Truth Through Consilience.

Give blooging a chance...

2011-04-19T16:53:00.000-04:00

So, I'm sitting here in a teacher training seminar where they are telling us about blogging and how cool it is. Honestly, I've been operating under the assumption that blogging is dead, that my friends can keep up with me adequately on Facebook, and that if my progeny wants access to who I am when I am dead and gone then I can just leave my login and password for them to get onto my Facebook and get the lowdown by looking through my history.
I don't know. I feel like the impulsive nature of my Facebook entries allows for what may be a more pure view of who I am and what I may be thinking at any given moment.
Secondarily, I don't feel like my Blogger has ever gotten a lot of action. I get more interaction in a day on Facebook than I've had in the life of both my blogs, combined.
Maybe I've just answered my own question. Maybe blogs are dead.
I await any response from you folks out in the woods.

The Politics Test--try it and be surprised

2009-06-16T20:25:00.002-04:00

OkCupid.com: The Politics Test - Online Dating Test:
Your true political self: You are a...

Social Liberal
(73% permissive)

and an...

Economic Conservative
(60% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Libertarian

You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness."

I am whoever the internets say I am...

2009-05-29T13:07:00.004-04:00

I took a personality test to complete my profile at stumbleupon, and these are the results...

Your Type is INFJ

Introverted Intuitive Feeling Judging

Strength of the preferences %
33 88 12 1

Qualitative analysis of your type formula You are:

moderately expressed introvert
very expressed intuitive personality
slightly expressed feeling personality
slightly expressed judging personality

The site suggested 8 possible jobs for me:

Literature/Writer
Humanities
Philosophy
Archaeology
Religious
Education
Psychology
Counseling

People the internets say I am like:

Immanual Kant
William Shakespeare
Ludwig Beethoven
Pearl Buck
Arthur C. Clark

Ocean Isle, North Carolina and Near Death/Paralysis

2009-05-25T17:31:00.006-04:00

So, on Wednesday, Angie's mom (Debbie) called us up and asked us if we would like to go on an all expenses paid trip to Myrtle Beach, SC. I had heard that Myrtle beach was sort of a combination of Atlantic City and Pigeon Forge, TN--neither of which are places that I would choose to go of my own accord.
LUCKILY, she was only being approximate. We were actually heading for somewhere much better: Ocean Isle, North Carolina. After a long and grueling trip to get there--one which included extremely sleepy driving and a night's stay at a crack den posing as a motel, we arrived here:

This WHOLE building.

Seven bedrooms, each with a master bath. It's own little boat dock on a tidal plain that is full of little water creatures, three blocks from an awesome beach. It normally goes for $5000! We got it for free. I didn't ask questions; I just enjoyed.

I went to the top floor, and if you can see past my fingers, you'll see an awesome kitchen/livingroom area that overlooked the tidal flats.

The tide is in.

The tide is out.

We went straight out on the flats and found baby king crabs, tasty blue crabs, and the largest hermit crabs that I've ever seen. We also caught a whole slough of unidentified fingerlings and baitfish. I caught the largest fish with a hand-net--a seven-inch version of something that clearly would grow to a much greater size, but I don't know what it was. Much fun was had.

The beach was gorgeous! The sand was warm, but not hot; the water was cool, but not cold (no one wants to feel like they're swimming in urine); the days were sunny, but not glaring or too hot; and the surf was big, but not too dangerous--a subject I will expound on right now.

Near Death/Paralysis

The surf was coming in at between 6-8 feet in a fairly predictable manner. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn to body surf. It took me a few tries, but I finally started catching waves and riding them in to the beach, landing softly on my belly after 25-30 yards. I had so much fun! However, I had to quit when I nearly broke my back and my neck on the same wave. it was a great eight-footer. I caught it just right and started slipping down the face in a semi-endless slide down the face with the foam chasing around my body. It felt as romantic as I hope I'm making it sound. Angie said that I looked like a swiming dog.

Anyway, I feel like on a good ride, you keep your feet right between the upper layer of water that is falling forward and the lower layer of water that is sucking backward. Unfortunately for me, on this ride, I got my feet too high. All of a sudden, instead of sliding forward, I was being driven like a stake into the sandy (and shell-y) bottom. My chest caught on the bottom before my chin hit--which on first though seems good, except that so much of my mass was pointed down instead of forward that when my legs continued forward, my body failed to follow. I got bent in half, backwards, to the soundtrack of two audible crunches--one in my lower back, and one in my upper neck. "I'm dead or paralyzed," actually ran through my head while I was still being neatly folded and pressed. I was a little stunned when I stood up and braced against the next wave's arrival. I am sore as hell now though. My back has been killing me all the way home. This might just seem like a close call and no big deal otherwise except that I have Spina bifada occulta, which is sort of an incomplete version of Spina bifada. Doctors have told me not to play football, wrestle, horseplay, to heavy lifting, etc... I ignore them. With the exception of activities classified under "work" or "labor", things involving the use of my lower back are unequivocaly my favorite things to do.

This was pretty damn close though.

The end of humanity...as we know it.

2009-05-05T15:06:00.002-04:00

Ray Kurzweil called it. Others are picking it up.

Backpfeifengesicht...

2009-04-27T15:08:00.001-04:00

73% of my students are.

