Now's As Good A Time As Any

I got it at exactly my maximum bid. You’ll have to forgive me if I was hoping for a little more consumer surplus…but anyway, my brain is going to be fixed now!

Since I’m heading towards a big change in my life with getting out of school and hopefully gainful employment, I’ve been thinking some more about my goals in life, which currently number only one: write and publish a book. I’ve kind of been vacillating on that one, too, because by the time I get around to doing so, books might be totally passГ©. They’re kind of on the way out now, except for the ten or twenty or thirty real blockbusters each year. But I’m cooking up some new items, such as:

• Come up with at least one more Project that will be helpful to people, sort of like my Apple II BBS List, my Captain Beefheart MP3 download site I ran out of my dorm room in college (probably not quite legal, but also no longer in existence), and the law school stuff. Maybe something in a different field of endeavor than any of those, but still on the Internet. Maybe something science-related?
• Learn a certain number of languages to a certain degree of proficiency. Maybe 10 languages total. French, Spanish, Somali, Mandarin, Hindi (or Urdu or Punjabi or one of the other thousands of languages of India), Arabic, Japanese (or Korean or Vietnamese or something else from that neck of the woods), German, Russian, maybe classical Latin and Greek in there somewhere.
• Spend at least a year being productive in some fashion on every continent. I don’t know if I would count Australia or Antarctica as we used to in elementary school. But maybe a year in Brazil and a year in Spanish-speaking South America, a year in Central America, a year in Western Europe and a year in Eastern Europe, a year each in northern, western, southern, and eastern Africa, one in South and one in East Asia, one in China in particular, one in the Middle East (maybe I’ll save that one, hopeful that things will settle down in, like, 40 or 50 years…at least before I kick the bucket). How many years is that now? Heck, that’s only 13. If I take care of myself I could have a good 60 years ahead of me.

Now you might well object: “You like hot showers and air conditioning and having clean clothes every day and being with your family. How are you going to spend a quarter to a fifth of the rest of your life away from all that?” And you’d be quite right. And you’d further object: “What about cockroaches and mosquitoes and nasty diseases and landmines and various people who’d like to kill you? And dirt?” And yeah, I’m scared to death of those things. And you’d say: “What about having a family and a house and a cat and stuff?” I can’t say for sure I don’t want those things too. So you got me: I’m conflicted. But who ain’t?

Being an urban high school teacher has a certain chic to it among a certain set of people. If I can’t go to my class reunions and have people say: “Wow, you’ve accomplished a lot in the last 5/10 years!” maybe I can get them to say: “Ooh, you’re an inner-city teacher! You’re such a good person and stuff! You’re so much less worthless than those 100-hour-a-week investment banking clones!”

I wonder if I should go to my fifth college reunion. And/or my tenth high school reunion. Anyone ever done these kinds of things?

I’ve seen two! There’s always more where they came from. I hope at least they’re not swarming under my bed this time…

No one from my education program has ever found my blog, or at least none of them have ever told me.

With probably twenty minutes left in class today, I just ran out of energy. I decided to tell stories about my car for a couple minutes and then let them work on their homework for the rest of the period.

It’s the weekend as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got nothing left in the tank for this week. I mean, I have things I “have to do”, but I’m not going to do them.

I haven’t been to the movies in the longest time. Maybe that will be on my list for the weekend.

One more week of teaching for this quarter. Five more lesson plans. And a bunch of other stuff I have to turn in for classes, but who’s counting?

Oh well.

Okay, I’m seriously not going to bid it up again…if I get outbid I’ll just (exhale) let it go…

We’ll know in…let’s see…7 minutes and 20 seconds…

Okay, so for spring, I’ll be at Northland, where I thought I would be in fall. No more three hour classes…done by 3 or 4 PM every day…aaahhhhhh.

By my count, I have 20 assignments due over the next three weeks left in the quarter (not including finals week), plus two more weeks of teaching. What kind of people do they think we are?!

Brrrrrrrr!

I’m jonesin’ for some enchiladas with mole sauce from El Acapulco, AKA “Mom ‘n’ Pop Mexican Joint”.

I did a chalk-and-talk lesson today, and I didn’t feel like it was anything special, but at the end one of the students and both teachers in the room told me it was one of my best lessons yet. I need to think about why that might be the case, but it appears that “flow” in a lesson is very important. If you have considered the transitions between topics carefully, it will be easier to follow the lesson as a whole.