Pun Intended

Pulling hair out...

Creative Teacher Fired

"Michael Baker, who made news last year when district officials told him he couldn’t teach history from the present backwards, has not been in classrooms since April 18.

His abrupt departure apparently came on the heels of a video he showed to a geography class called “Baghdad ER.” 

The documentary film chronicles life in the emergency room of a combat support hospital in Baghdad and includes graphic footage."

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Add another one to the list.  A teacher does something different, memorable, tries to bring some relevance into the classroom - and they are fired for it.

I will still never get over the buy-out that took place at my Alma Mater shortly after I graduated.

What REALLY kills me about the article, is that a bunch of people called this Vietnam veteran anti-American, a communist, and only showing an anti-military point of view.  Interesting.  Let's see what the department of defense thinks...

Defense Link review of "Baghdad ER"

"It is a poignant testament to the sacrifice of American troops and the dedication of military medical personnel."

- Defense Link News

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GEEZ!!!!

Going nuts!

In case you missed the "case of the cracking coconuts," go here to read all the milky details.  Maybe you had to be there.  Good thing I can relate my crazy personal life in anecdotes pertaining to serious current event memoirs in class!  And yes, that is a coconut in the sink, and yes, he is hitting it with a hammer, and no, that didn't break it.  I think I have some students whose heads are as thick as that... I kid I kid.

Maybe.

In other non-news, Michael got a Chinese water dragon and named it Wheetabix, after the cereal produced by an Australian (UK?) company known as the Sanitarium corporation.  Is this a throw back to 1950's companies that had crazy names that all sounded like toilet bowl cleaners or is it really a nod towards a place that Michel Foucault would have written about?  Crazy Brits.  Is that PC?

I've also made some interesting discoveries.  Apparently reading Medea in class is gold, but Lysistrata does not go over well.  That's ok.  I still find "woolly female logic" hysterical.  Maybe that just proves what a geek I am; among other things.

Finally: yes, I have a lazy eye in pictures.  Leave me alone.

"You're only coming out because you came back in"

for jane


225 days under grass
and you know more than I.

they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.

is this how it works?

in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.

I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.

the tigers have found me
and I do not care.


----Charles Bukowski

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Yesterday was brilliant.  Today was like rubbing my face on a brillow pad.  Must everything be a pendulum?  Sometimes I'm not so sure I'd rather just sit on the bench that revolves rather than experience the carousel affect.

Since the two weeks post-graduation and the 4th of July have been my only real holidays this season, this is the first summer I have not felt like a child, and it is strange.  Except for that one summer when my childhood ended.  That mile marker was twenty.

This summer still stands out because I have not seen a lightening bug, and that seems to have made all of the difference.  Do they disappear when you age? 

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Back in the years when I kept a live journal, (I just re-read two years worth of one of them, what a  waste of an hour), I was able to post what music I was listening to, and that feature seemed to express more than anything I ever wrote.  I think typepad should implement it, too.

It frightens me how much of my life I have forgotten.  I had so many vague references to things that I assume were fun occurences, inside jokes, etc. and now I have no idea what I was talking about.  Other things jar my memory like a semi colliding into my brain.  And ouch, it hurts.

Shysteroos:

a society of people from Rabeleis' Gargantua and Pantagruel, who make a living by charging people to beat them up. 

Perhaps teaching isn't this severe, but sometimes when I come home and I'm tired, the description seems amusingly fitting!