I worry about the future for different reasons than most people’s reasons.  I worry about the future because present generations aren’t learning about the past.

Seriously.  Our students don’t seem to have anything to make connections to, these days.  They believe ridiculous things on Facebook updates.  They don’t associate Lincoln with the Civil War.  They think the Disney versions of fairy tales are the original versions.  They don’t know that the Little Mermaid died.  They don’t know any nursery rhymes.  They can’t finish a line of poetry.  They don’t know why Paul Revere rode through the streets.  They don’t understand the difference between a comparison and a contrast.  They are uncertain about antonyms and synonyms.  Most of them have never used a thesaurus.  Some of them have never heard of a thesaurus, and when they hear the word, they think it’s a dinosaur.  Most students think a dictionary is good only for a definition, and if they don’t know how to spell a word, they can’t find it.

I worry about a future wherein the so-called “educated” population has nothing filed away in their heads, but rely on Google to find out the simplest things.  I worry about a future that has me picturing, in my head, surgeons googling the whereabouts of the spleen with the patient on the table.  Already, we have a population that doesn’t know how to do math without a calculator.

TV shows make stupid people seem like the norm, and ignorance seem like the ideal.  Our schools are emphasizing conformity and punishing creativity.  Physical ability is trophied even while much of the population’s physical ability is atrophied.  Academic success is pretty much ignored lest some kid’s self-esteem suffer because he/she can’t do “it” as well.

Excellent work that, a generation ago, would have been put up on the wall so all could see and benefit and honor it, is now hastily shunted away because not everybody can do that well.  Kids who can’t do that well now no longer have examples of what things could be like if they worked harder, etc.  Bright, fast kids are advised to slow down, and ignorant teachers “reward” them by giving them more of the same or, even worse, relegating them to the hallway where they spend the day tutoring slow kids.

I worry about the future because people know nothing about the past these days.  I worry about the future because people are spending the present letting other people think for them.

What kind of future is in store for our children if they are not taught about the past, and encouraged to do things more than one way, and encouraged to apply and connect this with that, and that with the other?

Education is about connections.  If our students have nothing in their heads, lives, or experiences, what sense can they make about anything?  How can things be relevant if there is no relativity?

I’ve had students who couldn’t follow the directions on a box of brownie mix.  Oh, they could read the directions, but they weren’t sure about teaspoons, tablespoons, and measuring cups.  Imagine.

Speaking of “imagine,”  I’ve had students who had a hard time imagining anything because imagination requires connections, too.  Image-ing is possible only with prior knowledge – schema.  How can we create the “magic” part of “i-mage-ing” unless we know as much as possible about as many things as possible?

The more schema we can bring to the table, the more connections we’re able to make.  The more connections we make, the more we can understand.  The more we understand, the more we learn.  The more we learn, the more we know.  The more we know, the better able we are to cope and improve the universe.  Not to even mention those  sofa Jeopardy wins.

As for those teachers who advocate “no memorizing, no studying, no homework, no proving knowledge or mastery, and almost total dependence on electronics,” I have only this to say.

Bullshit.  You’re all full of bullshit.

And this from Mamacita, who advocates tech so thoroughly and enthusiastically that my students who don’t use the social networking that they were told to use are left out of the announcement loop altogether.

P.S.  Dear Students:  Midterms are this week.  If you skived off class and didn’t check Twitter, Facebook, Google +, or email, you’ve got a big surprise coming.

And if you aren’t able to make connections, it won’t do you much good to show up, anyway.

Mamacita says:  I’m guessing that many most bloggers will be posting tributes this weekend, and telling the blogosphere ‘where we were’ when the planes hit the World Trade Center. Here is mine. This is actually the second third fourth fifth sixth seventh time I’ve posted this on 9/11, so if it seems familiar, you’re not crazy. Well, not on this issue, anyway.

==

The morning began like any other; we stood for the Pledge of Allegiance, and sat back down to watch Channel One News, which had been taped at 3:00 that morning in the school library, thanks to the timer. But Channel One News didn’t come on.

Instead, the secretary’s voice, over the intercom, told the teachers to “please check your email immediately.” We did. And we found out what had happened.

