10 Minute Rule

I’m teetering on the edge of ridiculous fatigue. I’m talking take a nap on the way to the couch and wonder how you never made it to the couch tired. Yep, that actually happened. I suppose that also validates the suggestion that I have way too much going on in my life and approximately no time for any of it. Yep, that is real too.

I think I’ve learned a great deal about what I can and cannot do as I’ve tried to navigate this school semester. In doing so I learned about what I really want out of life and what I think I am capable of and need to do in order to enjoy life the way I would like to.

Some More Thoughts:

1. I think that the reason this particular presidential campaign cycle is so jacked up is because there really is not anyone who is so charismatic and clearly made to be the president–in any party–for us to rally behind. We appear to be looking for the best of the worst.
2. Maricopa, AZ won the Battle of the Burbs for the third straight year. How does a small town like the ‘Copa beat out every other burb in Phoenix? 3 yrs in a row?

I’m back at this Waiver thing again. I think I hold on to the Wednesday spot in hopes that something interesting and influential will happen in football. It doesn’t and my interests wane considerably. One thing I am interested in is the reemergence of RG III as a viable QB option. I have a theory about III. I don’t think he sucks at all. I think he was in a system that was not designed for him with an offensive coach who remains completely inflexible in terms of how to use the talent he has. That points to a larger question, which I have addressed before: Is it about the system or the players?

I coach youth football. Our head coach has a system that works very well and highlights the skills of some players. It is in some ways similar to the system another one of my boys was in that highlighted the skills of players other than himself (as I continue to complain about, his 60lb butt was a lineman against 120-200lb boys). Both coaches, though completely different as individuals, are tied to their systems and their success is therefore tied to having players capable of operating in that system. I can likely say the same of Belicheck. I can say that of a lot of coaches, which means that it is clearly then up to the players to wind up in a system that fits. I think RGIII was in a bad situation and now he is well on his way to a good one. He is in a system that was starting to be readjusted to fit a mobile, accurate, sort of short armed QB and that is who he is in a nutshell.

I think RG III will be as good as he can be within the constraints of the talent around him.

Moments ago I spun up the CNN page only to discover that Blac Chyna is engaged to Rob Kardashian. Okay, wait. There is someone named Blac Chyna? I mean there are some strange things that go down in the world of celebrity nonsense, but come on! You can’t pluck your stage name from bad female wrestlers and a misspelling of your occasional skin color. Furthermore, what the hell are you trying to put over on this nation? For whatever reason you have the attention of America’s most powerful purchasing demographic and what you are doing with that power is straight up nuts. Lets recap:

Kim, you were dating a basketball player and decided to marry him. Your sisters soon followed suit, each apparently being connected to a different ballplayer at various times. Heck, Chloe even married one. It is as if you all were checking the pulse of American desire and doing exactly what you thought was the in thing at the time.

Once you decided to stop writing in your basketball diary you dumped the dude and found yourself a rapper. So what, I’m supposed to believe that chicks of a certain social popularity are to want to be with rappers? Not surprisingly your sisters followed suit, which brings me to this latest debacle. One of these kardashian-Jenner-kin, Kylie I believe, is dating the rapper Tyga who has a baby with… wait for it…

Blac Chyna.

I cannot make this stuff up. Obviously someone can and they are more creative and tapped into the cultural zeitgeist of young America than I am. Still, I’m not having any of it.

Kim et al, you are not progressive. Sure, there is a certain grin the finds my face when I consider that ‘America’s darlings’ are almost all dating black rappers. Then I look around and think, ‘crap now rap looks as bad as you do.’ I wish the rappers were in on the joke but clearly they are not. Of course, anyone who would adopt the stage name Tyga lives primarily on one side of the joke. Meanwhile, Kanye hasn’t been right since VH1 storytellers.

I think E! and whatever other channel lives on the lives of these fools ought to pull the plug. To quote Voltaire (and maybe Stan Lee) ‘With great power comes great responsibility’. These chicks and their TV station have the former but seem to have misunderstood the latter.

Once upon a time all of this social intrigue belonged to the british royals and we all followed them (Princess Diana in particular) the way we laud the Kardashian’s daily schedule (and incumbent soundtrack). At least the royals did it with a hint of class. Get off the air Kardashians. You’re making us look very stupid.

It isn’t diabetes. At least it isn’t that yet. A friend who is diabetic helped me run a test this morning and the blood sugar wasn’t as crazy as I thought. I once thought the number would be something like 300 and I’d be on the verge of death only now finding out what 300 meant. Well it isn’t, which is good I suppose. I’m not sure how I would be able to cope with losing limbs.

Beyond that moment of glee life is all fatigue. In fact I’ve been sparking this blog with nonsensical phrases and have had to delete bunch of stuff that made no sense. I need sleep.

I’m coming or you, sleep!

