My daughter sends me videos

Teen spirit

I like it when my daughter runs out of shampoo because then the recycling smells nice.

Disconnected thoughts

I'm sick. Well, kind of sick. I was brought up with a very simple rule. If you had a fever, you stayed home in bed. If you didn't, off to school you went. But now we're so enlightened that it's all based on how we feel, not any kind of objective measures. So today I have no fever, but because I feel bad I only kind of went to school. I went in and gave a test, then I came back home. Now I feel pretty much the same, maybe a bit worse, so what do I do? This is such a self-absorbed, baby-boomer kind of thing to do. Back in the day there were rules and you followed them, stupid or not. Now, everyone's got an opinion.

On my way in this morning I saw a truck for someplace called Studs Lumber. Now I know "stud" is a building term (there's even a tool called a stud-finder. I know 'cause we have one), but really. Men are such pigs. And then I find myself thinking up catchy slogans for Studs Lumber. "Is that a two-by-four in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" "Come play with our tools."

I feel kind of creepy writing stuff like that, but people go out in public with t-shirts that say all kinds of over the top sexual references. I saw a Bud Light commercial on the football game yesterday where it's strongly implied that a bottle of beer has sex in an elevator with a sheaf of wheat while the (human) security guards watch and register approval. Ugh, and WHAT? Having come from the world of advertising, it's even creepier, because I know there were many meetings where well paid men (it must have been at least mostly men) discussed this, from the original objective (Bud Light now makes a wheat beer), to the initial idea to creating the words and pictures to revising and producing the video. Weeks and weeks and millions of dollars spent and this is what they came up with. Ew Ew Ew! I'll never drink another Bud Light again (full disclosure: I have never even had a Bud Light except when there is no other beer available).

Decimal Savings!

I just walked past Five Below and they're having a 50% off sale. So I guess it's now Two-Point-Five Below.

Non-compliant

I have been taking out the trash since I was about 8 (before that we lived in an apartment building and the trash just went down a chute near the elevator and into an incinerator. Funny how I can remember that and not where I left my reading glasses). I have been taking out trash at my current address for 18 years, and I am here to announce that I have just been found non-compliant with the Lower Merion Township Refuse/Recycling Rules and Regulations, and thank goodness there are both rules and regulations, because just rules or regulations probably wouldn't be enough. The notice, which was left in my recycling bin, informs me that future non-conformance may result in non-collection, and though my friend tells me he gets one of these every week, I fear non-collection.

To be helpful (I guess) the notice has a whole series of check boxes to designate what sort of errors I made in my disposal methodology. There's a column on Recycling and one on Refuse. Penn and Teller once did a whole show on the ridiculous lengths people will go to in order to recycle- they asked people if they were willing to sort their recycling into 10 different bins, including one for "slightly used paper towels." My sins were in the arena of Newsprint/Mixed Paper. My corrugated cardboard was not "broken down and tied in bundles no bigger than 4 foot x 4 foot x 12 inches." Now what the heck does that mean? Broken down? Like by bacteria? I've never seen cardboard I'd describe as broken, down or otherwise. It also "must be bundled and tied ...or in brown paper bags, nothing in boxes." That's just silly. The thing I was recycling was boxes. So I have to put my boxes in paper bags? What if I have a box of paper bags? What should I do with that, smart guy?

Two other failings to add to my too-long list: I seem to have tried to recycle something called "waxed cardboard." I do not know what that is. I guess I'll have to check all my cardboard now and make sure none of it is shiny. And finally, I had "Paper and Commingled mixed." Sorry, I thought commingled meant mixed.

Fortunately, I seem to have escaped being scolded for anything else, including trying to recycle windows, lightbulbs, paint cans or TV dinners (does anyone even know what a TV dinner is anymore?), or discard any "dirt, rocks or trash." Huh? Why in the world would anyone have dirt and rocks they wanted to throw away? Where would they have been keeping it? And trash? No trash in the trash? I'm befuddled.

Fortunately, this was only my first notice, so hopefully I won't have to leave next week's trash on the steps of the township building.

