Quotation Saturday
Mamacita says: I don’t blame Mother Nature for being upset; we’ve not treated our planet well and probably deserve some discipline for that. Even so, I think maybe she’s hitting us a bit TOO hard, and in too many places at once.
Excuse me now, while I go down and hide in the closet under the staircase. The tornado is only twelve miles away, and the sirens in town are blowing so hard I can hear them all the way out here. While I’m sitting on the floor in there, back to the wall, I’ll say a few prayers for the people who are being hit by Hurricane Ike.
Today’s quotations, brought to you by a lot of people who can say things much better than I can.
1. The soldiers fight and the kings are heroes. –Talmud
2. People are no longer sinful; they are only immature or underprivileged or freightened or more particularly, sick. –Phyllis McGinley
3. How can they say that my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? –Logan Pearsall Smith
4. We don’t call it sin today – we call it self-expression. –Baroness Stocks
5. Nothing, nothing, nothing, no error, no crime, is so absolutely repugnant to God as everything which is official; and why? Because the official is impersonal and therefore the deepest insult which can be offered to a personality. –Soren Kierckegaard
6. Obstinacy, and heat in sticking to one’s opinions is the surest proof of stupidity. Is there anything so cocksure, so immovable, so disdainful, so contemplative, so solemn and so serious as an ass? –Montaigne
7. Optimist: a man who gets treed by a lion, but enjoys the view. –Walter Winchell
8. Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to form. –Andre Maurois
9. Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever. –Don Marquis
10. Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. –Norman Mailer
11. Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going. –Tennessee Williams
12. Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory. –Thomas Beecham
13. In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically. –Vincent Van Gogh
14. There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does. –Francois La Rochefoucauld
15. So long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him – pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it? –Lawrence Sterne
16. In memory everything seems to happen to music. –Tennessee Williams
17. No one is old enough to know better. –Holbrook Jackson
18. Never confuse movement with action. –Hemingway
19. If you are not a thinking man, for what purpose are you a man at all? –Anon.
20. When a man’s life is at stake, no delay is too long. –Juvenal
21. You must never disagree with a man while you are facing him. Go around behind him and look the same way he is looking and you will see that things look different from what they do when you are facing him. Look over his shoulder and get his viewpoint, then go back and face him and you will have a different idea. –Will Rogers
22. All men have a reason, but not all men can give a reason. –John Henry Newman
23. A man who reforms himself has contributed his full share towards the reformation of his neighbor. –Norman Douglas
24. A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large. –Finley Peter Dunne
25. If you destroy a free market you create a black market. If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law. –Churchill
26. Money don’t buy class. –Andy Rooney
27. Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. –W.H. Auden
28. I wanted a perfect ending. . . Now I’ve learned the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. –Gilda Radner
29. It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. –Oscar Wilde
30. Applause is the spur of noble minds; the end and aim of weak ones. –Charles Caleb Colton
31. No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor. –Andrew Carnegie
32. The best manner of avenging ourselves is by not resembling him who has injured us. –Jane Porter
33. There was one who thought himself above me, and he was above me until he had that thought. –Elbert Hubbard
34. Noah’s ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic was built by professionals. –Anon.
35. The advantage of being eighty years old is that one has had many people to love. –Jean Renoir
36. A stiff attitude is one of the attributes of rigor mortis. –Henry S. Haskins
37. It’s not what you are that holds you back; it’s what you think you are not. –Denis Waitly
38. Do not offer advice which has not been seasoned by your own performance. –Henry S. Haskins
39. It usually takes two people to make one of them angry. –Lawrence Peter
40. We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. –John Stuart Mill
41. To remain young one must change. –Alexander Chase
42. Who ever told you that you have to find the miracles of life in someone else? –Fran Sawyer
43. “It can’t happen here” is number one on the list of famous last words. –David Crosby
44. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important. –M.L. King, Jr.
45. So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend. –Robert Louis Stevenson
46. If nobody loves you, be sure it is your own fault. –Philip Doddridge
47. The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system. –Earl of Shaftsbury
48. Some people think that whatever is done solemnly must make sense. –G.C. Lichtenberg
49. The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here. –Finley Peter Dunne
50. Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being. –Goethe
Now I’m off to the closet under the stairs. Hope to see you all in a few hours.
I need some red shoes anyway.
Those Worthless Study Halls. . . .
Mamacita says: Back in the public schools, I never had very many study halls. I taught seven academic classes daily, and my colleague Pam and I didn’t even know we were the only teachers in the system to teach seven academics daily. Everybody else taught five, or even four, and had study halls. They all pitied us. We pitied them.
We learned that we had a bigger academic load than anybody else while traveling in a system van to a workshop. The other English teachers – from every middle school in the system – could not believe Pam and I had seven classes daily, and we couldn’t believe they didn’t.
Given a choice – which public school teachers are seldom allowed to do – I would choose an academic subject over a study hall any day. I hated study halls. I hated them when I was in high school and was required to take one, and I hated them even more as a teacher. I seldom had severe problems with students in an academic class, and most of the problems I did have were in a study hall.
