Bad Luck Poem

Well as I mentioned earlier things have not been going great lately. Today I laughed when I read an e-mail from my friend Samantha who is going through similar trails. In response to her creative letter, I wrote a poem to express what I have been going through lately. It is a bit corny, but I like it anyways, and maybe you will too.

A few weeks ago
I woke up and got ready to go
I went to the kitchen when lo and behold
There was a puddle there and the fridge wasn't cold

I cleaned it up and off to work I went
Brandi called me up and told me it was spent
How could that be? We had it only six years?
No matter, we needed a new one from SEARS

$1700 for a new fridge they said
They brought it out but dropped it instead
Living out of a cooler for a week is no way to get fed
Finally we got one, but there were more things to dread

We had our health, but then started day care
Ever since then our kids learned to share
Toys and games but mostly viruses I fear
Added misery to our home where once there was cheer

Two ear infections and strep throat was the diagnosis
Over and over a trip to the pharmacist
When I finally thought I might develop a psychosis
Madelyn caught flu and threw up on my clothes

Hanging on, trying to make it through
My computer froze up and I don't know what to do
I have to take it in, for I don't want to buy one new
But no doubt that will cost me too

All and all I guess I can't complain
We're all still alive and all still sane
Still I wish that things would get better
If nothing else, at least it's nice weather

Wait…is that rain on the radar?

It's all about heart

I have volunteered more of my time to help coach the Junior Varsity baseball team at the school in which I am conducting my student teaching. I thought that it was wise because I hope to coach baseball or softball when I get a full time teaching position, and I thought that it would be useful to have a little experience doing it, even though it was dumb given all of the time commitments I already have. However, it has been great. I have learned a lot about coaching and baseball. What I learned most is that kids are not getting the support they need in order to compete. So many of our players have not been playing ball for more than a couple years, and they are already sophomores and juniors in high school. It is unfortunate that they have not had the benefit of playing in the summer or in Babe Ruth leagues beyond school. There are so few players that my high school could not even field a third team for freshmen and sophomores like most schools. In one sense this is an advantage. The high school I went to was highly competitive and I was not big enough, strong enough, or fast enough, when I went there, to make the team. At least this way everyone gets to be on the team.

While participation is nice, competitiveness is nice too, and my JV team lacks the latter. In fact they are so not competitive that they have not won a game in a few years. So far we are 0-5, and there is not much hope of winning this year if things remain the same. It seems that the kids do not know how to win. Their morale is so low that after the first inning, they practically give up. Ground balls find their way to the outfield every time, and pop flies have a tendency to fall no matter how long my players have to get under them. Runners get picked off and opponent's batters have a tendency to walk or get hit by a pitch. Things go from bad to worse and worse even still. It is not a pretty sight.

But why would I write about this? What can I learn from all of this? I learned that heart which coaches and players often talk about is a real phenomenon. It is something that keeps you playing hard no matter what the odds. It is something that does not allow you to give up. Something that keeps you from throwing in the towel. I don’t know if I can instill it in my players, but they need it for sure. Friday they didn’t make it through four innings or one hour before we threw the towel in. Tuesday we scored our first run in four games, but didn't have a hit. It seems they are losing before they even take the field. They need heart. For myself, I will keep going out there even though they seem to be a lost cause, if for nothing else, because there is still a chance that they will find out what they are missing.

Those who can do...

I was reflecting on the phase from where it originated I do not know, except that it ended up in pop culture somehow. It goes, “those who can do, and those who can’t teach.” After teaching for a few months now I can say with confidence that there are those who can’t teach. It is not as easy as the catchy phase makes it seem. Imagine trying to hold the interest of 30 teenagers, engage them in learning, and at some point help them to learn something they did not know they needed learn. Imagine selling something that your customer does not want to buy, all the while trying to please your boss who wants you to meet your quota. Imagine being a drill sergeant who has a platoon of new recruits to train who have been conscripted into service against their will, and then disallowed to yell at or hit them. Imagine trying to make the Cold War as interesting as American Idol, generating interest in American government when students just want to watch South Park. These are some of the obstacles to teaching.

