoy the good times and be prepared for the worst. 

Right Back To It

We now enter the three-week slog before Winter Break-- and while some of us teachers might not make it until the end and will end up crying under our desks, broken and despondent, amidst piles of ungraded essays, I am determined to give it the ol' college try and try to teach through these dark days with energy and alacrity-- but today was rough, I attended the 7 A.M. early morning faculty meeting (to avoid staying after school) and then planned and graded my ass off during my prep, essentially became a game-show host second period for a spirited lyric-fill-in game, and then taught Creative Writing mock-epic tone and fairy tale tropes so they could have some fun writing a story, and then went back to grading synthesis essays during my study hall duty . . . my back hurts, my eyes hurt, my brain hurts . . . and that's only day one.

Happy Birthday and Happy Thanksgiving . . .

Today is my wife's birthday, and there have already been TWO birthday miracles:

1) our local and venerable candy factory, Birnn Chocolate, actually made a batch of dark chocolate raspberry jellies-- they are by far the best in the known universe . . . honestly, most raspberry jellies made in America taste quite gross (apparently these taste more like the European version) but for whatever reason, Birnn rarely makes them and we haven't had them in years-- this is odd, since they are by far the best thing that they make . . . but I am no chocolatier and times are tough on the choclate front-- apparently, because of global warming, ageing trees, and gold mining, there is a cocoa bean crisis and quality chocolate (and cocoa beans) are hard to come by-- I learned this from the Asian lady that has worked at Birnn for many, many years-- she gave me an entire lecture on the current global state of chocolate and cocoa beans;

2) I managed to clip and upload my favorite cinematic Thanksgiving scene-- a moment from the excellent Thanksgiving movie Pieces of April-- if you haven't seen it, it's worth a watch-- excellent ensemble cast, and a funny, poignant, dysfunctional-family-over-the-holidays story with a brilliant plot . . . I'm sure I broke some copyright laws in posting this scene-- I had to pirate the file, then convert it, then load it into iMovie, then clip the appropriate portion-- but I've been searching YouTube for it forever, and no one has ever posted it-- so this is my contribution to the digital disaster-- I hope someone enjoys it.

IT's True, Tomorrow IS Another Day . . .

This morning, I started screwing around with a very special digital something that I wanted to post today, but then I got sidetracked and forgot all about it-- perhaps tomorrow?

Black Friday = Dark TV Show?

We joined my mom yesterday for a fairly mellow Thanksgiving—the first one without my dad—but we had plenty of good Pilgrim food that he would have enjoyed . . . and this morning, on Black Friday, my wife is watching the darkest of shows, a Netflix series called "The Big C," which is about a mom dying of cancer . . . I'm not sure why she's doing this to herself, but she says she likes it— I also noticed that the great character actor Oliver Pratt is once again playing the husband of a victim of cancer (he also played this role in the excellent Thanksgiving movie Pieces of April) but as for me, after reminiscing about my dad and my brother yesterday and all the other folks absent from the table, I'm more in the mood for "The Chair Company" or "The Big Bang Theory."

Thanks, Andrew Hickey!

I am thankful for all the usual things, of course-- family, friends, a steady job, shelter, hot water, a loyal dog-- but I am also thankful that Andrew Hickey, creator of the absurdly detailed and comprehensive podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," has finally arrived at Led Zeppelin-- I just finished his two part "Dazed and Confused" episode and it was quite a journey-- at the start he mentioned The Zombies album Odessey and Oracle and I had to listen to that for a few days-- it's fantastic chamber pop-- and a similar thing happened in an earlier episode when he introduced me to The Beach Boys album "Wild Honey," another music rec from Hickey I'm quite thankful for . . . anyway, I think there will be more songs that I'm interested in from this point forward and his song-by-song analysis of the first two Zeppelin albums and the entire story in general illustrates what a wild scene was happenign in the late 1960's-- musicians collaborating, competing, stealing songs from each other, stealing songs from blues musicians, then distorting them, putting their own spin on them, claiming them as their own-- leading to a tangled web of credits and plagiarism and payouts and future lawsuits and fantastic music.

Future Crossing Guard!

This morning, as I was weaving through the back roads on my way to work (because all the main roads have been under construction) I came to a STOP sign in front of a fairly crowded school bus stop and a middle school kid who was crossing the street in order to get to the crowd of kids at the bus stop outstretched his arm and gave me the hold-up sign-- he must have been worried that I didn't see him, or that I didn't know he was about to cross the street and that I would run the STOP sign and hit him-- and then when he got far enough across the street, he gave me the thumbs-up sign, as in: now it's safe to go and you won't hit me and I found this very endearing and helpful and this kid definitely has a future as a crossing guard or an assistant ref or an airport tarmac crewman or a sign language interpreter or some other job that requires well-timed body language.