I ran into a friend at the grocery store this morning. I was buying the usual assortment of sunday junk: donuts, creamer, chips, etc. I stopped and asked he’d been doing and he let me know about being diagnosed with Diabetes. Let me give a little context here. I’ve been feeling awful over the last year. I’m struggling to think and speak as clearly as I have in the past and most recently have been dealing with strange shooting pains throughout my body. I webMD’d the heck out of it, trying to avoid going to a doctor and learning that I have like three days to live. Nothing really added up, but a few symptoms aligned with Cancer, some with vein issues, some with diabetes. I don’t eat very healthy and the last time I used my gym card for actual gym use was at the tail end of 2014. I’ve always been healthy-ish, so when he rattled off a list of symptoms that coincided with mine, I got very nervous.

Right before I wrote this blog I found a bruise on my leg that hadn’t been there a day or so ago. It could be something from the field trip I didn’t notice or the normal wear and tear of life, but I’m nervous now and I think something is wrong with me. I’m going to call a doctor tomorrow and try to get set up with an appointment. I haven’t had a check up in at least four years so I am long overdue for that. My fear is that I do have diabetes and I waited too long to do anything about it. On the bright side it would explain my inability to engage on the intellectual level I’ve grown accustomed to and the lack of energy in every aspect of my life.

Still, I don’t want it to be diabetes. I don’t want it to be anything. I want my health problems to be the result of abject laziness and the cure for that to be finally getting off my butt. Only, I know the world doesn’t work that way and real change always requires an inability to go back to what was comfortable. I have been comfortable for far too long.

I’ve been flipping back and forth between NFL coverage and CNN and I’ve discovered that there is a lot of hype with precious little truth or story behind any of it. I’ll start with a sports example. Come draft time everyone is talking about the next truly amazing athlete and trying to be the channel that gets it right by picking a winner. To that end they all hype a handful of ‘could be’s’ of their choosing while the world gets behind one or two folks who were dominant at the college level. Every year there is a QB that might be the next Brady or Manning. Every running back considered a first rounder is the next Beast Mode or AP. Likewise CNN sells hype like its land in AZ–cheaply and all the dang time. We’ve seen the station push the Trump machine as an important story to follow and we all bought the heck in. We’ve seen how they can do that to any candidate or story in order to make it relevant and sell commercial time. Don’t believe me?

CNN is still running front page stories on the MH370 disappearance. Yeah, that plane search I once compared to the entire first season of LOST is still relevant to these guys and it still is being hyped up enough that every now and again someone gives a hoot. The problem there is that we (the masses) fall in so easily behind these stories and people and hype mattering that we lose any real since of objectivity and understanding in the process.

That ain’t the media world I want to live in.

I had an opportunity to visit the Grand Canyon today. I went alongside my fourth grader who’d asked me to be a chaperone on the journey. It was fun, overall. Towards the end of the day I had nearly two hours to spend with the four boys under my charge. Until then it had been a lot of soul searching and seeking patience, but as we drifted into the trees and our adventure began, all of that stress bled out of me.

The first part of the day was rather structured and involved me saying ‘No!’ quite a bit. Recently she-who-makes-me-whole pointed out that I might be ‘that dad’. We all know him, the one you always look down and away from as he screams at his kids any time they step just a tad out of line. I suppose I might be that dad. I’m that dad in public at least, when these boys know they ought to act right and occasionally don’t. Heck, i’m that dad to everyone’s kids because I believe it takes a village to raise a child. So, yeah. I call out my kids publicly and did so with my four who did tend to act the very fool of which I speak. They would saunter super close to the edge of the canyon after the teacher and ranger both repeatedly warned them not to. Food was discarded haphazardly. Rocks were eventually dug up. In other words, they were boys trying to be boys.

Once we were done with the canyon proper we headed into the woods for a walk to the lodge where dinner was planned. We turned it into an adventure, walking into thickets of trees so deep that multiple kids were like, ‘I’ve never seen real woods before’ and ‘I know we’re lost because I can’t see the road!’ Yep, they were in the deepest patch of wilderness most of them had ever known and it was totally fun. We picked up sticks and called them hiking sticks, we looked for animals, and we walked and walked and walked.

Deep down inside I’m a twelve year old. That isn’t always a good thing, but sometimes it is just what you need to find an adventure.

I’m starting to feel for Trump a little. Not a lot, mind you. I don’t want the man to be president, but I have noticed that media coverage of him has shifted to a really negative cycle now that his campaign manager is accused of roughing up a reporter. Lets be clear: The man relegates campaign press to a caged bullpen during rallies. His distaste for the press is clear. That being said, it is interesting that the negative cycle was only triggered by the abuse story. Here’s the worst part:

I’m on his side here.