So then this is my phrase in response to the one we all know, “those who can sometimes do, but those who can can’t necessarily teach others to do it.” Have you ever tried to teach someone something that you knew how to do? Was it frustrating? You see it on the golf course all the time. Undoubtedly there is someone out there who went along with his buddies because of peer pressure but has no idea what to do (like me). All of his friends are likely to try to help him. “Hold your hands like this…” “Keep your head down…” “Use a different club…” “Grip it looser…” The advice is never ending, but inevitably their rookie friend will not improve because all of this new information is too much and he has little experience with golf. Probably his friends will give up on him and let him hack his way through 18 holes. So then can everyone teach who can do? I think not.

Teaching today, and always as far as I can tell, is a very challenging thing. It is not a matter of simply transferring knowledge from one mind to another. Teachers and students are not computers. It takes creativity, empathy, communication, and sensitivity among other things. I heard someone say that teaching history is most effective when told as a story. History can be very interesting, but history teachers often make it boring. For instance, we studied the space race, and instead of making it about V2 and Jupiter rockets which is boring, our lesson focused more on monkeys and the lunar landing. My students were interested in the space race when I suggested that there is a possibility that we did not actually land on the moon. Some of them were shocked. How could that be? I asked them if we could land on the moon tomorrow, and most answered that we could, however we could not because our space program revolves around the shuttle, and the shuttle cannot land on the moon and then leave again. They were hooked. Suddenly a boring lesson about space ships turned into a heated discussion on whether we faked it. Is such a thing possible? Why would we fake it? How can we know for sure? Questions were flying and learning was happening. I was very pleased.

You see there are many ways to transfer information or “teach.” The challenge is in finding the method that is most effective. Power point, videos, books, computer programs, there are many tools that a teacher can use, but like other tools, they are only as effective as the person wielding them. If you don’t think I am right, try to teach something to someone else who knows nothing about it. Try to teach your girlfriend about horsepower, or your sister about baseball. For women, try to teach your boyfriend, or husband about skin care, or laundry. The point is not that there are not women interested in baseball or men who can do laundry, but the point is that it is not always as easy as it seems to teach someone something they are not naturally interested in. Therein lies the most significant challenge to teaching. So think about that the next time someone makes teaching the butt of a joke, or you hear the phase, “those who can do, and those who can’t teach.”

But teacher... my computer crashed

I have always been suspicious of those students who use the excuse that their computer crashed when it was time to turn in a project. More often it was the printer, which is understandable because we have advanced in the area of print technology far beyond Gutenberg, but we have not managed to make these print machines reliable. I thought that people who had a computer crash must have been dumb and left it out in the rain or something because I could think of no other reason why a computer would crash. I have had a computer since 1995 and never had a problem that I couldn’t fix myself. However, last week I found myself unable to even get my computer to turn on. Being in my own estimation a fairly cleaver man I promptly took it apart to "take a look" but was unable to do anything but look, and then promptly put it back together. It then worked for about five minutes. Believe me for those five minutes I felt like I was invincible. I mean if I could fix a computer with no formal training, what couldn't I do? It turned out that in fact I hadn’t fixed anything, and my computer remains dead. I am hoping that it might be resurrected, but I am not sure I can wait until the second coming. Meanwhile I am using my wife's computer which is much more capable than mine, even though she only uses it to check her email twice a week. It is nice except that it has none of my games or gadgets on it, all of which I have been prohibited to install. I only tell you all of this to say that I am sorry for not posting anything for the last two weeks. I will try to post all of the things I wrote in that time over the next few days, and that I now am more inclined to listen when a student tells me that their computer crashed and their term paper along with it.

More "Big" Ideas

Ok so maybe I have gotten a little carried away with this big car idea, but it is fun for me. Besides I forgot to share my favorite idea. If I were to name my own big car, it would be the Juggernaut. That's right. Maybe there is a market for cars made with superhero names like Superman, Batman, or the Hulk. I'll feel the market out with that one. Also I think it would be a good idea to name some vehicles after dinosaurs. After all they have mystique and also connote size. I am thinking for our first line we could have the T-Rex, Velociraptor (sports car) and Stegosaurs. It is just a start, but there is a long list of names to choose from.

