Happy Halloween

What are you going to be for Halloween????   Me?   Yes, I am going to be me. Now there is a scary thought. 

Do you have any crazy stories to tell of your youth at Halloween time?  Let me see now; is the statute of limitations up yet?  Ok, it is so here goes. There were 4 of us roaming the streets of my tiny hometown in Iowa late on Halloween night.  Then a brilliant idea came to mind. Lets tip over old man Wilson’s outhouse!!  Yeah, we all agreed, lets do it.  With the silence of a herd of elephants we snuck up to the back of Wilson’s house and spotted the outhouse.  We counted, One…. Two.. Three… Go.   Over it went.  Only one problem. Old man Wilson was still in it.  Have you ever run so hard in your life that you thought you were on a jet?  That was what I felt like. I did not stop running until I got home.  Oh my.  To this day, the four of us still have shared this secret until now. I guess I have spilled the beans.

Have a great Halloween.

Enjoy,

It has been another crazy week.  Monday started with one of the yucky medical tests we have to have done when we reach the age of 50. Everything checked out great so I guess it was worth it.  On Tuesday I took a van to Princeton, IN. It was a nice trip with an overnight stay in Mt. Vernon, IL.  Thursday found me delivering movies around the state of MO. It freaking rained the whole time.  Yuck weather.  Today I am just trying to hold my head above water with this dang cold I seemed to have gotten.  Are you like me?  Every time I go to the hospital for something I come home sick with something else? 

Hope your weekend is a grand one.  Following is a couple of humorous items I ran across this week.

When Laws Are Fatal

Rio De Janeiro officials had announced that drivers could 

run red lights between 10 PM and 5 AM without receiving 

fines. This was necessary to cut down on the rash of fatal 

carjacking and robberies occurring at the city's stoplights.

Take the money

Dave's grandfather left him ten million dollars, and the 

next week Jill agreed to marry him.

After three months of married life, Dave noticed that his 

beautiful new wife was ignoring him more and more. On the 

rare occasion that she would go to bed with him she would be 

indifferent, or even worse, called out other men's names!

Whenever they went out in public, she ignored him and 

flirted with other men. Finally, he decided to confront her.

"Jill," he said, "the only reason you married me was because 

my grandfather left me ten million dollars when he died"

"Don't be ridiculous," she replied, "I don't care where your 

money came from!"

Enjoy,

It has been a strange week for me.  On Wednesday I was called to help shuttle some vans around town. Not that unusual, I have done this many times before.  Then, around 4:00 pm my other job called and needed me to deliver some movies across the state on Thursday.  The van company I work for told me I would be going out of town Thursday to deliver a van. So… I decided to deliver the movies on Wednesday night.   BIG MISTAKE. I left about 5:00 pm Wednesday.  Finally at 6:00 am I was back home, this, after 8 stops throughout the state traveling over 600 miles in the process.  I ended up being awake, working for over 24 hours straight. I am too OLD for this. Lol To top it all off, the last stop I made was at 2:30 am in the Ozarks.  After opening the theater door with my key, I discovered they had installed a bugler alarm. It went off and scared me to death. I envisioned being surrounded by cops with guns drawn.  I waited around for about 10 minutes and finally just left, alarm still blaring as I drove off.  I do not know what happened at the theater after that, I suppose the manager had to be called to turn off the alarm.  What a night.

The out of town trip on Thursday for the van company I was supposed to take?  Cancelled.  Dang, I could have done the movie run during the day, like a normal human being would. Lol  I did take a van out to the middle of Kansas on Friday.  That was all I could handle anyway after the all night marathon on Wednesday.

It is raining here today, a nice fall day I suppose to stay in and cook some chili or something.  FOOTBALL weather. Hope your team does well. 

Enjoy,

Forgive me dear bloggers for it has been awhile since my last confession… I mean post.  Lol  

I just got back from a trip to LA again.  Leaving KC here early Friday morning found me in Moriarity, NM that night.  I was ready to investigate the town with my camera but darn it, I forgot to pack it.   Bummer.