Invisibility and Matter Cloaks

2009-04-02T14:38:00.005-04:00

Remember the invisibility cloak from Harry Potter? Scientist are in hot pursuit of a technology that could make such a thing real.

On top of that, it looks as though it may be possible to eventually develop a "matter cloak" that allows matter to pass "through" it unimpeded!!

If we can get the matter cloak to pan-out, it opens up a whole new level of science and space exploration for us. The space shuttle and International Space Station do about 17,500 mph in low-earth orbit. That is roughly 8x the muzzle velocity of an M16 rifle (2181 mph)! There is a lot of ice, space debris, rock, and trash in orbit and impact shields have to be replaced very regularly. A matter cloak would be very helpful, and might be necessary for manned-interplanetary exploration. Matter cloaks would also be helpful to keep that same debris from wrecking up the mooring lines of space elevators (a.k.a. "skyhooks")--another probable necessity for any permanent off-world human presence.

Writing and Grammar

2009-04-02T07:27:00.004-04:00

So, you can probably tell (if you've read any recent postings) that I've been writing lately. There are three major reasons for this:

I'm lazy. I don't really like work, and so I want to find a way to stay home as much as I possibly can while keeping my standard of living at least on the level that it is currently. I want to spend more time with my kids. I like being at home. If I can make a career out of writing, that'd be cool. That said, I don't expect to make a career out of writing, but I've recently come to the realization that I probably could have done a lot more with my life if I had exercised a little more gumption. I'm starting the marathon now.
Writing is fun. I really enjoy it, and it helps me relax. I wish I had more opportunities to write, but life keeps getting in the way. I've probably only put in ten hours in the last two months. Those ten hours have produced about 55 pages of raw material. It's not a lot, but I'm really excited about this summer and the prospect of more time to work.
I don't have enough time to exercise my imagination by reading any of the bajillions of books that I want to read, so I write what I want to read (sort of--it'll get better, anyway) so that my imagination can go crazy for a half-hour at a time.

There's also a not-so-secret #4: I don't really understand grammar in any sort of formal, structured, rules-based way. Right now I use punctuation like musical rests; it's a hit-and-miss method. Here is more or less the lineup of punctuation by magnitude of silence:

space between words
comma
parenthesis and dash (same pause time, different use)
colon and semicolon (same pause time, different use)
period, exclamation, question mark
paragraph break

Messed up, right?

I'm hoping that writing will help me to get more curious about grammar and mechanics so that I can familiarize myself with them a little more completely.

So it's been awhile...

2009-03-19T09:54:00.002-04:00

If you're having a relapse and need just a little bit of Adam's sweet, sweet words in your eyeballs, Ikeep a daily work blog for my English 10 class. You can find it here:

http://cmhsenglish.blogspot.com/

Sample for my Intro. to Modern Mythology Writing, 10th Grade...