What it boils down to I think is that there are too many companies in the market now, and too many cars. Ford, Chrysler, and GM know this first hand. They were used to huge percentages of the market share, and cry when their share is lost to Toyota, Nissan and Honda. Such is business. The other extreme though is a country like India which had a state owned auto-industry which produced a small amount of inferior vehicles without much choice or variation on the vehicles they produced. So in the end I guess I prefer the free market method that we employ today. Especially if someone is interested in my name ideas.

The bigger the better

Alright, I finally got around to writing something that I have been thinking about for a while now. How big can vehicles get? It is getting out of control. Believe me, I am a devout capitalist, and I believe in free market, and I recognize that the only reason these vehicle exist is because people want them, but when is enough enough? I used to drive around in a Ford Probe, which is a very small car, and I thought to myself that the bumper of these vehicles is at my eye level. If they broadsided me I would be killed. Something has to change. Even the names of the vehicles connote largeness. Titan, Tundra, Expedition, are just a few. Nissan in fact seems to be leading the way with the large vehicle line, but let's not forget about the line of Hummers, which while they have gotten smaller since the first commercial hummer was made available, they are still grossly oversized. I would like to see a movement away from this trend.

However you know what they say...if you can't beat em join em. So I think I will. In fact I have a few ideas for car names that might prove catchy. I am going to patent them and then sell the rights to the name to which ever company wishes to use the name. Here is a sample of the names I have come up with so far: Mammoth, Colossus, Titanic, are some of the names I was thinking may fit. I also think we should create a line of vehicles names after Greek gods: Zeus, Apollo, and Aphrodite (2 door for the dating scene) are some of the ones that might work. Otherwise maybe we should name them after continents to show their size: Antarctica is a good one, America is also nice, but for the largest of course it would be called Asia. Only the most confidence damaged people would need to drive around in a vehicle named after the largest continent in the world, but I think there is a market there. Anyways, those are just my thoughts, tell me what you think, maybe we can go into business together.

Oh Nancy

I have been amazed at how utterly ignorant politicians seems to be when it comes to economic principles. I have witnessed high school students who understand the basic concepts of supply and demand and the effects of increased taxation on business etc. They have explained to me that the minimum wage increase is likely to cause either higher prices on products and/or fewer jobs as employers lay off workers to offset the net income change. They get it why don't politicians? Believe me I am not interested in returning to a time when the factory owners hired children to do dangerous work and paid them little to compensate. I am not advocating for a return to a time when you could be fired for complaining about a wage that was below subsistence level. What I would like to see though is a government which is careful not to change things when they are going well, and apparently some people think that the status quo is not good enough. Nancy Pelosi had a few things to say about the recent surge in the stock market.

*****
Nancy Pelosi condemned the new record highs of the stock market as "just another example of Bush policies helping the rich get richer". "First Bush cut taxes for the rich and the economy has rebounded with new record low unemployment rates, which only means wealthy employers are getting even wealthier at the expense of the underpaid working class."

She went on to say "Despite the billions of dollars being spent in Iraq our economy is still strong and government tax revenues are at all time highs. What this really means is that business is exploiting the war effort and working Americans, just to put money in their own pockets."

When questioned about recent stock market highs she responded "Only the rich benefit from these record highs. Working Americans, welfare recipients, the unemployed and minorities are not sharing in these obscene record highs". "There is no question these windfall profits and income created by the Bush administration need to be taxed at 100% rate and those dollars redistributed to the poor and working class". "Profits from the stock market do not reward the hard work of our working class who, by their hard work, are responsible for generating these corporate profits that create stock market profits for the rich We in congress will need to address this issue to either tax these profits or to control the stock market to prevent this unearned income to flow to the rich."

When asked about the fact that over 80% of all Americans have investments in mutual funds, retirement funds, 401K's, and the stock market she replied "That may be true, but probably only 5% account for 90% of all these investment dollars. That's just more "trickle down" economics claiming that if a corporation is successful that everyone from the CEO to the floor sweeper benefit from higher wages and job security which is ridiculous". "How much of this 'trickle down' ever get to the unemployed and minorities in our county? None, and that's the tragedy of these stock market highs."