Bright Lights, Big Ciy

Spending the night in New York tonight. We are big fans of a British actor/comedian named Eddie Izzard. He's kind of a cross between Monty Python, Ricky Gervais and Robin Williams, with a bit of Jerry Seinfeld. Literate, silly, topical, historical. We've seen him twice in Philly, but on this tour he's only playing in a couple of cities, New York being one of them. Because we are baby boomer parents we also have to attend to our kids' every needs, so we first dropped one of our kids in some suburb in some place in very northern New Jersey that you could live a long and fulfilling life without ever visiting. Some kind of camp thing. So rather than drive back and forth we figured we'd just stay here.

Eddie was hilarious as usual. He came out and said he was going to talk about everything that ever happened, "with gaps." Lots of great bits, including lots of biblical stuff. Regarding the 10 plagues- "There were flies, locusts, frogs...Frogs? You can't have a plague of frogs, only more frogs than usual." Go to youtube if you're interested.

On the way back we walked through Times Square and came upon David Blaine, who's known both for magic tricks and for feats of endurance, including things like standing inside a block of ice for 63 hours. Now he's standing in Times Square for 72 hours straight raising money for Red Cross relief for Hiati. He autographed cards for us and we gave money. Just one of those things that can happen if you keep your eyes open.

I grew up in New York- lived most of my first 30 years here. And I spent a lot of time in the neighborhood where the hotel is. My father used to work on this block, so I'd walk by here regularly. For you literary types, it's a couple of doors down from the Algonquin Hotel. It is also home to many clubs. No, not like Animal Rights Club- more like Harvard Club, Cornell Club, U Penn Club, NY Yacht Club. I know these places because my dad taught me that if you were dressed properly and acted sure of yourself, you could walk inside and use the bathroom.

When I'm in New York I'm more of a side street person than an avenue person. The avenues have all the big flashy buildings, many of them quite wonderful, but the side streets are quieter and are filled with hidden treats. Another thing my dad taught me about walking around New York was to look up. You could easily walk along the street and see nothing but store fronts, but the upper stories of building in midtown are often decorated in unusual and beautiful ways. There are arches, balconies and intricate tilework, some of which is hard to see unless you're in the building across the street. Why did they do that? The building I parked in front of had dark wooden columns around the upper story windows. Nobody uses wood on upper floors. Why here?

On this same street is the Royalton Hotel, which contains a lobby bathroom designed by Philippe Starck that I cannot find a picture of. This bathroom has a notable feature in that it is impossible to find the place to actually do your business. A friend of mine and I once wandered around for a couple of minutes before finding that (1) if you push in the correct place on the right side wall that a stall would open and (2) if you approached the wall opposite the door that water would begin cascading down it, inviting you to join in.

And to finish up on the bathroom theme, one of the best gifts anyone gave euphemisms was the nautical community's naming their bathroom "the head." So right on 49th street is a portapotty with the company name "Call-a-Head."

Are we ready for some fun?

Here's my Awesome Teaching Techniques activity for tomorrow:

This session takes a closer look at the pedagogy involved in using web-based strategies to support passion-based and inquiry-driven approaches to learning. Project introduced during webinar.

There are a whole bunch of "shoot me now" aspects to this activity. First of all, nobody uses the word pedagogy to talk about actual teaching. Pedagogy is primarily used to describe the teaching process by people who don't teach. It's a perfectly valid word, just pretentious and unnecessary. I've already said my peace (or is it said my piece?) on webinar. Inquiry driven? I guess that means people ask questions, so all of my classes are inquiry based- "Can I go to the bathroom?" "Will this be on the test?" "Is there a pencil sharpener in here?" "When is this class over?" "Can you get your feet off the desk?" "Would you please stop talking and be quiet?" All of this activity is inquiry based.

So that leaves us with passion-based and web-based. I grew up pretty emotionally closed in. It took a long time and lots of work to learn to access my own emotions and my passions. The last thing I'm interested in is using web-based anything to support my passion-based approach to anything.

This is, as they say, bass-ackwards. Just because you decided in advance that you want to use the web doesn't make it any more of a strategy than does deciding in advance that you will use a fork to pick up your food. A strategy is a plan for meeting stated objectives. Anything you do to try to implement that plan is called a tactic. They are fundamentally different things. ("My objective is to be hungry no longer. My strategy is to eat something. My possible tactics for eating include, fork, hands or direct facial). Deciding in advance that web-based is the right kind of tactic to support any kind of learning is, well, how can I say this delicately? Uh, stupid. Before you pick tactics you'd better be sure what you're trying to accomplish, and if your objective is to promote independent, linear, clear, non-distracted thinking, then web-based could possibly be disastrously wrong.