Anyway, Moriarity is just east of Albuquerque, NM.  I wanted to stay in Albuquerque but it was the last weekend of the Great Hot Air Balloon Festival.  No rooms to be had.  Moriarity was having their annual Pinto bean festival.  Sounded like fun but I left town before the parade. If I go back next week they will be having the Pumpkin Chunking Festival. Now what do you suppose that is all about?  

When I checked into my room on Friday, I opened the door and noticed the beds were not made. I looked and the bathroom door was closed. I think someone was in there.  I backed out and got another room. Maybe I should have asked if they needed a roommate, you think? Lol

I stayed in Ontario, CA on Saturday night and flew out of LAX on Sunday.   The entire trip was nice and I enjoyed getting on the road again. 

Enjoy,

     As many of you know I spent my entire career, teaching math in the public schools.  Sixteen of those were in the middle school and the last 14 were at the high school level.  Of course I have many strong feelings about public education and the path that it is on.  The recent violence in schools across the nation scares me to death, as it does you I am sure. Perhaps I will write my feelings on violence in the schools in a later post. I ran across the following article by Tamim Ansary. It may be a bit long and boring but I found it very interesting so I decided to share it here in my blog.

Enjoy,

Ed

Is Teaching Easier than Rocket Science?

One day at a drugstore, when the line was moving slowly, the woman ahead of me began to heckle the pharmacist for taking too long. The pharmacist lashed back: "I don't have to be here, you know. I could make more money doing something easy, like teaching."

"How do you know teaching is easy?" I butted in. "Have you done any?"

"No, but it isn't rocket science," the pharmacist scoffed. "Anyone can teach."

It's easy, right?
The pharmacist's words reminded me of my own (limited) experience with classroom teaching. As part of a program called Think-Write, which paired professional teachers with professional writers, I went into middle schools and then high schools for a couple of years to teach writing.

It should have been a milk run for a guy like me. I know a lot about writing. I've done such a lot of it, and I run a writer's group that's produced many published authors.

Instead, minutes after stepping into a sixth-grade classroom, I was drowning. Luckily, a real teacher was standing by to save me! The kids, you see, wouldn't do a thing I said. Some tried and couldn't, some wouldn't, some went speeding off in the wrong direction, and some didn't even notice I was there. Or care. Wherever I directed my attention was the wrong place, because just then, chaos was breaking out somewhere else.

I got better at it, but never good, and I came away from the experience stingingly aware that teaching is a discipline all its own. Is it easier than other jobs? I wasn't sure, so I decided to get the opinions of people who had done both teaching and another job.

Cushy hours?
Kate Roxas got her degree in accounting and worked as an auditor. The money was good, but she ended up hating the job.

"The hours were horrible, the business world was so cutthroat, and I never built up any cohesive relationships because I rarely had the same client for more than a month. When I came home, I never had great stories to tell because, well, there just aren't that many great accounting stories," she says.

So she got a master's degree in math education and went to work in a middle school. "Teaching," she reports, "is more fulfilling than accounting, but not easier."

Roxas disputes the notion that teachers have cushy working hours. As an accountant, she concedes, she worked more hours per day, but as a teacher, she works more minutes per hour.

"I'm only in the classroom from 8 to 2:30, true, but I'm teaching every second of that time. I have 160 kids in five classes and I have to know each one. I can't go into a parent-teacher conference and say, 'I don't know your kid!' As an auditor, I could space out sometimes, chat with coworkers, use the phone--I can't do that as a teacher."

Lives and emotions
"Don't get me wrong," she adds. "Auditing is intellectually challenging and you need lots of knowledge to do it well, but at the end of the day you can leave it at the office. With teaching, you can't do that. Teaching is about people's lives and emotions. It's about relationships and connection. That's the component some people have and some just don't. You can be the best mathematician in the world, but if you can't relate to kids, you're just a mathematician. You're not a teacher."

Former environmental engineer Suzanne Hoff also speaks of the emotional stamina teachers need. Hoff used to work for a consulting firm, overhauling old military bases, designing landfills, and such. Now she teaches computer skills to students in grades five through eight. She also consults on the yearbook, coaches track, and runs a computer club at her school.