"We democrats are going to address this issue after the election when we take control of the congress. We will return to the 60% to 80% tax rates on the rich and we will be able to take at least 30% of all current lower Federal Income Tax tax payers off the roles and increase government income substantially. We need to work toward the goal of equalizing income in our country and at the same time limiting the amount the rich can invest."

When asked how these new tax dollars would be spent, she replied "We need to raise the standard of living of our poor, unemployed and minorities. For example, we have an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in our country who need our help along with millions of unemployed minorities. Stock market windfall profits taxes could go a long ways to guarantee these people the standard of living they would like to have as "Americans"."

*****
Let me summarize Nancy's school of economics: low unemployment rates mean that workers are being exploited. Spending money to rebuild a ravished country is bad. We should tax the rich at %100. The stock market is evil. Rich people are evil. Illegal immigrants should be supported by tax payers to the level of middle class. Wealth redistribution is the answer.

It is odd how she is so interested in making everyone equal and yet requested and received her own jumbo air force jet to fly her from Washington to San Francisco; the jet has been called "Pelosi One." She makes me want to shake her so hard that she suffers from shaken Congresswoman Syndrome. I don't feel as though I need to debrief her absurd remarks because they are so absurd, so I will just leave it at that.

Busy

I am sorry for any one who checks this blog regularly so as to read my brilliant posts as soon as I post them because I have been remiss in posting these last couple of weeks. Ok, well that is probably no one. I will try to make up for it with blinding brilliance. I have a great number of things that I could share, but I am not sure what you might want to read. Let's see... well I went on my first Men's advance (we are not calling it a retreat) and that was a lot of fun. I started coaching (sort of) baseball, I finished teaching WWII, and I am getting ready to teach the Cold War one of my favorite topics because I myself am a pinko commie. Besides that there have been some interesting things in the news, like Brittany Spears shaving her head or something stupid like that, as if I really cared. A crazy astronaut tried to murder the woman that her adulterous lover is with. Then Anna Nicole Smith died and no one talked about the astronaut chick any more. My Dad suggested that maybe NASA killed Anna to get their girl off the headlines (something to think about). The stock market slipped yesterday and everyone had a cow. So what it is higher than it has ever been, consumer confidence is up, unemployment is down, and Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the house. Ok well maybe that last one doesn't help. Trust me I listened carefully when I heard that someone tried to kill Chaney. You can say what you want about W, but if we had to suffer Nancy he would look like a saint I suspect. So anyways, enjoy the posts, and for goodness sake, leave some responses.

Land Wars

As I was driving around this morning after dropping my kids off I drove by a field with hundred of fig trees piled up ready to be burned. As usual being that I have a soft spot for agriculture, I was sad to see the figs ripped out in order for developers to build more houses. In and around Fresno this is a common sight. Farm land being destroyed and replaced by cookie cutter houses. But this is nothing new for me; I have come to accept although not support the urban sprawl that has become standard in the United States. As I was lamenting this phenomenon I thought how ironic it is that at one point there was nothing there but wild grass and any trees that happened to grow there all by themselves. Before the figs and other trees were planted, and rough grasses plowed into neat rows, there was only natural flora. Then I thought that some people protest the development of so called "wilderness" into farm land. Here is the process: naturalists protest the use of wilderness for agriculture, agriculturalists protest the development of farm land into suburbs, then no doubt someone protests the purchase of those properties (after many years) for city projects or freeway onramps.

In many places of the world even today there is conflict over land. A classic example is Israel and Palestine, but there are others. In our own country there is conflict over tribal lands and who has the "right" to use the land. This issue has been addressed by several philosophers, including John Locke, whose philosophy is a cornerstone of our government and society. He claimed that a man could only possess as much land as he could use. But technology has made it possible to use much more land than a man who lived 300 years ago could. The point is that we are still fighting over land. Unlike in the Middle East however, we don't use guns and bullets to settle disputes, but we still do use a weapon of sorts. It seems to me that we use money to wage war over land now. Farmers have more than whoever controlled it in the first place. Developers have more than farmers. Cities have more than the poor saps who have their land bought up using imminent domain. We are waging war over land, just as we have for thousands of years.