I scrolled down the monitor and read the end of the message. The superintendent had ordered all teachers to be absolutely mum all day about the tragedy. We were not to answer any questions from students, and we were especially not to offer any information to them.

The day went by in a blur. Many parents drove to the school, took their kids out, and brought them home. Between classes, frightened groups of students gathered in front of their lockers and whispered, gossiped, and cried, and begged us for information. By that time, the superintendent’s order had been seconded by the principals, and we were unable to give these terrified kids any information. In the computer labs, the MSN screens told the 8th graders the truth, but they, too, were instructed NOT to talk about it to the other students. Right, like THAT happened. The story was being repeated by 8th graders, and it was being told bloody-killing-deathtrap-you’re next-video-game-style.

At noon, many of the students were picked up by parents and taken home or out for lunch. Those few who returned had a big tale to tell. The problem was, the tale was being told by children, and few if any of the facts were straight. The tale was being told scary-style, and the atmosphere in the building got more and more strained. We are only a few miles away from an immensely large Navy base, where ammunition and bombs are made, and we’ve always known it was a prime target, which means, of course, that we are, too. Many of my children’s parents worked there. The base was locked down and those parents did not come home that night.

Reasonable questions were answered with silence, or the statement: “You’ll find out when you get home.”

This, added to all the rumors and gossip spread by children, turned my little sixth graders into terrified toddlers.

As teachers, we were furious and disgusted with the superintendent’s edict. We wanted to call all the students into the gym and calmly tell them the truth in words and ways that would be age-appropriate. We wanted to hug them and assure them that it was far away and they were safe. We asked for permission to do this, and it was denied. Our orders were ‘silence.’ We hadn’t been allowed to hug them for years, of course, but there are times and places when hugs ARE appropriate. No matter, the superintendent stood firm: no information whatsoever.

The day went by, more slowly than ever a day before. The students grew more and more pale and frightened. We asked again, and again he stood firm that no information whatsoever was to be given out.

By the end of the day, the children were as brittle as Jolly Rancher Watermelon Sticks.

A few minutes before the bell rang to send them home, a little girl raised her hand and in a trembling voice that I will never forget, asked me a question. “Please, is it true that our parents are dead and our houses are burned down?”

That was it. I gathered my students close and in a calm voice explained to them exactly what had happened. I told them their parents were alive and safe, and that they all still had homes to go to.

The relief was incredible. I could feel it cascading all through the room.

I was, of course, written up for insubordination the next day, but I didn’t care. My phone had rung off the hook that night with parents thanking me for being honest with their children. That was far more important than a piece of paper that said I’d defied a stupid inappropriate order meted out by a man who belonged in the office of a used car lot, not in a position of power over children’s lives.

The next day at school, in my room, we listened to some of the music that had been ‘specially made about the tragedy. I still have those cd’s and I’ve shared them with many people over the past few years.  It is true that kids cried again, but it was good to cry. It was an appropriate time to cry. We didn’t do spelling or grammar that day. There are times when the “business as usual” mindset simply is not appropriate.

I wish administrators would realize that kids are a lot tougher than we might think. Kids are also a lot more sensitive that we might realize. It’s an odd combination, and we as educators must try our best to bring the two ends of the emotional spectrum together and help these kids learn to deal with horrible happenings and still manage to get through the day as well as possible.

Ignoring an issue will not help. Morbidly focusing on an issue will not help. Our children are not stupid, and to treat them as such is not something that builds trust. Our children deserve answers to their questions.

How can we expect our children to learn to find a happy medium if we don’t show them ourselves, when opportunities arise?

September 11, 2001 – September 11, 2011. God bless us, every one.

The students who don’t seem to do as well at this level are those fresh out of high school. Not all of them, of course, but of those who have and give the most problems, most are right out of high school.

This semester, every student who has asked for special privileges or exceptions, or who has excessive unexcused absences, or who has behaved poorly or inappropriately in any way, or who has plagiarized, or who has expected paper and pens handed out like Halloween candy, has been a younger student, a year or less out of high school.