Hear me out. I saw the footage and recognize the coming lawsuit and criminal charges as frivolous. Yet everyone is demanding the dude be fired. Why? This is behavior in line with his role and responsibility. Trump cannot and will not cave to the media pressure on this one and it will make him a stronger candidate. I will say this: I’d rather Trump be my president than Cruz.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Some of the best basketball in the history of the sport is being played over in the Western Conference of the NBA. The Warriors are on pace the break the 72-win mark set by the Jordan and Pippen lead Bulls oh so long ago (95-96). The Spurs have already set the home win streak record at 38-0 and have a legit chance to win the last three to have a perfect home season. It isn’t like everyone else in the league sucks. I mean the Knicks always suck and the Lakers are terrible, but there seems to be a level of parity everywhere else in the league. This is a big accomplishment.
2. Speaking of the Lakers, as Kobe makes his farewell tour the Lake show seems to be on the verge of absolute implosion. Check this figure: It is possible that both the Spurs and the Warriors will have fewer losses than the Lakers have wins. The Spurs have 12 losses. The Warriors have 7 losses. The Lakers have 15 wins. At least Kobe is having fun on his farewell tour. Last night Dwayne Wade crashed Kobe’s press conference just for giggles and a public goodbye.
3. Rhonda Rousey is done. She is done the way Tyson was done after the surprise Buster Douglas loss. Her confidence is broken and her desire–her heart–seems out of it now.

Couple of things to say tonight so I will run them down:

1. Blog and wine is merely perfection. Or per-fiction as the wine goes. The hard to get red blend is magical.
2. Saw Batman v. Superman again and enjoyed it more the second time around. First view is the fanboy viewing and as a fanboy I was disappointed. I wanted a great many things to happen that did not. As an educator I found that there is a lot of great material in the script, though I felt that it was very much paint-by-numbers. The film painstakingly pointed out all of the deeper context stuff we arrived that on our own.
3. I still have very little hope for the large crossover movies as they pertain to DC. Marvel will get it going again, but DC is too damn introspective to make it work all of the time.
4. Three minutes left to blog and I’m low on words and consciousness. Yet another one of those nights where I don’t seem to have enough left in the tank to make a valuable contribution.
5. Going back to the movie, I felt Affleck did a better job as Wayne than the Bat. He was better than Clooney at least. I’m okay with him filling out the suit moving forward, but if I don’t get me some Robin imma snap.

Education is not really about teaching. I suppose, on a grand scale, it never was.

Sure, there are some people who teach because they want students to learn but the more and more you get drawn into things the more and more you get sucked into the politics and straight up nonsense that plagues the profession. I’ve practically gone into hiding in an effort to shift my focus back to the teaching and away from the nonsense that is education. Its working a bit–I’m rediscovering my love for the classroom one day at a time–but that doesn’t change the fact that nonsense hovers above me like one of those giant interplanetary ships from Independence Day.

This most recent rant on the topic is triggered by a ‘discussion’ taking place at the developmental education level about changing the competencies of a developmental english class to remove language that suggests we need to help students know how to actually understand what they read. This bit of hopefulness is possibly being replaced with a line about ‘analyzing evidence for its relevance to a specific writing task’ Can you guess what I think that line sounds like? Yep, bullshit.

All the wordsmithing in the world can only serve to distract people from the task and further distract us from the gigantic turf war that is education. One school (in our district of 10) wants to remove any reading-based competencies from writing, mainly because we are trained to teach writing and the reading instructors are trained to teach reading and there should be no overlap.

But there is overlap. Simply put, there is no reading without writing and vice versa. This nonsense about analyzing evidence for relevance borrows heavily from the language of the Toulmin model, which most dev educators don’t even want to teach to students because of how overtly and uselessly complex it tends to be.

The real issue here is that this is the bitter end of a two year fight over language about what we should call what we teach. I spent over a year as part of that conversation and I promise there wasn’t more than a few days of discussion about what actually benefited student learning. These academic conversations are always about the academics. It is politics–partisan at best–writ large on a tiny stage. Frankly, I’m done with all of it.

It is high past time to start calling things how I see them and quit being so politically correct with the world. Maybe there is a little Trump in me after all…

Some Thoughts:

1. Had a student remind me today that bitterness is just anger with a heap of jealously mixed in. That being said, I remain somewhat bitter about my eldest son’s football experience last year. Dang near ruined him on the sport. Sad, because he was such a fan and becoming a breakout player in season 1. Season 2 ruined him. Season 3? Still not sure he is getting back on that horse. I wish he’d had a better friend-level experience, but the way things were structured he wound up an outsider and made absolutely no friends on that team. Lost some in fact. That is the anger part and the jealousy part as well. I can’t deny being jealous of the parents and kids that did form bonds while we did not. That lack of inclusivity was a problem and it played itself out on the field as well as on the sideline. In my role as a coach now I strive to avoid that situation and I will work my ass off to get every child incorporated into the fold.