So what is the point? It brings me back to one of the things that I go back to again and again. That man is not really all that advanced. We have not really advanced at our core as much as we would like to think. We still struggle to walk the straight and narrow. Prostitution, murder, pillage, rape, maim, destroy, these are the things we have done since the dawn of time, and we are still doing them. Maybe we are not as savage as we once were, but I think it is debatable. But maybe I am just disturbed over the story of the astronaut who drove halfway across the country to kill her lover's lover. That story sure sounds savage to me. And must I point out that we are still worshiping idols? If you don't think so consider how much media attention Anna Smith got for her untimely death. Oh well, I can complain all day, but all I can control is how I act, and sometimes even that is too much. Have a nice day.

Questions

I learned something very important about teaching this week. We began the WWII unit this week and on Monday I stated by having the students first talk about what they know about WWII and then ask questions to drive the learning. I used the question model to begin a lesson about Pearl Harbor and the US entering the war. We talked about whether the US should get involved when other countries have conflicts, and most of my students had an opinion. We used that discussion to lead into a lesson about the US foreign policy leading up to the war, and then our entrance into the war. I felt that it was a good lesson and was glad that I had succeeded in stimulating learning. The next class period we did a lesson on the diverse people who were involved in the war, women, hispanics, blacks, Japanese and Native Americans. I did not use any questions to drive the learning only dove right in. I was dissapointed with their reaction. So I completely rewrote the lesson for the next day (they are on a block schedule) and changed the lesson drastically. Instead of being about diverse groups in the armed services, it became about freedom, and what freedom means. I feel like it was a much better lesson. I had the students write a parallel poem at the end of the lesson, and the "Freedom for Some" poem is the one I wrote to model for them. The moral is that questions drive our learning. We do not usually care to learn something that we do not question or that we already understand. I am going to try to always allow for questions to lead the learning in my classroom.

Freedom for Some

This poem I wrote the other day because I was having my students write a poem to show the paradox between the diverse groups of people fighting in WWII and the freedoms they had or didn't have in the USA. We did a lesson on Tuskegee Airmen, 442nd (an all Japanese unit), women in the armed forces, Navajo Code Talkers, and Mexican Americans in the military. All of these people served in the war, and yet they did not all have equal freedoms. Anyways, this poem shows that paradox. My wife objects to the language I used, but I feel it is appropriate.

I am a white man.
I am a black man.
I am a free man.
I am told where I can eat, drink, sit, and even pee.
I am loved by all.
Some love me, but others hate me.
I want to serve my country.
I want to serve my country.

The Army drafted me to fight.
I had to fight to get into the Army.
They trained me and called me a soldier.
They spit on me and called me a nigger.
The men around me were my brothers.
The men around me were closer than brothers.
I fought in France and felt like a hero.
In France they treated me like a hero.

I was proud of my service, fighting for freedom.
I was proud of my service, but I don’t know what I fought for.
I came home and they called me a hero.
I came home and they called me a nigger.
I love my country and my country loves me.
I love my country, but my country doesn’t love me.
The USA is still the land of the free.
They give freedom to some, but not to me.

Experiencing Death

This is a poem that I wrote in High School. It is a parallel poem, which means it shows two different things that happen at the same time. In this poem I was comparing a soldier with a person who decided to go to college to avoid being drafted.

I am but a young man.
I am but a young man.
I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die.
I will go to school for escape.
I will face the Death.
I want the Country to help me.
I want to help the Country.
I go away to learn at school.
I go away to live in Death.

School is so stressful.
Death is terrifying.
I know I can make it.
I don’t think I will survive.
I fear nothing at all.
I fear for my very life.
I curse the Country.
I fight for the Country.
I read about the Death.
I live the Death.
I don’t think there is really a Death.
I cannot escape the Death.
I will never die.
The Death will swallow me.

I drink with friends in happiness.
I drink alone to forget.
I am completely healthy.
I am numb with pain.
I am full of life.
The Death took my life.
I know everything.
Nobody knows anything.
My whole life is ahead of me.
My life was left behind.
Here’s to life.
Here’s to Death.
I am a great man.
I am a dead man.

