- Breaking the preconceptions of my students (this was what my two paragraphs were about).
- Having Connor in my classroom.
- Having Connor tell me that he already knew some of what I taught them today due to TikTok.
- Trump's indictments and that--one way or another--social studies teachers 20 years from now will be teaching about these events
- How pleasant the weather seems to be getting.
- Concerns about what would happen if a forest fire came to our neighborhood or town (again, I suppose)
- How excited I am about the upcoming Star Wars show: Ahsoka
- The number of hours I have put in this week for school and yet still feel behind.
- The lingering cough
I had a couple of paragraphs written, but I deleted them because I felt that I was getting too preachy (again). Since then, I've more than passed the fifteen minute limit that I give myself to come up with a topic for the blog. As per an agreement I made with myself, that means I need to simply list some of the topics that I've been thinking about and call it a day. Here they are:
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Whether I've had good reasons or not, I am now well too far behind where I needed to be with a major task for school: getting my language arts classes active on Canvas (I have some more wiggle room with my AP classes). Due to COVID, I've structured most of my courses so that they can access and submit nearly all of their assignments online. Unfortunately, this only works if I actually have those online assignments updated, uploaded, and published so that students can see them. At present, none of my classes are there.
I finished planning out the due dates for the first units of my LA classes, but I need to fix the due dates online, make the changes that I'm making to those assignments this year (or build the new assignments that I am planning to build), rebuild my Bitmoji classroom frontpage with the correct links, check that all of my links are functioning, and publish the unit for students to access. It's a lot of moving parts, and I need to get moving to get them all done before tomorrow morning. Thus, I bid all of you a good night, and I'm glad that I've preordered an extra mocha for tomorrow. This is the earliest that I have ever started a school year. While I have an entire rant ready about this year's school calendar, I think that I'm going to let it slide for now as I had a good first day. Most of my students seemed excited to be at school if for no other reason than to see their friends. Some of them were even seemed happy to see me.
This will be a bit of a strange year because I have Connor in two of the classes that I'm teaching this year. I have never had one of my own children in one of the classes that I've taught before, let alone two classes. It was clear that I was already a bit of an embarrassment to him as he hid his face more than once as I "entertained" the class on this first day. I think that we will be all right as long as he's willing to let go of the idea of coolness and learn to embrace the weird. I do have one anecdote from yesterday's open house at our high school that I forgot to share. As teacher-of-the-month, I have the privilege of parking in the coveted parking spot of our principal for the remainder of the month. Yesterday, as we had just briefly visited his school's open house, Rowen was riding with me as I pulled into the spot. Mischievously, I pointed out the sign that said the spot was reserved for the principal. He looked at me--clearly shocked--and yelled, "What are you doing?!" I said something like, "It should be fine; I don't think anyone cares, but if someone does say something, I'll just tell them that you told me to do it." To this, he protested greatly for a bit, but followed me into the school even if he kept shaking his head. I told this story to one of our assistant principals as we had a quiet moment in the halls and while Rowen was off with Janelle (who was shadowing Connor's girlfriend rather than Connor at both of their requests--and to the confusion of some of my friends on staff). When she later saw Rowen, she asked him in mock sternness why he told me to park in the principal's spot. Rowen went into complete denial with his eyes wide and threw me under the bus without any hesitation. To be clear, I am emotionally ready--even downright excited--about the first day of school tomorrow. Sadly, I am not as prepared as I would like to be for this coming week, let alone this school year, at this point. In previous years, this would have put me into a bit of a frenzied state, leading me to stay up entirely too late and being rather groggy on my first morning.