2009-03-19T07:57:00.003-04:00

On a starry night, in a small village on the outskirts of New Roanoke, under constellations strange to modern man’s eyes, a baby named Danny Adkins was born. His father had gone off to fight in the wars across the sea, and the letters had stopped coming several months prior to Danny’s birth. Sarah Jameson—the mother, who was a woman of little inheritance—had put all of her hope in marriage to the child’s father, but when war had broken out, he had felt the call to arms. He claimed that the bond of brotherhood that he shared with his fellow countrymen begged his duty, and off he went. And so they lived in the village, making do with what they could raise in their garden, and bartering or doing small chores for what they couldn’t grow. The war ended and Danny’s father didn’t return.
As the boy grew older, his mother filled his head with stories of his father. Sarah would set him down in his cot by the fire for bedtime. Danny would pull the covers up to his chin, and she would smile at him with that crinkly smile that always made him feel as if everything was right with the world. She would sit down cross-legged next to him, reach out with her hands that were so rough with years of hard toil, smooth his hair, and tell the same stories over and over again. But the boy never tired of the tales—they were all he had of the man who had left such a gaping hole in his mother’s heart.
“Your father was a wonderful man,” she always began. “Once, when he was but a boy of about your age, he saved an old woman from a robber. He didn’t do it through force or arms. He was a smart one. As you know, your father was a shepherd, and one day—while he was out in the field—he spied a treacherous-looking fellow creeping from rock to rock, following a sweet grandmotherly-looking woman as she travelled from our village to New Chicago to do business. As this deceitful-looking man crept upon the innocent old lady, your father crept down upon the thief from higher up the same hillside. He moved quiet as the dawn of the morning from tree to tree.” Her eyes would gleam with tears unshed at the thought of her lost love doing a noble deed. The story always advanced to the part where Danny’s father perfectly imitated the call of a hunting Spitz Cur a mere fifteen feet from where the robber and the woman were about to come to blows. At this point, she always laughed so heartily, rocking back and forth and slapping her weathered hand upon her thigh. “Both were scared so badly that our young rescuer thought for a moment that he might have done the old woman a disservice. Her poor soul was like to crawl straight out of her skin and make for Terra and the Elders without a glance back! Both the old woman and the robber had turned tail and run—each moving in opposite directions—at that most fearful sound; thus, your father saved the old woman and prevented the robber from adding to his soul’s damnation.”
And now, she did wipe the tears from her eyes. But they were tears of mirth and not tears of sorrow; those would continue to go unshed for as long as her son required the strength of his mother for survival.
Danny grew up listening to these stories and so it was inevitable that he too should have some adventures in this world. He had helped to save a fellow youth from drowning during the summer of his ninth year. During All-Hastening’s-Eventide of his twelfth year, he discovered—through what many considered to be exemplary tracking skills—that a bloat toad had gotten into the sweet puddings that had been left on the sill to cool. He had not only discovered the creature’s presence, but he had wrangled it from the kitchen and thrown it into the god-fires that the town had set for the Eventide Watch. This was a feat that most full-grown men would not have done, choosing to wait for the poisonous scourge to leave; yet he had done this all on his own.
By his fourteenth year, it was decided that his full height was upon him, and it was time for Decisions to be made…or forced upon him. Danny was taken on a three-day journey to the foothills of the Silver Gate Mountains. It was a place that people didn’t visit. Tales—the very oldest of tales told by the most ancient of the world’s elders—claimed that the silver door set in a gap at the base of the tallest peak was the fountain from which all mankind had sprung forth onto this world; that before this place, there had only been Terra; that now, only this world contained the sacred vassals of The Hastened; that people had long ago moved from somewhere else to this place, through that door.
It was to this Silver Gate that boys were sent when it was time for their Decisions. The elders said that when a young man came to the door, and fasted for two or more days with his back pressed to the door, that boy could hear the voices of Terra’s Elders whispering his future to him. If the boy listened and heeded them, he would know his calling and find his right place amongst the men of his village, town, or city.
Danny had spent a week in cleansing with the most ancient of the village elders, learning things that the old man thought might be helpful to Danny during his Decisions. Then he packed up his poke and his bedroll, and said goodbye to Sarah, his mother. She waited for him at the front door to their little homestead, her face all stony in determination not to cry or make upset noises. Danny tried to honor her attempt at stoicism and so he did not try to hug her or get too mushy. He was about to become a man now anyway, after all.
“Mother, I know that you feel some apprehension about my Decisions. It’s the first time that I’ve been gone for any period of time over a couple of hours, and I don’t intend to ever be further from you than the next village over for more than a day again. But—”
Sarah Jameson’s resolve melted as her baby-boy-turned-nearly-a-man spoke. She snatched him up in the greatest embrace that any boy ever received from any mother in the history of anywhere, and held him long, crying quietly into his shoulder. Then, after a minute or two, she let go, and without looking at Danny square again, firmly grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around, and swatted him on the butt one last time to send him on his way. She turned quickly, grabbing up the broom that sat at the doorsill, and entered the darkness of the inside of the house.
After three days of walking, and two nights of camping amongst the rolling hills along the road to the Silver Gate Range, the darkly forested peaks of the mountains had grown to fill one quarter of the eastern night sky. Their jagged edges were thrown up to sink into the stars, taking great bites out of parts of the sky that Danny had never known that he would miss until they were already missing.
“This is it, young Adkins,” said the voice of the youngest of the elders—Guillemin—the only one who was still able to travel this far. The middle-aged man held his hand out in the dusk and passed something into Danny’s hand. “There’s your key. Now before you ask, and so’s you don’t get confused, no one knows anything about the key except that those who are on their Decisions have always carried one. It don’t seem to do much ‘cept sit in your hand or pocket or wherever you decide to keep it. But we’ve always carried one on the Decisions, and so will you.”
Danny rolled the shape around between his fingers. It had a long, cylindrical rod attached to a flattened bit. The key was hard, but was not cold like metal. And its edges were worn, but not like wood; they had gone smooth like glass. Danny couldn’t identify the material that the key was made from and he looked forward to daylight so that he could examine the object further.
Old Guillemin stepped back a few paces, and then without another word he walked into the darkness and faded from view through the trees. Danny looked down at the thing that he held in his hand—the thing that he still could not see clearly—and started towards the foot of Silver Gate peak. The darkness cast by the outstretched arms of the mountains reached out and embraced Danny. As he moved up the steady incline towards the mountain, the air began to change from the sharp, dry air of the plains to sweet and damp mixed with a sharp tang of pine trees. His boots and the hems of his pants became soggy with the dew that had accrued in the grass that grew in clumps between the trees. The light of morning was beginning to build, but it was scattered by a low fog, and the shapes of trees and rocks that loomed through the mist lost their meaning and occasionally surprised him, as if he had suddenly spotted one stalking him through the haze.
The pitch of the path that he followed eventually became steeper, and he sometimes found himself scrabbling up the slope on all fours. Danny hunched low, hobbling under the sweeping fronds of a spruce tree. He flipped up his collar to keep the cold dew that was sloughing off the tree from running down the neck of his jacket, but it was really no use. He had forgotten his cap back at the house—something he had been kicking himself for since day two of the march—and his shaggy brown hair kept falling into his face and across his sharp brown eyes. He reached up once more with his left hand to sweep the hair out of his line of sight, and as he looked up he stopped dead. He had walked out from a stand of trees into a small opening, and from out of the fog emerged the depths of a giant crag in the mountainside. And wedged into that gaping maw of the massive peak, he could just see the gleam of silver—the Silver Gate.
Danny looked around, and now that he was looking for it, he saw the signs of generations of temporary habitation: smaller trees had been cut away for firewood or shelter, leaving their stumps here and there in the clearing. There were blackened spots on the ground where fires had been lit and inexpertly covered before their maker had left the site. Small, crushed-up piles of refuse, pine needle bedding, and animal bones lay in several spots—places where inconsiderate young men had not properly cared for a sacred place before moving on.
Danny went to check out the fissure and the Gate before gathering materials to make camp. He approached the craggy cleft in the wall of rock quietly, with the apprehension and reverence of someone approaching an ancient battlefield. The place had a solemnity to it that begged for Danny’s full attention. The Gate lay embedded in the granite as if eons of wind and rain and earthquakes had eroded and excavated the rock from around it, rather than that it had been built or carved into the rock. It looked as if it belonged there. Its height was not impressive, standing about one-and-one-half the height of a grown man, and just slightly less than the width of a man’s arms held out at the shoulders. However, the metal of the thing shone as if it had just been polished; there was not a hint of tarnish anywhere on the face of the structure. The Gate was designed in a pointed arch, like an arrowhead, with no handles, splits, or hinges anywhere to be seen.