FDR

I wanted to apologize for my earlier rant. I was simply upset at the facts surrounding FDR. I need to give credit where credit is due, and I wanted to acknowledge that FDR was very good at keeping up the nation's moral. It should be credited to him because had this not been the case, had despair and fear continued, a more radical leader may have gained power, as in Germany. Also despite the internment of the Japanese Americans, FDR was a good war time president. He foresaw the need to combat Fascism in Europe and imperialism in Asia, and took action when it was needed. While I am still overall critical of his leadership, I recognize that there are important contributions that he made to our nation. I just wish that his failures are not ignored because of his successes.

First four weeks

After four weeks and an entire unit I have learned a lot about teaching. There are many things that I would do differently, and yet many that I think I did well. For this unit on the Great Depression, I wanted to focus a lot on writing. Obviously writing is something that I find very valuable, and I wanted to share my experience with it in the classroom. I thought that it would be a shame to do something well and not use it to teach my students. So I created fictional characters set in the 30s, and gave each student one of the characters. As the unit progressed and their characters experienced some of the ups and downs of the time, I had them write journal entries to reflect their learning. Some of them did very well with this, and others not so well, but the point was that they were writing. For a unit assessment I had them use their characters to write a narrative essay about the Great Depression. While some of the essays are not well organized, I was pleased that nearly all of the students wrote. I had one student who hates writing, and doesn’t like school in general write two and a half pages. I was so pleased with him. Even if the essay was not excellent compared with others, for him it was the best he could write, and he will only benefit from having done it. Writing is proof that a person is thinking, and I know now that my students were thinking. So no matter the things that I have struggled with in these first few weeks, there is at least one success, and that is that my students wrote a story. If nothing else went right for the rest of the semester, this would be enough.

Tiny Miracle

Today I noticed a flower so meek.
Through the heavy ground it did peek.
I thought of the grueling process it did take,
To show us its gleaming beauty, far from fake.

It pained me to think of all the people,
that find a flower less than a steeple,
And those who cut them to caress,
Ruining the tiny miracles brief but pleasant happiness.

The New Deal

Just a few thoughts on the New Deal after teaching it to my students. In short it was a sham. Roosevelt somehow managed to maintain high approval ratings while the economy continued to suffer. I believe that he was a great man for keeping up moral but for turning the economy around, well he was a failure. In England and Germany the depression was long gone by the time Roosevelt sent the country into a recession in 37, five years after taking charge and turning out law after law. Hoover cut taxes to give people more money to spend, but Roosevelt raised taxes. Hoover was criticized for not giving veterans bonuses from WWI, but Roosevelt cut veteran pensions and reduced military spending, yet was spared criticism. Thank goodness for Japanese imperialism or we might still be in a depression (ok that is a stretch). Let's not forget what Roosevelt did during that engagement. Putting Japanese Americans in camps? Who else imprisoned his own productive loyal citizens? Oh yeah Hitler and Stalin. At the same time too. I'm not saying Roosevelt is equal in evilness to Hitler or Stalin, just similar at the same time. I am just tired of people celebrating men when there is no reason to celebrate. It turns out that the best presidents are probably their own best advocates. It seems that tooting ones own horn is more important than running the country.

Hoover and Roosevelt

As I began teaching the unit on the great depression I decided to try to dispel some of the myths that bother me about this time, but more importantly to present all of the information and let the students to decide for themselves what is truth. For instance, most people (who know anything about the Great Depression) are under the impression that Hoover is largely responsible for the economic crash, and furthermore that he did nothing to help the country as it plunged into despair. In fact Hoover offered federal money to all of the states, but only a few decided to accept it. He created more Federal works projects than any other previous president including the Hoover dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and work on the Supreme Court building. He tried to stabilize farm prices by asking farmers to leave their fields fallow, but this only softened the fall.

Hoover was a good man, a humanitarian, who was adept at helping people, and worked hard to not only ease the suffering of the American people, but also to maintain the tenets of our government and economy. In contrast Roosevelt was a playboy and a smooth talker. A person who was good at telling people what they wanted to hear. He also opposed women's suffrage and was critical when Harvard accepted its first black students. Nearly everyone he met commented that he seemed intellectually weak. When he took office after promising a "new deal" he made things up as he went, borrowing many of the things that Hoover proposed, including the bank holiday which began the "hundred days."

