Hitting the Reset Button

Playing a little bit with the time space continuum, AKA the timestamp, on this post. I’ve talked about my natural nocturnalism before, and it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t work well with a schedule where you need to be out of the house by 7 AM. Last week I would get home, take a nap in the evening, then get up to watch convention speeches and blog, then try to take another nap in the early AM hours before getting up again for work. I have definitely concluded that that is not a schedule conducive to my long term sanity. I think I could probably make a 9 PM to 3 or 4 AM schedule work and fool myself into thinking I’m doing a night owl shift, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to function missing the prime time hours so often.

You’d think that by this point of my life my body would have adapted to this sun thing you normal people are so fond of, but so far, no such luck.

OK, back to tweaking my lesson plan for Harrison Bergeron and egalitarianism. Catch ya tomorrow.

Family Time

Celebrated my niece’s second birthday today, which was nice. My mom gave me an office chair that she found uncomfortable and which seems like a vast improvement over the last one I was using, but we’ll see how it holds up over the next few days.

I also gave my brother back is copy of Batman #430. It’s cover-dated February 1989. It’s the first Batman comic published after “A Death in the Family,” the famous story that killed the second Robin as a result of a 1-900 number reader poll. (Am I the only one who remembers news stories about Robin’s death like they were last month?) It was also the comic he bought when he started collecting comics, and he started a month or so before I did. So it’s the beginning of a hobby and a collection that’s been part of our family for two decades. Since he decided not to collect Batman as a regular title and I did, he traded it to me somewhere along the line. He was younger than my daughter is now when he bought it. Now he has a daughter of his own. The cover has a couple of folds and wrinkles. The pages are a little yellow. The story’s been written out of continuity by at least a couple of universe-changing events DC Comics has published in the last 20 years. But in spite of that – maybe because of that – he wanted it back, and I was happy to give it to him.

He’s promised to give me another copy, which is certainly a fair trade. To be honest, I’m just glad he gave me a reason to pull it out of its longbox and relive the memories.

Reading Choices

It’s amazing to me how much I can read thanks to the Internet. When I was a kid, I’d get one newspaper a day and maybe a newsmagazine or two each week. Now I’m practically inundated with online magazines, the blogs connected to those magazines, blogs by experts in fields like political science and education. Now that it’s election season I can totally get lost in it. And now I’m thinking about buying a Kindle. I can’t keep up with the information I already have and I’m trying to get more.

And I spend so much time dashing from site to site that I don’t know if I’m actually processing the information or finding ways to add to it. I’ll worry about that another time. Right now, I’m just gonna enjoy living in the future.

Brain Still Fried

First day of class today, and my brain is friend. Whoever had the bright idea to move political conventions to September was no friend to political junkie teachers, I’ll tell you that. Been pulling thoughts together and hoping to say more this weekend. I was reading a New York magazine piece comparing Clinton’s and Obama’s speeches, and got to this line: “Had [Romney and Ryan] not elevated Clinton in the first place, putting him in ads, using him as an example of the kind of “good Democrat” that Obama definitively is not, 42’s repudiations of the claims and his validation of 44 might have less purchase.” It’s not the first time I’ve seen that notion that the Republicans have elevated Bill Clinton’s profile in the effort to take Obama down a peg.

I will freely admit that’s not a universe I ever expected to live in, where Republicans attacked a Democrat for not being enough like Bill Clinton. I think the 1990s are rolling over in their grave right now.

Speech Overload

Between Bill Clinton turning “Arithmetic!” into an applause line, John Kerry using Rocky IV to slam Mitt Romney, and Joe Biden’s irrepressible Joe Bidenness, I won’t have the brainpower to fully process the speeches from the Democratic Convention until the weekend. But here’s my favorite part of President Obama’s speech:

So you see, the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you. My fellow citizens – you were the change.

You’re the reason there’s a little girl with a heart disorder in Phoenix who’ll get the surgery she needs because an insurance company can’t limit her coverage. You did that.

You’re the reason a young man in Colorado who never thought he’d be able to afford his dream of earning a medical degree is about to get that chance. You made that possible.

You’re the reason a young immigrant who grew up here and went to school here and pledged allegiance to our flag will no longer be deported from the only country she’s ever called home; why selfless soldiers won’t be kicked out of the military because of who they are or who they love; why thousands of families have finally been able to say to the loved ones who served us so bravely: “Welcome home.”

If you turn away now – if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible…well, change will not happen. If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void: lobbyists and special interests; the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are making it harder for you to vote; Washington politicians who want to decide who you can marry, or control health care choices that women should make for themselves.

Democracy is not about constitutions and institutions. It’s not about politicians and parliamentarians. It’s about citizens, taking responsibility not only for themselves but for their society. We don’t just live in our nation. We don’t just serve our nation. We don’t just preserve our nation. We build our nation. Always, every day, in moments small and large, we build it. We build it together. Let’s strive to build it with wisdom, with compassion, and with determination.