I would be remiss if I did not mention again how objectionable I find the near total lack of the student perspective. Students are hardly mentioned, and when they are it's often stereotypical. "They don't read." They mutitask." They don't form personal relationships because they're on the computer al the time." Etc. Ugh.

But I'm not cranky or anything.

Mark McGwire

So Mark McGwire admitted to taking steroids today. Given that many people just assumed he used them the admission itself wasn't huge news, aside from his actually saying the words. That being said, I was stuck by the range of reactions to the news.

I heard two consecutive callers on the baseball talk station. The first expressed well articulated outrage at McGwire's opportunism in timing his admission right before he started his new job as hitting coach, and that he broke records by cheating and was unforgivable. The second said he didn't blame McGwire for not admitting his steroid use before Congress, because "(Congressman) Henry Waxman is just a liberal left-wing pig" (note to caller- you left out "Jew," but I know you were thinking it) and concluding that McGwire was innocent and only admitting using because that would make people stop asking him about it.

That about covers it. My personal opinion is that the guy was a cheater. That there were other cheaters around doen't make him any less so. His admission sounded very calculated to me. That being said, I don't think that disqualifies him from ever working in baseball again, so on a certain level, who cares? What's interesting to me is that Jose Canseco, who was absolutely roasted in the press and elsewhere for writing the book that blew the cover off the whole steroid thing, has now been pretty much 100% vindicated. Canseco also used steroids and is hardly an beacon of morality, but the one thing everyone who knew him well said was that he was not a liar, and the McGwire episode is the last thing in the book where his assertions had not yet been proven correct.

Can we get some real baseball soon?

How pathetic am I?

Four short words: Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies.

And they're actually not bad, in a dog biscuity, sweetened with something other than sugar kind of way. Probably best with strong (i.e., cover the taste of everything else) coffee. I just bought them because they were low in sodium (I have ever so slightly high blood pressure) and it's hard to find anything baked without a major helping of salt and/or baking powder. We'll see if I get through the bag.

Oh, and by the way, is it just me or have supermarkets just stopped putting the heat on this winter? My last 4 trips to the supermarket have been cold way above and beyond (or below and beyond?) the normal supermarket cold. Even the employees are in winter coats.

So Unrealistic!

Ever noticed that in the whole roster of teen comedies that nobody ever has any homework? The only real homework-doing I can think of is at the end of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (the best teen comedy ever), though I guess the Bill and Ted movies involved time travel to help do a history presentation. It's like watching 24 and wondering when Jack Bauer eats or goes to the bathroom.

As an older person, I particularly scoff at the movies like 17 Again. I know everyone has moments where they'd like to go back in time and do the thing's they were doing back then with the knowledge they have now. This mature perspective, of course, would not be of any use was one required to write a 5 page paper comparing and contrasting Odysseus and Penelope. There have been occasions when my kids have had reading assignments and I've read along with them, just to help them understand the books, but I last read the Odyssey in 1967 and I ain't doing it again. I remember "Rosy-fingered dawn" and "Wily Odysseus" and a major slaughter scene at the end and that's about it. So how well prepared am I to help my kid write that paper?

Out and about

My coffee pot broke. No, not the electric coffeemaker or the espresso machine. I don't use either of those for myself. I use a french press, which is basically a beaker with a plunger. You put coffee and hot water in the beaker, wait 4 minutes and push the plunger down to strain out the grounds and then you have, at least in my opinion, the best coffee. Not much to break, except the beaker and those do break from time to time, so I went to replace it.

As I was paying at the kitchen store, I notice a big box on the counter with a label "Cordless Wine Opener." Most of the wine openers I've ever seen and all that I've ever used are called corkscrews and they're all cordless. When I mentioned this to the sales woman, she said, well this one just pulls the cork out by itself. That's a fine trait in a wine opener but is unrelated to cordlessness, so I asked if they had any that had cords, because I'd never seen a wine opener with a cord. This remark brought another sales person over, who told me that this one is automatic. I had more to say, but thought it best to leave before I was asked to do so. Now that I think about it, my coffee pot is cordless too!