I wonder sometimes if it would be better for us as a society to require at least a year of full-time employment before a student is allowed to go on to college. Would it help these young people develop a sense of pride in workmanship, in rules, in discipline, in a paycheck? If even one student learned – and probably the hard way – that a sense of entitlement and a fierce, protective mommy are actually detrimental to the personal advancement and growth of an adult student/citizen/worker, it would be worth it.

A year of full-time employment might also help a student to decide if college is really the route he/she should follow. Hopefully, it would be, but maybe not right away.

Then again, for many students, a year in a factory, or in construction, or on a farm, or in retail or foods, might well be the deciding factor in a kid’s decision to go back to school and get the kind of education that would mean never having to do such work again.

Before all non-athletic field trips were prohibited here, our high school used to take all the juniors to the local General Motors plant. Back then, probably half of the kids would end up working there in a few years anyway, and of the remaining students, some recoiled in horror at the very thought (after seeing vats of molten metal and hearing the ’scared straight’ anecdotes of the workers) and applied themselves anew to preparing for college, while others listened, fascinated, and changed their track to a Rose Hulman/Purdue engineering mode.

But oh well, no more field trips except for the athletes. Those buses were needed to transport the teams a hundred miles to a game, anyway, which is of course more important than some life-changing field trip that might help a student make a decision that would put his life on a career track. Go, team, go.

One of the problems is, most of the big factories, those places where the non-college people were pretty much guaranteed a good job with benefits, are gone now, farmed out to other countries, outsourced, so the Mothership can pay the workers less and therefore make more money for themselves. But who do they think is going to buy all those cheaply-made cars and other merchandise? Their laid-off workers? This is not a very good way to promote brand loyalty, or any other kind of loyalty. People who have no job are not in the market to buy very many things, hello, CEO dimwads.

My student population is motivated in many different ways. It’s not like a high school classroom, where the goal is (sadly) to make a high score on a standardized test. That’s no motivation for a student. Or for anybody else except big government and clueless administration. No, my students’ motivations are important, and life-changing. If they had been allowed to tour the General Motors plant, some of the decisions they are making might have been made earlier, but that’s a moot point. My students are back in school and they want very much to do well. Most of them are. A few of them aren’t, but I haven’t given up hope yet. School takes some getting used to. As their instructor, I don’t have to worry about prepping my students to do well on one big stupid poorly-written standardized test. I just have to worry about helping them find success, and NOT the kind where I diddle about with the statistics so students who are doing poorly will think they’re doing well and have fake high self esteem. I mean, REAL success. Genuine self-esteem.  The earned kind. There is no other.  Anything not personally earned is a joke.

At this level, they get what they get, and they know that; therefore, what they get is a source of pride. Or shame, as the case may be. Both are earned results, and every kid in the universe knows the difference, and why some kids get one and some the other. The only people who don’t seem to understand are those fierce protective mothers, administrators, and the PC cops.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fierce protective mother. But a parent who consistently stands between his/her child and the results of that child’s actions, is doing the kid no favors. Let the consequences fall, and let the kid deal with them. He/she earned them, after all. And not all consequences are bad, remember. Let the kid reap the good stuff, too, IF it was earned. Not actually and truly and equally earned? It means less than nothing, and is worse than a bad joke.

Oh, and in case there’s a sentient person out there somewhere who didn’t know: those gift-grades, given so a slacker can “graduate” with his/her classmates, are BAD, BAD THINGS. A student who chooses to earn a zero should get that zero, not the 65% that another student might have worked hard for. Whoever thought up that 65% minimum should be dragged out into the streets and shot. We all get what we earn, and if we don’t earn it, we shouldn’t get it, whether it’s points or percentages or salaries or anything, in fact, in the world.  We do not deserve what we did not earn for ourselves.

I’m proud of my students. I will miss them, after this week. They did well.

Except for those few slackers, of course, but you know what? They had the same chances and choices as the others, and they chose poorly. Let the consequences of those poor choices fall on their heads, and let them deal with it themselves.

Those who worked hard? Congratulations. Those who did not? Well, there’s always the summer session, or the fall semester. Try again. And this time, do it right.