BANKSY!!!

2008-10-10T07:35:00.002-04:00

BANKSY

My Newest Hero: Yves Rossy

2008-09-26T08:41:00.004-04:00

FLYING...

My informal philosophy of education

2008-07-20T10:38:00.002-04:00

Philosophy of Education

“In the art of living, man is both the artist and the object of his art;
he is the sculptor and the marble; the physician and the patient.”
-Erich Fromm

It is the job of high school teachers to help lead the child-student into the world of adulthood; a teacher introduces the student to the realities of existence (both good and bad) faced as a free adult. Of utmost importance is that the student gains a thorough education while being introduced to this adult world. This ensures that the student has been exposed to the tools that they might use to make the best of their abilities, and of their lives.
The general education that students receive in public school creates a false impression of the world being divided-up by subject when there are no such walls in the real world. Educators should impart to students the broadest knowledge of the field in which they teach, working to generate an acumen in the connection and consilience of topics that may not seem interrelated, and to integrate ideas that seem disparate using critical thought. In-class discussion (via Socratic methodology) is the best route to metacognition and understanding: with many minds there will be many divergences of thought, and that is what will lead students down the road of higher learning to a greater complexity of understanding.

Literature Review
A superior education is both broad and deep. It enables students to view the world in an objective, quantifiable way as well as with a subjective and philosophical eye. The late Dr. Philip Phenix, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Education at the Teachers College of Columbia University once summed up a superior education saying (1964):

A complete person should be skilled in the use of speech, symbol, and gesture, factually well informed, capable of creating and appreciating objects of esthetic significance, endowed with a rich and disciplined life in relation to self and others, able to make wise decisions and to judge between right and wrong, and possessed of an integral outlook. These are the aims of general education for the development of whole persons.

A person, having received the fullness of a superior education, works on a level independent of habit or whimsy. When a fully educated student obeys a rule, it is because they understand the source or reasons for that rule—not for the low reason of blind obedience. As the philosopher Fernando Savater (1996) said, “…an action [or inaction] is never good just because it obeys a rule, a custom, or an impulse.” A fully educated student will be in charge of their faculties and metacognition. They will be able to think through (if it is their will) any process they wish and will have the mental resources to draw upon to make choices after deep thought on a topic.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy
I believe that the biggest detriment in extending a superior education to students is reductionism (the way that we break knowledge into subjects), which results in losing the context of the material that is to be learned, and making that subject matter harder to put into a schema. While context-less, linear-style education may result in higher standardized testing, students may find it an uphill struggle to really grasp meanings within these “learned” materials. A complex and consilient schema—one that involves a lot of interrelation of multi-subject schemata—is required to identify what may be important in a text (or—more importantly—in life), and figure out all the different ways things may be connected. It is an impairment to your education to be of one mind about how the world is classified (be it scientific, creative, whatever… I’ve met people who can’t cross those lines—there are a lot of them). A spider web of knowledge is the goal of a complete and superior education. Giving different constructs (things, ideas, etc…) as much interrelated context as possible is the best way to achieve excellence in understanding.
I hope to guide students to a sufficiently complex understanding of the place that we inhabit (ourselves, the universe, our collective knowledge, however you want to see it) through the use of a subjective “art” (which is English education). I chose to teach English because of how subjective it can be, and also how much the study of English and the English language may depend upon conversation and critical thought. English is a very integrated sort of subject. For a thorough knowledge of how our language works—and to be able to thoroughly explore texts in English—a broad knowledge drawn from many areas of study may be required. The literature is nice, but is not what is of primary importance to me. What is important to me is that my students leave my classroom being able to see around cognitive corners.
To me, the final important aspect in dispersing a superior education is alerting students to the difference between a full life and a long life. The high school experience is temporary by nature, but many people never grasp the transient nature of time as a concept. Students may know that school will not last forever, but the school situation has taken up such a very large portion of their lives that it is very hard for them to contextualize time and change, in relation to themselves. Students get acclimated to the environment of school, making habit the activities and modes of thought that are important for survival within that environment. Sometimes these habits can be hard to break. Many of the ingrained habits are important in the real world in a general way, while in school those same habits may be imperative. However, many habits developed in school are useless or even counterproductive to life as an adult. A teacher should practice the students in thinking ethically, and with a metacognitive intent, so that the student may experience true freedom and shed habits, understand the logic of rules and laws (rather than follow them blindly), and act in appropriate, rational, and decisive ways when confronted with issues—either in school or the real world. I want students to experience the beginnings of their own personal philosophies; for a student to learn how to think philosophically and creatively about their place in sea of humanity. If I have done my job correctly, students leaving my class for the last time are more self-aware, and are ready to be productive and creative members of society—not because I trained them in a specific area of study—but because they have been given the education to know what they want to do with their time on this planet.