Roosevelt did some things that I admire as well, but I am critical of him because he is praised for "getting the US out of the depression," while in fact even during his presidency, the unemployment rate only once dropped below 8 million. Not exactly getting the country out of the depression. In fact it is the enormous military industrial complex that is created when the US mobilized for WWII that corrected our economic shortcomings. Roosevelt felt that he was so important that he was the only president to serve more than two terms. Of course he did not survive the forth term and died in office, leaving the country in the hands of Harry Truman. His cousin Teddy Roosevelt is the only other president to run for a third term, although it was as a third party candidate.

You decide who we should praise, and who we should condemn. I will just do what I feel teachers should do and present the facts.

First week

I survived my first week of teaching, but just barely. It is not so much the actual teaching or the kids, it is all the preparing and the work that goes into each lesson that has been challenging. Besides that I have night classes three nights a week which makes for a very long week. I love the kids though. They are amazing. If I can convince them that it is worthwhile to write and read, and express themselves, they seem like they are capable of great things. Several of my students have only been in the US for a couple of years, and yet they all work really hard. I think that it will be a good semester. I hope to learn a lot from them, and also to teach them something.

Back to Work

With the Christmas vacation nearly through I have been writing and reading fairly consistently, although I admit to a bit of Playstation playing. I did not write much though on the various book projects I have been working on, but rather I have been writing lesson plans for my new class. I am going to be teaching American History at Roosevelt High School in Fresno for my final student teaching. It is a state requirement to do “student teaching” which is when a University student in the Teaching program goes into a classroom and takes over a couple of classes from the teacher there. I was so excited about it that I decided to write my own lessons right away despite having the option of using my master teacher’s lessons for the first unit, which is the Great Depression. I have so many ideas about it that I expect I will share some of the things that I am passionate about on this blog, which is quickly becoming more about book reviews and teaching than writing, but that is where I am at right now. Hopefully this spring and then this summer I will get back to writing some of the books that I have been working on.

Besides that I have been reading a bit which is evident by the reviews that I have written for this blog. I have a few more that I think I will do including some from my course work. I must have read about fifty books in 06. I think that maybe I will go back and count them all just because I am amazed that I am capable of reading so much. Right now I am reading Citizen Soldier by Stephen Ambrose. It is a book about WWII on the European front. I was hoping to finish it before I go back to school but that may not happen. Anyways, to all of my fans out there (all three of you) I am going to try to write something interesting every week along with various reviews etc. I am going to post my short story about boot camp, and maybe my essay about the Grapes of Wrath and some more poetry by popular demand (just for you Aunt Mary). Exciting isn’t it? I think so.

Book Review The City in Mind

This book I expected would be very informational because of the subtitle “ notes on the urban condition.” I had hoped that I would learn a lot about urban planning and city development. I have been critical of urban sprawl for a few years because of the rapid rate at which Fresno is expanding, and I hoped to read about some alternatives. The Author examines several cities: Berlin, Atlanta, Paris, Rome, Mexico City, Boston, London, and Las Vegas. I felt as though he spent far too much time discussing the history of a city rather than the actual structure of the city. While I appreciate history as it relates to the present (I am after all a history teacher), I felt that he went into far too much detail to the neglect of the current situation in some instances. In the chapter about Mexico City for instance the bulk of it was about the Aztecs and Cortez, not modern Mexico City. All he had to say about it was basically, it is a mess. Ditto Berlin and London. It also had a strong anti Christian theme which seemed out of place in a book about cities. He took time to criticize the Crusades even though it had only the most minimal contribution to the chapter on Rome, and also pontificated about the Inquisition which as far as I can tell had nothing to add to any chapter. He blasted Gothic architecture and attributed it to Christians rather than simply Europeans, a distinction which is unfairly critical of Christian culture while sparing European culture. I can summarize the book in a sentence: suburbs are a mess, Paris is the best city in the world because of a man who nobody liked, and Boston is the city of the future in the USA. I don’t really recommend it for a study of urban planning because it was difficult at times to wade through the elaborate descriptions of historical events to find the characteristics of city development.