Cripes, I love my school and my students. I wouldn’t waste my meanness if I didn’t care. It takes too much effort.

Oh wait, that wasn’t what I meant to say.

It’s that time again.  The morel mushrooms are here.

My husband still speaks wistfully of the day he and the kids visited his step-grandmother Margaret (she whom John Dillinger once tried to carjack. . . .) and she shared with them her unbelievable and, naturally, SECRET, morel mushroom patch.

Remember now, Hoosiers do not share this kind of secret with ANYBODY. People who will show a stranger their genital surgery scars will not share a morel mushroom location with their own mothers. Margaret took Tim and the kids across her fields and invited them to help themselves to the mushrooms.

They were everywhere. It was like a planted crop. You couldn’t take a step without stepping on morel mushrooms. They were all afraid to move, because around these parts, folks, you just don’t STEP on morel mushrooms if you can help it at all. They’re too valuable!!

How valuable are they? Well, if you can bear to part with yours, you can easily sell them for fifty bucks a pound. But it’s rare to find anyone who would part with them.

They came home fully loaded.

We once went to dinner at a friend’s home, and when we got there, she was preparing morel mushrooms as a last-minute addition to the meal. It seems that the night before, her husband had gone to their secret mushroom patch and had dumped two huge buckets of morels into their kitchen sink. All the guests were flabbergasted; usually, people don’t share their found mushrooms with others, either. To this day, none of us can remember what the main dish was at that meal. All anybody can remember is the mushrooms.

Except for me. Naturally, except for me. I am a freak, for I do not care all that much for morel mushrooms. I enjoy preparing them, but as for eating them. . . . well, let’s just say that everybody wants to sit by me, because I don’t eat mine and am happy to share.

And speaking of preparing them. . . . don’t let anybody tell you to use crushed saltines!!!

The proper Hoosier method is to mix together a little flour and a little cornmeal and a dash of salt, coat each mushroom, and fry in butter for just a few minutes. Remember to turn them.

Let them cool just enough to tolerate, and turn your crowd loose on them. There will never be enough.

Back in the middle school, my students used to bring breadsacks full of morel mushrooms and sell them to the teachers for twenty dollars apiece. The teachers got morel mushrooms for bargain rates, and the students got cash. It worked out pretty well for both parties concerned. I never bought any from a student; it wasn’t that I didn’t trust them, it was just that, well, I’d seen these same kids try to tell the difference between a noun and a verb all year, and pick wrong every time. There was something about believing that they could tell the difference between a mushroom and a toadstool and pick correctly every time, that just didn’t hit me quite right. I’m sure they knew; outdoor kids know these things. It was just a feeling I had.

As for the finding of them, I am probably the only Hoosier in the history of the state who not only doesn’t like to eat morel mushrooms, but also can’t find them even if they’re right there by the toe of my shoe. I can’t SEE them. I also tend to step on them, which makes me the kid who is picked last for anybody’s mushroom team. Usually, I just stay home and get ready to cook them when they’re brought home, whether I end up with a bowlful or a handful.

But if you live around these parts, around this time of year, around now, anywhere you might go, you won’t be able to escape the morel mushroom stories. In southern Indiana, we’d rather hear about the morel that got away, than about your boring old six-feet-long fish that got away.

And since I don’t care for them myself, that would be the “Queen’s We” that I’m using here.

I love to say that. It sounds so borderline.

When the first space shuttle blasted off, my students didn’t get to see it. I don’t think my school even owned a TV at that point.  However, when that same shuttle landed, about eighty kids were packed into a classroom, eyes glued to that smallish screen, watching entranced as history was made: the shuttle landed safely, and before those very straining eyes, too.

I’m thinking that it was this event that inspired some schools to invest in some better “audio-visual” equipment than the ancient shared 16mm projector and portable, folding, grainy screen.  History was being made and the resources were now available for schools to allow their students to see it.  Well, some of it, anyway, and some schools are still waiting for the resources AND the equipment.  And the permission to use it.

A few years later, my school wasn’t much more advanced, technology-wise, and we rented a big-screen TV to watch the Challenger launch.