"For me," she says, "teaching is easier than engineering because it's more fulfilling, but it's also more emotionally exhausting. You have to play so many different roles. And you're always watching--to make sure you don't hurt someone's feelings, to make sure you don't miss that opportunity to launch a kid in the right direction, because everything you say or do has such tremendous impact on them."

Another teacher I talked to left the profession to work in the insurance business as a claims adjuster but then came back to teaching. "The toughest part about this job," she says, "is keeping a classroom unified and focused. Every kid is different. Every day with every kid is different. If you have 25 kids in a room, every one of them is at a different stage of personal and emotional development. Each one has a different grasp of the subject. I can't simply teach to the whole class. I have to teach to each kid in the class. I interact with 150 kids each day, and I try to engage each one in a personal interaction, because the lesson has to move every student forward from where they are."

 The most important skill
Susan de la Vergne teaches in a different context to a different audience than Roxas and Hoff. She worked long years as an information technology director for companies ranging from banks to utilities, but two years ago she decided to quit management and make her living teaching what she knew, mostly to technical professionals in corporate settings.

The most important teaching skill, she asserts, is listening. "You have to pick up on what people already know, what they want to know, and what they need to know--what will be a real value add-on here. You need listening skills to figure out how to fit your material into each particular person's framework."

How to fix the schools
All this has implications, I think, for improving education. I often get e-mails saying things like, "If only we could get real engineers teaching physics in the public schools" or, "If only we had real accountants teaching elementary school math!" The assumption seems to be that there's nothing more to teaching a subject than knowing it.

Let me not be misunderstood. Obviously, no one can teach a subject they don't know. But that doesn't automatically make the corollary true--that someone who knows a subject can teach it. Clearly you need to know enough about a subject, but that amount differs by grade level, and knowing more than enough doesn't necessarily make one a better teacher, because teaching is a separate skill in its own right.

In the wake of a 2006 report from the National Academies about the shortcomings of science and math education in the United States, there's a push to improve instruction in these areas by making science and math teachers learn more science and math. But I'm thinking, to improve science and math instruction, we don't need better-trained scientists and mathematicians in the classrooms; we need science and math teachers who are better trained--and more inspired--in the fine art of teaching.

It has been a good week here at the loony farm. The grandkids are doing great, coming up with something new and exciting everyday.  (Not sure how much more excitement I can take. lol)  Did anyone see the full moon this morning? Oh my, what a sight.  As I was doing my morning walk it reminded me of  ”The Wizzard of Oz”.  You know the scene, the good witch of the South (or was it north?), comes swooping into the land of the munchkins in her bright globe like device.  That is what the moon looked like this morning. I have been looking for Toto and Dorothy all morning. 

Have a super weekend.

Enjoy,

Ed

Stupid Quote:

"If a President of the United States ever lied to the 

American people he should resign." 

- Bill Clinton running for US Representative in 1974

A Boy’s Dream Date:

A boy was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to 

him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful 

princess." He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in 

his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss 

me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay 

with you for one week." The boy took the frog out of his 

pocket, smiled at it, and returned it to his pocket. The 

frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a 

princess, I'll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want." 

Again the boy took the frog out, smiled at it and put it 

back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, "What is the 

matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll 

stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won't 

you kiss me?" The boy said, "Look, I don't have time for a 

girlfriend, but a talking frog is cool."

Stupid Is Stupid Does:

"The toilet is blocked and we cannot bathe the children 

until it is cleared."

- Actual letter to a landlord

If Men Got Pregnant:

* morning sickness would rank as the nation's #1 health 

  problem

* all methods of birth control would be improved to 100% 

  effective

* children would be kept in the hospital until they were 

  potty trained

* men would be eager to talk about commitment

* they wouldn't think twins were so cute

* fathers would demand that their sons be home from dates by 

  10pm

* men could use their briefcase as a diaper bag

* they'd have to stop saying, "i'm afraid i'll drop him."

* paternity suits would be a line of clothing

* they'd stay in bed to whole 9 months.

* natural childbirth would be obsolete

* there'd be a cure for stretch marks