Two InterestingWorks of Art To Help You Get Through The Week

I've come into contact with two oddball works of artistry this week, and I am enjoying both immensely:

1) The Zombies' 1969 album Odessey and Oracle-- while I knew a couple of tunes on this album: "Time of the Season" and "A Rose for Emily"-- I certainly never listened to the album in its entirety, but I heard Andrew Hickey mention it favorably during his comprehensive, super-detailed podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs and so I gave it a shot and I truly love this album-- although I suppose it's slightly psychedelic, to me it seems more like a cross between The Beach Boys and a less raucous, more baroque version of The Sgt Pepper-era Beatles . . . anyway, I highly recommend giving it a listen, it's a fantastic collection of well-structured, catchy, and genuinely profound songs;

2) The Chair Company, an absurdist Tim Robinson comedy in the style of Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave Now . . . but even more so-- this is a show I have to watch alone, as my wife does not tolerate Tim Robinson comedy, but I find it wonderful-- Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a mall designer who suffers a public workplace fall due to a malfunctioning chair and gets sucked into a conspiratorial corporate mystery-- this is a workplace comedy, but unlike The Office, where the zany antics of Michael Scott and his staff make the workplace into something beautifully hilariously funny, in The Chair Company, work seems to be destroying these characters, reducing them to screaming, cringey disasters-- but there are also slapstick moments, genuinely emotional moments, and instances that are just suprising and laugh-out-loud funny . . . but only if you dig Tim Robinson.

The Miracle of Hot Running Water (and Sanity)

Like most people, unforeseen expensive house repairs put me in a dark funk (although this particular repair was not exactly unforeseen, it was more imminent and inevitable . . . but still, replacing a tankless Navien hot water heater/boiler is not a particularly fun or anticipated purchase-- it's not like buying a dirt bike or a jet ski) and that funk obviously carried through the weekend-- because I went to early morning basketball (which is normally on Tuesday but because it is Thanksgiving Week, we had an unprecendented Monday game) and the main reason I went was so I could take a hot shower before school-- over the weekend, I showered at the gym-- and obviously I also wanted to play some basketball, but my knees and hamstring weren't especially excited about waking up early on a Monday, after playing a few hours of pickleball on Sunday, and I had some trouble getting moving and then when I got to school, I realized I had forgotten my school bag at home-- the very important bag with my school issued computer and my gradebook and all the items I needed to grade-- so I had a choice to make, I could either drive back home and get my bag, and miss basketball-- or I could play basketball, check out a loaner computer, and make the best of it . . . I decided on the latter, which was the right choice-- I had a good time playing basketball and though I had trouble getting the loner computer to do anything I needed, I still managed to print out some guided reading questions, right before class, and teach the bulk of Act IV of Hamlet . . . and show some movie clips-- but I didn't get any grading done-- and then when I got home, I received some good news-- the plumbers were able to install the tankless boiler/heater without any problems, improve the venting and draining, use the larger gas line, and fix everything else that needed fixing, without any additional cost-- and I did remind my students to appreciate the miracle of hot water in their homes and I also told them that I was proud that despite all the financial and cold-water related trauma over the weekend, I managed to hold my sanity together, unlike poor Ophelia.

Spin Cycle Sanctuary

After watching the Giants blow another lead, I took a number of large laundry items-- comforters, afghans, a small rug-- to the local laundromat to be washed in bulk, and I am finding it strangely relaxing here, listening to the hum of the dryers and the slosh of the washers and the chattering of children, while I drink a can of Coke and read my book . . . it's almost making me forget that the Giants should have kicked that field goal instead of gambling on fourth down.

Rutgers Basketball = Jets

My wife and I purchased some cheap Rutgers men's basketball tickets for the game last night-- $15 each for the second level-- and now we know why . . . I had assumed they would slaughter the realtively obscure Central Connecticut Blue Devils, but that was not the case: Central Connecticut played much better basketball than Rutgers-- they had a couple of excellent three-point shooters, they rolled and cut to the basket better than Rutgers, and they moved the ball and executed skip passes (setting up open threes) better than Rutgers . . . so even though Rutgers had more inside presence (Ogbole) and bigger, stronger athletes, it's apparent than Rutgers has NO pure shooters, no offensive rhythm, and no real team chemistry-- so they are going to truly get killed when they start playing Big 10 teams . . . the grouchy old guy in front of us appropriately summed up the situation, just before leaving (early) when he said, "I could have gone to a Jets game."

Water, You Can't Live Without It (But You Also Can't Have It Dripping From Your Appliances)

I thought I was taking a mental health day today-- I drank some beers and ate some hot chicken last night, and I had plenty to do around the house, so it was an ideal day to take off-- but then Ian, who was sleeping on the futon in the basement, came upstairs this morning and said, "the water heater is leaking" and, unfortunately, he was correct, so now my restful and productive day has turned into something else: sopping up water with towels, running a fan, the two of use figured out how to shut off the hot water (three levers, which we conveniently marked with black tape many years ago) and now the wait for the plumber to arrive, which will hopefully be sooner, rather than later . . . best laid plans.

AI and Computers, You Can't Live With Them, But They Will Be Our Overlords

I nearly forgot to write a sentence today because I burned my eyes out trying to grade senior synthesis essays about Susan Faludi's "The Naked Citadel" and Hamlet-- a brand new combination of texts which did produce some fascinating ideas . . . but I made the kids handwrite the essays to avoid the whole AI issue and much of their handwriting is close to illegible . . . I'm getting too old for this shit, so perhaps next time I'll make them handwrite and then allow them to type that up, with some revision-- but there's honestly no good answer.