For the next few years, shuttle launches and landings were almost commonplace; there was another horrendous tragedy in the sky (Columbia) but for the most part,  NASA has done outstandingly well.  I am a huge fan of the shuttle program and it’s heartbreaking to know that it’s about to end.  Bad decision.  I’d far rather my tax dollars be used to explore the universe than to have them squandered on certain other projects which I shall not mention here lest I start a brouhaha from which I shall not back down and from which others won’t back down from their stance, either.  Therefore, silence is golden.  Snort.

I will be posting more about NASA’s programs soon, as it is my pet project, for want of a better phraseology.

The sky’s not the limit any more, and this thrills me to the core.

Hey, I made a little rhyme!  Yes, I do that all the time.  Channeling Fezzik, wherever you are. . . .

In the meantime, why not send your face to space?

Hah, did it again.

However, intelligent, sensitive, educated people understand that today deserves respect because a man who dedicated his entire life to peaceful means of acquiring freedom for all people fully deserves to be recognized, and there are still, shamefully, communities that do not consider this of any importance. Making it a holiday forces people to look at his name on their calendar, if nothing else.

If he had advocated violence, it would have been different. Violence does not deserve recognition. If he had advocated “something for nothing,” it would have been different. Bums do not deserve recognition.

But Dr. Martin Luther King advocated equal rights for all people, not just for whites and not just for blacks and not just for whites & blacks. He dedicated his life to gaining equal rights for EVERYONE.

And I can’t help but listen to a speaker with such beautiful grammar. His grammar enhances his message.

May we all have this same dream.

Careful, grammatically-correct language and an almost poetic speaking style will always get my attention.  It’s an assumption on my part, of course, but I associate good grammar with people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Martin Luther King, Jr. definitely knew what he was talking about, and he knew HOW to present it.

I’m almost out of detergent, but if I tear open the two little sample packages of Tide that came in the washer when we bought it seven years ago, I think I can finish out the night.

It doesn’t do to substitute other kinds of soap in an appliance. I tried that once with my dishwasher and Dawn, and the dishwasher vomited up enough foam to cover the entire kitchen floor and seep through the subflooring to cover the floor of the laundry room beneath.

In other words, I did a scientific experiment, and now I know what NOT to do with dishwashing liquid.

I also know how not to dispose of corncobs even though I have a perfectly good garbage disposal.

Garbage disposals have to be coddled and treated gently, kind of like an eccentric visitor who breaks his arm at your house and you have to put up with him for a month or so. (I saw that movie but I can’t remember the actor who played my garbage disposal. . .) Sometimes, just the thought of dealing with potato peelings is too much for a sensitive garbage disposal. Other times, the disposal fairly screams “more orange peels!” at the top of his manly lungs. The problem is, I never coordinate food preparation with the eccentricities of the disposal. So I end up putting garbage in a WalMart bag and setting it out on the deck for the possums to ransack.

Possums are quite possibly the most disgusting animals in the animal kingdom. Every time I see one, with that nasty pointy face, all I can think of is a cow’s hind end with a possum’s tail sticking out of it. The Discovery Channel is responsible for many of my nightmares and disillusionments.

The house on the other side of the woods from us is covered with lights. We can’t see it in the summer, but once the leaves are gone, we can. At Christmas-time, it’s beautiful.

Thank you, unknown neighbor, for sharing your twinkly lights with me.

This post is a rerun, but before Banned Books Week becomes just a memory, I want to share with you again this memo from a college-educated man who was in charge of a building full of impressionable middle school students.

I firmly believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator, should contain no idiocy or errors.

I also believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator that DOES contain idiocy or errors should be posted publicly and that the general public should be allowed to mock it.

I suppose that my belief that administrators should be required to be intelligent and able to proofread would be thrown out by the PC police.

This is the letter a principal gave me several years ago, demanding requesting that I take down my bulletin board about Banned Books Week. I had used that same bulletin board for over ten years, and in those earlier years, he had actually praised it for being timely and creative. That was, of course, before he saw Waldo on there.