I know that a study hall used to be a standard thing for almost every student. Once upon a time, a study hall was a good place for a student to relax a little, and get most of his/her homework done. The room was quiet and there was always a teacher in charge, who could help with assignments and tutor.
Now, a study hall is a dumping ground for non-participatory students, and these kids don’t want to “participate” in a study hall, either.
Back in the middle school, some kids had two or three study halls EVERY SINGLE DAY. Even a kid who DID homework didn’t need that much non-structured time. These kids wouldn’t have done any work for love or money, and having to put up with them time and time again in the course of a day, times 180 days, was more frustrating, nerve-wracking, and just plain horrible than teaching the most difficult of academic subjects.
Students got a citizenship grade for study hall, and many of them received exactly what they earned: an “F”, for “failure to behave like a decent human being.” They failed study hall. Unbelievable, isn’t it.
Most study halls have only two rules: Bring something to do. Sit quietly and do it.
What kind of kid flunks study hall? What’s so difficult about bringing a book or even a sheet of paper and a pencil to a classroom every day, when you KNOW you’re going to be written up and sent back to get “something to do” every time?
What kind of kid argues with a teacher daily about how “I ain’t GOT nothing to do!” and is genuinely horrified at the very idea of being asked to “just bring a book to read, or paper to write on.” Some kids are endurable only when they’re head-down on the desk, snoring away, but even that was too much to ask of some of these non-participatory kids.
All they wanted to do was talk, and bother people, and make trouble. They wanted to talk on their phones, and text each other, and listen to music. They wanted to roam around the room annoying people, and they wanted passes to roam the hallways and destroy things.
In study hall, even though it was against the rules, I let them use their Mp3 players and Walkmen, and that helped somewhat, but there was always a segment of teen society that refused to do ANYTHING except disrupt and prevent other kids from getting anything productive done.
Study Hall. Kids are failing STUDY HALL. They try to walk in the room with nothing in their hands, day after day, and they don’t want to do anything. They don’t see why they have to stay seated. They make demands. They want to talk. They don’t have enough, in their extra-light load, to keep them busy, and it’s because they don’t WANT to be busy. They want to play, on school time. This is unacceptable behavior.
It’s a lousy school system that doesn’t require every student to carry a full schedule of some sort, but it’s an even lousier person who opts for the lightest of all possible schedules and then proceeds to ruin all chances of productivity for everybody else.
So yes, definitely, I would MUCH prefer an extra-heavy academic load, rather than deal with a study hall.
Thankyouverymuch.
Now, of course, most of my students are adults who want to get the very most out of their second chance at an education, and hardly a day passes when one of them mentions that he’d give anything to have a study hall now, where he could get a lot of his classwork done and have a teacher always there for any help that might be needed.
It’s too bad that our kids have to put up with the kind of behaviors they have to sit beside every day.
It’s even worse that our schools have administrations that force everybody to put up with those behaviors.
Monday: More Things I Have Never Done – Yet
It’s Monday, and time for more things I haven’t done yet. Key word there: YET. Many of these I will never do, of course, because I’m just not that kind of person, but some of these things, I might do, someday. If I get a ROUND TO IT.
1. I have never gotten a traffic ticket.
2. I have never shoplifted.
3. I have never NOT voted.
4. I have never been in a fistfight.
5. I have never hurt anyone on purpose. I think we all hurt each other without realizing it, and overreacting sometimes hurts, but deliberately hurting someone? No.
6. I have never learned how to wink with my right eye.
7. I do not know how to knit. When I was a child, I asked my grandmother to teach me to knit, and she laughed at me and said she didn’t know how, either. I had thought all grandmothers knitted; all the grandmothers in my books knew how to knit.
8. I have never driven a car in a large city. Outskirts, yes. Airports, as of this summer, yes. (Thank you, Hula, for so many things!) Inside the city limits? No.
9. I have never gotten a tattoo, although I’ve been tempted many times and I’m not dead yet.
10. I have never sat in a hospital waiting room while a loved one had a quadruple bypass, but this one will change after the 17th.
I am really quite a boring person. Most of the things other people do as a rule, I have never done. Some of those same things, I don’t know that I ever want to.
I am not a particularly brave person, either. Not for myself, anyway. I mean, I would take a bullet or lie down in the road for my children or your children or my students or any of YOU, but if it were just me, I’d probably just pass out cold in a pool of flopsweat.
I will confess something to you all, though: I had a student once who was so obnoxious, I would have to think twice about taking a bullet for him. I still feel bad about that. Not bad enough to change my mind, but bad enough to worry about it.
But jeepers, the kid was KILLER OBNOXIOUS. I still have nightmares about him re-appearing in my classroom.
Also? There are a lot of parents I wouldn’t take a bullet for. Do I feel bad about that? Not really. People who aren’t kind to their own children are a waste of earth space. Parents who buy cigarettes for themselves instead of socks for their children are scum. Parents who look out for #1 and treat their kids like #2 are not worth burying. No, no bullet-taking for them.
But I’d do it for most people.
If I seem a little distracted and disoriented for a while, there’s a reason for it. I’ll tell you later.
In the meantime, I need a Diet Coke. And some almonds.