As a footnote, I know I complain about my kids sometimes but I have to give them props for generally tolerating this kind of behavior when they're with me.

And we're only 6 days in

I've already accomplished a couple of things in this first week of the new year. First, I had a class that was a total failure. It's one of those things that can happen when you teach a class for the first time, and I'm teaching 2 classes for the first time and am using a brand new book in a 3rd, which is pretty much the same thing. I'm a pretty confident guy, but when you spend an hour preparing for something, only to have it totally collapse on you, it's humbling. Even if you've had 30 years of practice making sure the message you deliver is appropriate for your audience, you can still find yourself in front of a class, explaining something that makes perfect sense to you, only to look out at the students and see nothing but, as my old boss used to call it, the bovine stare. You know, the way cows look- attentive but totally uncomprehending.

Second and on a much more entertaining note, I've started a turf war and am now sitting back and watching it unfold. That I didn't do it on purpose doesn't make me any less proud of myself, because I knew it was a possible consequence of my actions. I'm not really at liberty to share any details, but all I really did was offer to help somebody do something, and it's now totally blown up over who is in charge of what. I've been copied on about 20 e-mails, all of which contain my name, but none of which are actually directed to me. Every once in a while I chime in to say something like "I don't care." but nobody responds and the back-and-forth goes on. We haven't quite gotten up to name calling yet, but I feel like it's getting close. I'll keep you posted.

It's my pleasure to serve me

I have 2 receipts on my desk from 2 different superfresh (they spell it with a lower case S, so I will too) stores. At the first one, I guess the cashier's name is Shirley, because at the bottom it says "My pleasure to serve you Shirley" and yes, the space is like that on the receipt. Today I did the scan-it-yourself register and it says "My pleasure to serve you USCAN."

Back to school blogging

First day back. This has not gone as well as I'd hoped for a couple of reasons. First, I have a small roll book where I keep my schedule and class lists. I cannot find it. I thought I looked everywhere at home, but now I've come back to school and it's not here. Not that big a deal overall, I don't keep grades or even book numbers in it, those are all done electronically. But what I did have in there was my conference list. I missed Parent-Teacher conferences before the break because of the snow day, and I need to contact all of those parents that I missed.

Plus, my schedule is attached to that book, and there is no place online where I can look it up (note to self: scan schedule and put it in a Google document), so I had no idea what order my classes were today. I'd guessed that Calculus was first, which was fortunate because I'd guessed that and had therefore prepared my lesson for class yesterday. Unfortunately, I left said lesson plan at home, and so had the pleasure of recreating it at 7:45 this morning. It wasn't hard- I remembered what I'd done. It was just annoying.

So now I'm 2 classes and a meeting into the day and things are going alright. It's a bit foreign trying to teach when I'm not totally exhausted, but I've managed to get through it so far.

Even if you don't like football

you've gotta like this:

Any way you like it

I was in Starbucks this morning and the guy in front of me ordered "Two quad espressos over ice and 4 apple bran muffins." That's a first for me. I went in a coffee shop once that named all its drinks after famous people and the Keith Richards was 4 shots of espresso in a cup of hot chocolate. Hard to resist that sort of thing and I bet it tastes way better than a Red Bull.

I've been home for a couple of days now but one big question is still with me from vacation. If you're away somewhere and you run into someone you kind of know but you don't really like them, what do you do? This happened to us- it was a girl who played soccer with one of my kids and her extended family. I remember her dad being the most obnoxious sideline parent I've ever had to endure. He wasn't violent or completely abusive, but he would spend the entire game yelling to his daughter what to do. I remember thinking that it must be very difficult for this kid to learn to understand the game if she doesn't have the chance to think for herself.

Anyway, it took me a couple of days to realize where I know him from (the girl was unrecognizable as I hadn't seen her in 8 years or so but he looked the same) and then finally on the day we were leaving I waved hi to his wife from across the lobby. And that was it. Was that the right thing to do? Was I obligated to sit and chat with them just because we were slightly acquainted 8 years ago? Oh well, maybe I'll run into them in SuperFresh and say, "didn't I see you..."