Can’t Get Into the Game

I am sure that mine is not the only household where this is true, but it certainly defies stereotypes. My wife is far, far more interested in the start of the NFL season than I am. I was already feeling iffy about the sport giving its reliance on violence and the possible effect on players’ brains, but throw in the fact that the NFL has locked out its referees and I just can’t bring myself to care. I’m willing to at least listen to the conversation when a struggling business says it has to reduce costs to stay competitive, but the NFL is such a money-printing machine that I have no sympathy when it tries to avoid sharing that wealth with the people who actually make the games happen. (And yeah, no one watches the game for the refs. But who’d watch a sport where anything goes or where the players were expected to call their own penalties?)

Meanwhile the NHL is getting ready to lock its players out as well. Never mind that the sport already has a hard salary cap and that the last contract negotiation involved big salary rollbacks. The way TV networks are throwing insane money at live sports programming these days, I can’t really buy into the league’s claims of poverty.

I don’t even want to talk about the hypocrisy of college sports. But you can go read Michael McCann discuss Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against the NCAA.

I dunno. I used to be able to overlook the rooting-for-laundry aspect of sports fandom because these business, for all their mercenary nature, were supported by and helped to sustain a kind of civic identity. But if I don’t like the organization and what it does, should I want it to represent me? Should I tie myself to it just because of its location?

If you were to suggest that I’m going through this in part because I’m a Pennsylvanian whose state university and its athletic program are currently undergoing a major identity crisis, well, I don’t think I could argue with you. But I think there’s a deeper issue that recent events (and not-quite-so-recent-events like the Eagles signing Mike Vick) have forced me to think about, and that make it harder to be entertained by the games.

On the upside, it’ll probably improve my productivity if I have my Sundays free.

Circles Complete

I started my first year as a full-time high school teacher in 2009, 20 years after I started my first year as a high school student. So I guess this is the year I’m supposed to graduate. Not that I expect to go anywhere, but it is a year that I expect to make some major progress in getting better as a teacher. I’m going into this year looking to break away from the structure and format of a textbook-driven curriculum, to meet with my students where their knowledge and interests are and build a better understanding of our world. I didn’t always hit the goals I set last year, but I learned a lot of things and I’m ready to do it again.

As I’m typing this I’m having a conversation with my high school newspaper adviser on Facebook. I’m reminded yet again that I wouldn’t be who I am without my teachers, and that their effect on me continues long after I have left their classrooms. I’ve been lucky enough to continue to talk to some of them and express my gratitude. Others I have lost contact with because of time, distance, retirements, and (sadly) death. But I’m thankful for what they did, and I’m determined to honor what they gave to me by giving all I can to my school community.

For all of the hassle, the paperwork, the frustration, the disrespect, and everything else that drives me mad about education in America today, it’s an honor to be part of that community. Let the circle begin again.

Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid of a Blog (Post)

I’m falling asleep at my desk and I’ve been sitting here for an hour trying to come up with something to say.

Saw Dark Knight Rises today but I still haven’t unpacked what I think of it, except that I prefer Inception.

I’m thinking about writing some posts this week that will link back and refer to older posts. WordPress automatically puts Trackback comments from the oldr post to the new one. In the past I’ve found these annoying and deleted them. But now I’m thinking it might be wise to keep them. If someone stumbles upon something I wrote in 2004, that person might find it useful to see if I’ve updated or revised my thinking at all.

Summer’s just about over. Time to go get some rest, and then make one last push to clean off this desk. 🙂

Nobody Knows Anything

Fifteen years ago I was working at a PR firm. In the summer of ’97, Steve Jobs had recently returned to Apple and the big news was that Microsoft had agreed to invest $150 million in Apple to help keep the company stable. I remember looking at the front page of a newspaper that had a picture of this moment on it:

Photo Credit: Jim Bourg/Reuters via NYTimes.com - Steve Jobs & Bill Gates, Macworld 97

I said something to my boss like, “Well, that certainly sums things up,” because at that it looked for all the world like Microsoft had dwarfed Apple.

I think of that picture a lot these days, most recently when I saw Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo mention that for the first time in his site’s history, more than half of the visitors were using something other than a Microsoft operating system.

The odds that the future we envision will resemble the actual future on more than a handful of points is so very, very small. Some things we just can’t prepare for, and it seems like half the time we look back and say “We shoulda seen that coming.”

Look at the table of contents for the issue of TIME Magazine that discussed that Apple/Microsoft deal. Welfare-to-work programs as a new development. Hey, what’s up with the crazy El Nino weather? How does Wall Street feel about lower capital gains taxes? It seems familiar and alien at the same time.

And as I’m typing that, I’m trying to figure out how to get copies of 5-year-old magazines so my students can experience the first draft of recent history, but that’s not where I was going with this . . . but I’m gonna have to come back to that.

My central point at the moment is, we put a lot of effort into understanding the world, and that’s a good thing. But if anyone says they know for sure how it’s all going to turn out, just show ’em that picture of Bill and Steve.