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

References
Hunt, Adam R. (2005). Adam Hunt’s philosophy of education.
Unpublished Manuscript, Marshall University, Huntington, WV.

Phenix, Philip (1915/2000). Realms of meaning. In George Willis, William H. Schubert, Tobert
V. Bullough, Jr., Craig Kriedel & John T. Holton (Eds.), The American curriculum: A documentary history (pp. 363-374). Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers.

Savater, Fernando. (1996) Amador: in which a father addresses his son
on questions of ethics-that is, the options and values of freedom-and attempts to show him how to have a good life. Owlet Publishers.

Reflecting upon my student teachig experience...

2008-07-20T10:23:00.002-04:00

April 16th, 2008

So here I am—nearly done with something that has permeated every aspect of my life for nearly five years. AND. Here I am, about to begin something that will permeate every aspect of my life until I die. Education: I love the fact that I can say that education is my career; that I can say so and at once be talking about being a teacher and a learner—for I have found that I learn so much more, so thoroughly, when I am teaching. There is nothing like trying to find the pertinent questions to ask your students, in any subject, to help you discover that subject to be interesting and worth your own attention and curiosity. This is how I have found myself to be a successful teacher. I can approach a perfectly boring sounding topic—say for instance adverbs—and ask, “What makes adverbs important?” If I think about what they actually do for our language…WOW! All of a sudden they seem so much more worthy of my attention. It’s so much easier to teach a topic if you care about it, and I find myself able to care about almost anything if I can find, and then ask, the appropriate questions.
Clearly, because of my focus on asking questions, I am a big fan of the Socratic Method. It doesn’t do any good to pose a provocative question and then immediately answer it, especially when the answers are so often subjective and debatable (which is great because then students argue, and when they argue, they care). But is conversation enough? Of course not! You can sit around and talk about mowing the lawn all day, but it doesn’t get it mowed—in fact, you might not even know how to start the mower. Practice is of utmost importance, and I tried so hard to—after getting my students to think hard about how they feel about a subject, using bell ringers; and after discussing their ideas—get them to practice what they believe to be the answer to the initial question. Give it a try! Take a swing at it! Practice makes—well not perfect. I’ve always told my students, as they were trying to hand me a “finished” draft with 15 minutes left in the period, that there’s no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. Keep practicing!
The greatest problems I have in class result from the teaching style I just described. I can sometimes get off topic, as can the students, because of all the talking. Also, the students enjoy talking and try to do it at the same time: volume levels rise, kids talk over each other, I try to talk over them. Sometimes it takes a minute for me to get the lesson back on track. That said, I wouldn’t stop teaching this way for the world.
My biggest insight into teaching during the course of this unit—besides the fact that I would love to have been able to extend the unit an extra week or two, at my own will—was that with students of middle school age, you need to be super specific. I thought they would love the freedom to interpret directions on small assignments…WRONG! They were confused, frustrated, and at a loss. I also realized that even though some of these students look like high school kids, their attitude is completely different. Most of them—even most of the “trouble makers”—were still out to please any adult who would treat them reasonably. Not so with high school students. They are more self contained and less eager to make nice with a teacher to insinuate themselves into the teacher’s good graces. Middle-schoolers are still overtly looking for guidance and approval.
All-in-all, I feel that my student teaching goals were met across the board, with one exception: I still am not sure whether I want to teach middle school or high school. They both have their pros and cons, and I think I could love teaching either. At the moment, I’m leaning towards high school, but I’m placed at Huntington High right now (which I think is a fantastic school—I don’t care what so many people have said), but when I was at Barboursville Middle School, I was leaning towards middle school. This is a good quandary to be caught-up in because who knows where I’ll be hired? Now I know I can be happy with either age group, and that’s a good thing.

July 20th, 2008
As an adendum to this entry, Angie and I have each been offered jobs at Wayne Middle School, and Cabell Midland High School. We're going to accept the ones at CMHS, because of pay and convenience of location. Wayne Middle is "Out Wayne" as most West Virginians call it. You can probably draw onclusions of your own as to what hat means, but it's not as bad as you'd think. CMHS is a fair-sized high school; it's about half the size of the high school I graduated from, back in Nebraska. The principal seems very supportive, and seems more interested in the wellfare of the students than the teachers (which I think is the right way to align an educatioal institution). We're excited!

Moving on...