This is the same school system that had a virtual meltdown because I was bringing in speakers; the curriculum director didn’t want me to bring in people from the outside to talk about careers because, and I quote, “it might give the students ‘ideas.’” These people volunteered their time, and would have continued to volunteer their time, and it would have been of enormous benefit to the students, but no. Ideas are scary, and, to the ignorant, dangerous.

A few years later, the same man who denied permission for me to bring in speakers for free, spent nearly a million dollars of taxpayer money to take all the middle school students to town and have paid speakers talk to them about the same thing I could have done for free. By this time, you see, the Trend Wheel had spun back around, and it was now permissible to give the students ‘ideas.’

One of those speakers represented General Motors, and her speech was excellent, although it didn’t sit well with administration. She spoke about high school ‘graduates’ for whom a diploma was nothing but a piece of paper that connoted untruths. She spoke about how an employer should have the right to assume that a diploma pretty much guaranteed literacy and general competence. She spoke about all the money big corporations were having to shell into remedial programs for employees who had diplomas, pieces of paper that represented four years of showing up and not much else. She spoke about how businesses would really appreciate a diploma that told the truth: that if a student had been graduated out of respect for really trying, the diploma should say so, discretely of course, but in terms that the business world would be able to interpret. If the student was just going through the motions of graduation for self-esteem’s sake, the diploma should say so. And if the diploma was rightfully earned because the student had become fully literate and generally competent and had genuinely and individually and truthfully learned how to care for himself/herself in the world in general, the business world should be able to see that kind of diploma and interpret it for what it was: a real diploma.

Oohh, the remarks that were scattered throughout the auditorium. And when we returned to the individual buildings, there was much talk of blueberries and self-esteem.

My friends are mostly lawyers, musicians, various businesspeople, and other educators. Before the edict went out, I often had one of them come to my classroom and talk about what they did all day, and then the students would ask questions. Silly me, I really thought it was helpful.

Sure, they asked my lawyer friends about their individual rights and stuff, but. . . . .

Oh. I get it.

We certainly can’t have our students understanding their basic civil rights and those of their fellow citizens of any age, now can we.

What a narrow escape.

P.S. A few years later, I dared to submit a speaker proposal for my classroom again, and it was again turned down, but this time the reason was different. Apparently, it was unfair to other students if one group got to have a speaker and others didn’t. I suggested that other teachers could just as easily invite a speaker into their classroom, too, but nobody else cared to go to the trouble, so I couldn’t, either.

Are our schools in trouble? Darn right they are, and most of it isn’t coming from the students.

Censorship and book banning, indeed. If our society gets any more politically correct, it will be so boring and insipid and cowardly, it will be indistinguishable from an ant colony.

My blog, my rules.  What up, dawggggg?

I admit it: too much Scrubs.

Here’s the post:

Is anyone else out there lucky enough to have a job that makes you so happy that all you have to do is walk into the building and you feel the positive vibes? My days seem so short now; most days I feel as though I’ve just begun, and bingo, it’s time to go to bed again.

I get tired, yes. I am exhausted, usually, by the end of the day. But even so, I love this teaching gig with a passion I didn’t even know I was still capable of after enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous public school dealings for so long.

I think that after so long in the school systems of our country, the teachers who stay evolve a mindset that is almost enslavement. We endure schedules and treatment that no other professional would dream of enduring. We allow ourselves to be used and misused and overworked, all in the name of love for our students. What other professionals have a clientele that pretty much expects to be supported, fed, dressed, taught, and catered to in every possible way, without showing the least bit of gratitude?

We get so used to it, we don’t even realize that there is another world out there, where people show each other respect.

We really do love the students, don’t get me wrong. But year after year in a public school kind of makes a teacher numb to any other possibility that might be out there for a person with these talents. Every year it gets worse and worse, even while we are thinking and saying things like “Next year it will be better.”

But it never is.