2008-07-08T19:24:00.002-04:00

Okay, so a month after returning from my family vacation and attempting to keep a joke of a travel blog, I'm going to admit defeat and get on with my life. The guilt over my disinterest in blog-continuing something I blog-started has kept me away for too long. In the last three weeks, I have had friends from Nebraska visit (Gunter, Becca, and other Becca), and friends from Georgia (Russell and Rebecca)--leading me to the conclusion that I know too many "Becca's". I have also held positions at Autism Services, here in Huntington (WV), and at DirtBusters, Inc. The first job was rewarding, but the hours were a no-go. I really enjoyed both the clients and the staff at Autism Services. DirtBusters is just janitorial work at commercial and industrial locations; it's mindless and easy, and the hours allow me to see my kids.

THE BIGGEST NEWS:
Angie and I have secured jobs at Wayne Middle School as full-time Language Arts teachers!!! WOOT!!! I was beginning to acquiesce to the idea that we would be working substitute jobs for awhile, so a real position is a welcome surprise. Next stop--paying taxes for the first time ever (yeah, that's how poor I've been).

I'm going to keep working for another month, and then I'll begin studying up and writing my lesson plans. YAY!!

Nebraska's Sandhills and Carhenge

2008-06-03T09:24:00.008-04:00

So, I've clearly failed in keeping up with my vacation blog. I kept putting it off, and putting it off. There was always something else that I HAD to do. I'll use my three kids as the excuse for that lack of action on the blogfront.

After leaving Lincoln, we drove west across Nebraska--my home state. We left I-80 in Grand Island and cut north, heading in the direction of the Sand Hills, which is incidentally the largest dune field in North America--granted they are almost completely grown-over with grass now. That's not to say that there's no free flowing sand though. At one point, my oldest son (William) decided that he had to have a PB&J "right now" because he was "starving to death." I pulled over on the side of the road and cracked the door to promptly have it ripped out of my hand by the wind, a wind which proceeded to suck any loose item it could grab hold of right out into the road and away. I'm guessing the wind must have been a steady 40-45 mph, which was cool when we were driving, because with the wind at our backs, we were getting about 28-29 mpg out of our minivan--a great thing nowdays. Anyway, as well as the detritus that it snagged out of my car (only a few pieces of which I managed to catch--most was gone before I knew it had escaped), the wind carried A LOT of sand. I worked my way around to the back, got into the cooler, made William a relatively sand-free sandwich, got his sliding door shut, circled back around the van, and had the glasses whipped right off my face and into the road. I played chicken with a semi to get them back a they continued to skitter across the two-lane roadway. Well, not really. The semi was a long way off, but the way those glasses were moving, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get there in time. By the time I got back into the car, I was becoming aware of the fact that my skin was raw and extremely itchy from the sandblasting it had received. My skin repaired pretty fast because I grew up in dry and windy climates, which means I have pretty greasy skin, and it was an adventure. My wife wasn't so enamoured of the landscape though. About the same time as we left the Sand Hills, we reached Alliance, Nebraska.

Angie wanted to stop and see Carhenge, famous for its post-apocalyptic sense of fun and artistry, as well as for being the only thing to stop in Alliance to see. Luckily, it's only about 3 miles off the most direct route between I-80 and the Black Hills of South Dakota--our final destination. You should go see it if you ever come this way; it's free, it breaks the tedium of the remarkably flat hour between the Sand Hills and Nebraska's Pine Ridge, and its story is nice too. The henge is a monument built by an out-of-town sculptor for his father. It's weird, but more people go to see this commemoration of a West-Nebraskan farmer than go to most gravemarkers. Besides the automotive recreation of the U.K.'s Stonehenge, there are a few other whimsical pieces of car-art on the property--some better than others, but all are just odd enough to be worth stopping for. It was a nice side trek, and the kids seemed to have a great time, running in circles around half-buried vehicles and enjoying the novelty of the thing.

PS-So sorry about some of the confusing syntax in this entry. I am rushing through writing the entry so I can apply for some jobs, go to an interview, do some grocery shopping, and clean the house before going to get the boys from school.

#3 (Gin)

2008-05-19T09:57:00.004-04:00

Well, Lincoln was fun. I got to meet my new neice, Em. She's a pretty, tiny little thing.
We had a little backyard get together with my dad's side of the family and I tried a few things that I hadn't tasted before, which is sort of a compulsion for me. Whenever I see a food item I haven't seen before, I HAVE to try it. A good past example of this is the horrid, but interesting Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Soda--just disgusting. You should totally try it. At this particular party, I decided to try gin. I'm not a drinker, and I didn't try gin the way a lot of recent graduates might have. My dad had some Bombay Sapphire, which they were mixing with tonic and lime. Being the cook that I am, I like to taste my ingredients separately before mixing them with other things; I like to understand the components of my creations. So... like I said, I'm not a drinker. I didn't know what gin was, or how it is made. I poured a very small amount in the bottom of a glass and smelled it: very strong pine, a lot of alcohol, a slightly oily skin to the smell... I took a very small amount into my mouth. It was like sipping on a cedar chest--a cedar chest soaked in alcohol. Nasty, but interesting. Already knowing what lime and tonic tasted like, I added generous amounts of each to the gin, which resulted in an excellent example of how different ingredients blended together can result in an entirely better whole. I'm still not a drinker, but it was a new and pleasantly interesting experience.