Next year, the classrooms are more overcrowded, there are fewer books, there are more dysfunctional families who seem to be in charge of the system, there are more duties, there are more responsibilities, there are more problems, there are more “incidents,” and there is less and less support. There is no respite. There is no discipline. The teacher’s union here stands idly by and allows a principal to schedule a teacher to the point that there isn’t even time in the course of the day to blow her nose. I am not exaggerating, either. The contract guarantees some prep time daily? We’ll count walking down the hall to fetch yet another class as break-time. We’ll count your driving time, from building to building, as your lunch. Ask any music teacher if I’m stretching the truth.

Yes, every year it’s worse. And a teacher doesn’t really know how bad it is, until that teacher walks out and tries something new.

Me, for instance.

And now, I teach every day in a building full of wonderful hardworking students and smiling administrators and friendly janitors and awesome bosses who TALK TO US AS THOUGH WE WERE EQUALS (instead of slaves) and the building resounds with humor and happiness and dedication.

Heck, even the restrooms here are superior. And there is ALWAYS toilet paper!!!!! The halls and classrooms are clean and well-maintained. Everyone behaves properly.

The sad and odd thing is, I did not know how bad it actually was until I left the public schools. While I was there, I was the most loyal and hardworking and dedicated person in the building. Sure, the days seems awfully long, and sometimes the despair and frustration were so thick one could cut it with a knife, but it was my obsession, to somehow be a positive force in this not-very-positive place. I came to school at 7:00; I got home around 6:00. I was determined to make a difference, a positive difference.

But, but, there was no appreciation. There was only the expectation that if I could do that, I should be doing even more.

I couldn’t keep on.

But now? I feel positive every day. I love coming to school. All I have to do is walk into this building and I am instantly wide-awake and happy.

Sure, there are some, um, “interesting” students here, but MOST of them are pure quality.

I still work the long hours. But I am appreciated, and treated like the professional I’d forgotten I was, all those years.

And now, I truly believe I am helping to make a positive difference. I can see it. I can hear it.

Scheisse, I love my job.

The really ironic thing is that in spite of all the negative things about the public schools, I still believe that this nation’s schools are the hope of our future. There is such potential in every classroom, such stories to be told, such wondrous talent and creativity and sensitivity and music concealed behind the t-shirts and the grubby jeans and exposed underwear and defiant raising of the eyebrows and the punky hair and the chips-on-the-shoulders and the trendy slang and the stubborn glares. . . . there is poetry behind the obscenities, and magnificent scientific discoveries behind the unwillingness to conform.

It’s too bad teachers are no longer allowed to cultivate it.

Why can’t we be allowed to step back and bask in the glow of unbridled enthusiasm, and throw ourselves into helping students learn and discover and grow, grow, grow, both physically and mentally and socially and culturally and scientifically. . . . .

What happened to us as a people, as a culture, as a nation, that our idea of ‘school’ has sunk to the level of equating success with a number on a piece of paper?

I do tend to rant, don’t I. My apologies.

I miss what my former job might have been, in a perfect world.

But oh golly, I do love my job now!!!!

Mamacita says:  Sunday is Independence Day! And, if you do not believe in that, then, Sunday is the Fourth of July.

Deny it if you will, but you will be wrong. You have a fourth of July. Everybody has a fourth of July. It’s right there between the third and the fifth, so none of your lip now. If you live here, this country’s history is now your history, too.

When our kids were younger, we used to use our deck as a launching pad for bottle rockets. Well, the actual launching pad was a pop bottle, but who can find those any more? Now, we just jam the rocket between the cracks in the deck boards, light it, and stand back. Our deck is covered with black burn marks, but I kind of like that. It makes me remember happy summers with small children.

Oh, hush. We watched them carefully.

When the kids were older, we used to set off the big stuff in the back yard while the children sat safely on that same deck, watching. But I won’t go there in case there are any of those prissy types reading.

Our sidewalk is covered with black spots, too. That’s where we set off the coiling snakes. I’m still kind of partial to those. I like to look at the sidewalk spots, too, because they make me remember those giggling little kids, watching the coiling black snakes with big laughing eyes. The kids, not the snakes.

Nothing perfect can be truly beautiful. I’d rather have my spotty sidewalks and the memories than a pristine landscaped lawn. Good thing, too, since our grass is over a foot high in places the regular mower can’t go. The tractor’s in the shop.