We're leavign the Black Hills of South Dakota today. I'll catch up on the blog soon.

#2

2008-05-18T23:01:00.003-04:00

May 14, 2008

We woke up at about 6:45 a.m. and talked about how we wanted the day to proceed. The hotel we stayed at was supposed to have a pretty solid breakfast setting, so after showers and whatnot we made our way to the foyer for a tummy fill-up. Angie decided to spend that time in the exercise room, opting to eat a light breakfast while I was packing up the room and getting the boys ready to go. Anyway, we went out to the front and found the breakfast area filled with an eclectic group of people—equal parts motorcyclists, retirees, and Mennonites. I wish that I could have taken photographs without causing consternation amongst one or another of the breakfast cliques.

While the boys and I ate, Angie went to the exercise room, only to find it being used for storage. She had to move several boxes of this-and-that’s, then had to plug in the treadmill and the TV. After that, I packed up the van while Angie took her post running shower. Then, it was time for the obligatory pictures in the giant chair, and we were off again.

We arrived in Lincoln (Nebraska) at about 3:30 p.m. (Central), and have been sleeping ever since.

Post Graduation Travel Blog: Entry #1

2008-05-18T22:48:00.000-04:00

May 13, 2008

Well, we left on our semi-annual trip to Nebraska this morning around 10 a.m. We dread this trip every time because of the long trek across the Midwest with the kids in tow. (For those of you who are new readers, I am the father of three kids—ages 4 years, 2 years, and 7 months. It’s a long drive.)
Usually we leave at 3 or 4 a.m. in order to get a significant portion of the trip behind us by the time they wake up and start getting restless. We had to stick around for the West Virginia primary today (you may have seen something about it on TV).

**side note: the vote was it’s own private fiasco for us since we forgot to change our party affiliation—a move which would have enabled us to vote for the person we would have preferred—so it was kind of a waste anyway, except for a vote in the local school board election that only a resident of our area could care about.)**

The big event of the day occurred when the baby was locked in the van at a gas station today while Angie was gassing the van up and the boys and I were in the bathroom. The van isn’t supposed to be able to lock with the FOB (that remote unlocky thing the keys are attached to on newer vehicles) in it, but we’ve had random, poltergeist-like electrical issues with our van, and apparently it locked when I closed the door after getting the boys out. The situation came to our notice after I brought the boys back out of the station. The whole town came to the rescue, with a total of three clothes hangers being rushed from all such characters as the John Deere tractor retailer, the station attendant’s daughter, and a ten year old boy. The local auto dealership arrived first though, and jacked its way into the car quickly and efficiently, and without any thought for compensation. I wish I remembered the name of that tiny Illinois town, but my anxiety at the time wiped the name from memory. I think it had a flower name like Poppy, or Pansy… I don’t have my map on me, and I’m writing this without aid of the internet. Hmmm…
We ended up getting as far as New Florence, Missouri today at the Day’s Inn, which under normal circumstances would have been just your average I-70 stop, but the nice little lady who owns the place has made it into something special. It’s this fun little faux log cabin set up with a matching pizza place next-door called “The Cabin”. It was sort of like being at home (because we live in a cabin), and the prices were okay…well, that’s not completely true. It was around $65 when I checked at the desk, which was a little high for us, so I went out to deliver the bad news to Angie and move on to the next place. We started to drive away and Angie got a little wishy-washy about whether she wanted to leave or not. I’m a spend-a-holic, and when she gave a little, a turned that car around without any druthers as to whether the price was too high or not. The owner said that since we had come back, she would give us the coupon price, which was $56. WHOOO-HOO! It’s still more than I would have wanted to spend except that Benji (my 7 month old) was shrieking. Laying around all day messes up a baby’s digestive system, and he was getting uncomfortable. We went and got some pizza next door (which was really good, btw), and we are now relaxing before the final leg to Lincoln, Nebraska.

As an addendum to this entry, I should point out that this trip isn’t our normal trip to Nebraska. My family was just in West Virginia a few days ago for our tandem graduations and we don’t feel like we necessarily needed to drive almost 1,000 miles for the annual trip. However, my brother and his wife just had a baby about two months ago, and we’d like to visit the new kid; it’s going to be a pit stop on a longer journey. We’re going to the Black Hills of South Dakota (where Mt. Rushmore is), and maybe on to Yellowstone and the Tetons (we’ll see). I thought this might make good blog material—we’ll see…

The End of Student Teaching; Mohawks and Educators; Cage Fighting for Careers

2008-04-29T09:36:00.009-04:00

Back to school a day late today. My two-year-old, Ethan (who you can see on the left, there) was sick yesterday. He had a temperature of 102F, but I think it was nothing serious; he's just got his two year molars coming in, and the weather has been flip-flopping a lot. Our whole family gets headaches with barometric change, and we were all down yesterday. No fun.
My time student teaching is nearly done, and I am both excited and a little scared about the end my undergraduate education. I've especially enjoyed my time here at Huntington High, and would love to get a job here. The department is friendly, and the students here are always interesting. I had been warned that this school was not a place I wanted to be--mostly, they said, because of all of the kids from the projects who go to HHS. I have found HHS to be a reallyy fun school to teach in. I'm also starting to think that people's problems are less with the personality types and activities that can sometimes correlate with the projects, and that these attitudes towards HHS have more to do with latent racism in the local population. The other schools that I taught at had more-or-less the same SES (socio-economic standard) rates as HHS, but the racial and ethnic makeup was 99% white at the other school, while HHS is only 84% white (a big difference in my part of the country). I base this on the fact that the teaching staff here shows (on average) much more interest in the student than other schools. The test scores show the result of this care, being generally higher than the statewide average. I think this speaks loudly when you consider that 25% of households in HHS' area make less than $15,000/year, and 47% make less than $30,000/year. Low SES households traditionally produce students who are less academically motivated, so a better test result in this school is reflecting that something excellent is occurring here, and it's my opinion that this excellence is attributable--at least in part--to the excellent teaching staff.

When my supervising teacher saw me looking at my Flickr photos, and discovered that I keep a mohawk whenever I'm not professionally bound to a conservative curb appeal , her face lit up like a bottle rocket and she pronounced, "Ooooh! You would just love a job here! This is where you should teach." I reflected that though she thought the mohawk was cool, I didn't think the administration would smile on it the way that she had. She told me that she thought that the mohawked-me image was a great way to deliver English as an important curriculum to the school's impressionable youth.

I said I'd cage fight for the next job I saw, then. I think that I could take most of the more tenured folks who would be applying for the same job. If they give me any trouble, I can always break out the old light saber.
I'm yammering. To sum up: I'm excited to teach, I'm afraid I won't be able to get a job. Welcome to life. Right?
I graduate on May 10th.

Arnold, Calvin and Hobbes

2008-04-22T14:46:00.003-04:00

Leave it to me to slap together a comic strip and a Victorian-era poem.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

-Matthew Arnold ("Dover Beach, 1867)

A better opening blog than the first...

2008-04-22T08:02:00.006-04:00

As a newborn babe
you opened your eyes and saw
The Inscrutable

__________________________________________________________

Then, as you grow up
you begin to gather up
All That Is, in concert

______________________________________________________

And then blow the winds

Ethanol and Starvation

2008-04-21T10:00:00.008-04:00

This is probably the worst topic ever for an opening blog. I know I'm supposed to introduce myself, and try to pull you in--make you want to read again in the future, and I promise that I'll get to that at some point. Oddly enough, future entries will probably have more to do with my life as a teacher and a father than anything else. I hope that this entry won't put you off. I just need to get some of this off my chest. That said--this topic (start by reading the Calvin and Hobbes comic) is something I've been thinking about for a long time. For about five years now, I've been lecturing anyone who would listen about the stupidity of using corn ethanol as a replacement for gasoline. (To clarify, I have no problem with ethanol from switch grass.) It is not energy efficient--taking more petroleum product to manufacture than just using gasoline. The reason for this lays almost entirely in how much energy is required to free nitrogen (in the form of nitrates) to be used on corn as a fertilizer. Nitrogen fixes very firmly to other structures, and we use extreme heat to free it--heat deriving from the burning of fossil fuels.
Exacerbating an energy issue in order to sell more corn--at steeper prices--seems wasteful in a multiplicity of ways:

We're fighting wars over energy--some overt, some covert. I'm not sure I even specifically have a problem with the idea of countries fighting over resources. It's got a historical precedent, and I don't think there's really any way to stop it. However, if they don't have to occur right now, let's just not.

People worldwide had become dependent on U.S. corn as a source of food. I should mention right here that I am a card-carrying Libertarian, which implies that I am also a "social-Darwinist" (which is actually true to some extent), but allowing people to starve is a whole different matter. How important is a twenty-two gallon gas tank? Well, on average, it takes as much corn (turned to ethanol) to fill a twenty-two gallon gas tank as it would take to feed one person for an entire year. That's pretty messed up.

The whole situation is politics driven. I live in West Virginia now, but I was born and raised in Nebraska: "The Cornhusker State". Elected officials from Nebraska (and other corn-based, agriculturally-driven states) have a lot of power in the Senate and the House of Representatives. They face heavy pressure from their voting constituency to take up political "arms" in favor of policy that favors their agriculture economies. Despite that the science doesn't back corn ethanol's claims of energy conservation, and lower greenhouse gases (I'll talk about this in a minute), legislators face a lot of pressure to serve up corn ethanol as a great replacement for petroleum to the rest of the country. They have to do this in exchange for votes, come election season. Result: Legislators will do nothing about corn-based ethanol concerns until pressure from the people dictates their actions to do so.

My final complaint is that ethanol in general is supposed to emit fewer greenhouse gases. If it claimed fewer toxic emissions, that would be fine; there's very little emitted, other than water vapor. Unfortunately--and this often goes unrecognized--water vapor is probably THE #1 GREENHOUSE GAS. It traps energy from the sun like almost nothing else.

Okay, I'm done for now. Just a few links to help you along... I tried to pick a few from sources that don't have any particular interest in the debate other than editorial or scientific concern.

Random links for yer edumicatin':

Science News (2 years ago): Demand for Ethanol May Drive Up Food Prices

Reuters (2/2008): Bloomberg slams US energy law over corn ethanol

San Fransisco Chronicle (2005): UC scientist says ethanol uses more energy than it makes: A lot of fossil fuels go into producing the gas substitute