Unfortunately, one of the reasons that I'm behind is that I've felt a little under the weather ever since my return flight from Michigan (illness from return flights being an ongoing theme this year). I spent much of this weekend in bed or on a couch trying to sleep away the exhaustion that hit me, but I'm still pretty tired. Thus, I'm headed to bed after finishing this post, comforted in the fact that I have everything ready for tomorrow (at the minimum) and should be able to get at least the next few days ready using a combination of my prep time and tomorrow afternoon. Normally, I'd be concerned that this lack of preparedness would lead to teaching nightmares or difficulty sleeping; however, I'm strangely content at the moment, so I think I should be fine. Mountains and the sea are the primary locations dealt with in today's readings. These primordial locations have long symbolized security/order and danger/chaos. In the creation of the world, God raised up the land from the dark, chaotic waters. The story of the Flood of Noah, itself a symbol of the destructiveness of sin, ends with the Ark landing on a mountain. Moses receives the Law on a mountain. In today's readings, both Elijah and Jesus seek communion with God on a mountain; meanwhile, His disciples are told to leave in a boat on a sea that begins to storm.
We cannot always be on the mountain, isolated from our world and the tasks that need to be done. To be true missionaries of Christ, we are tasked to go out into the sea of our turbulent society that challenges and rocks us, threatening to overwhelm and drown us despite the boat of faith that we have constructed. Jesus shows the disciples that they can overcome those waves even without that human-constructed boat as long as they keep their eyes on Him. This is not an easy task, and even Peter finds himself faltering and failing, but again, Jesus saves him the moment that Peter asks for His help. Jesus did not command His disciples to stay on the mountain forever. In fact, Peter was ignored in last week's Gospel when he asked to make a more permanent residence on the mountain. Rather, He tells them time and again to go out onto the water, and He meets them there. From the beginning, God reached into the waves to bring stability to chaos. We have been tasked to do the same. My time in Michigan brought to my attention a new television addiction--a British comedic "gameshow" named Taskmaster. My eldest daughter and her godparents introduced it to me, and I am completely hooked. I am so hooked, that I have been purchasing seasons on Amazon so that I can see them on my TV without ads (as opposed to watching them for "free" on YouTube). I will note that they are not as family-friendly on Amazon because the language is uncensored (there are a LOT of f-bombs--although, almost all are for comedic purposes).
The basic premise is that a Taskmaster (Greg Davies) and his assistant (Alex Horne--who is the actual Taskmaster) have five comedians perform different bizarre tasks and clips of their attempts are shown to the entire group (and an audience) later. They have no real idea of how well they did compared to the others until the clips are shown on screen (with the exception of the final task which they perform live in front of the audience). The Taskmaster then awards points based on their performances, but can sometimes be quite subjective (often hilariously so). The show started in 2015 but often has more than one season in a year, so it currently has 15 seasons available. The seasons also vary in length for the first five seasons (between 5 and 8 episodes) before normalizing to their now ten episode format. I was shown sporadic favorite episodes while in Michigan, but have now started at the beginning and have not been disappointed. I'm almost set for the first day of school. For three of my four courses, I have updated their syllabi and posted both them and the first week's schedule (which includes links to online programs like Quizlet and Turnitin) on PowerSchool for students and parents to see. I still need to finish updating the Canvas pages with the new assignments, due dates, and point values that I've adjusted or created this school year.
I have some of the links for the fourth course ready, but I still need to work on the syllabus and first week's schedule, let alone its Canvas pages. There are a lot of "moving parts" that I'm trying to adjust as I build the pacing and assignments for my new APUSH class. I will likely still have to make adjustments and additions as the school year progresses, but I believe that I have a solid overall plan which will hopefully engage students to put forth their best effort in this challenging class. For that matter, I feel that my adjustments to Language Arts 10, Honors LA 10, and AP World will make those classes be even more engaging that previous years. In short, even though I still have plenty of work to do before school starts, I'm feeling really good about this year. Already, I've met with students who are excited (and some, a little trepidatious) about being in one or more of my classes. Certainly, I feel more energized as I start to see my students--both upcoming and former. Next week is going to be great! It is no secret that I love Star Trek, and Strange New Worlds has become my favorite show in the Star Trek universe. Sure, I still have some qualms--such as how certain characters are protected by plot armor because this is a prequel series and we know their ultimate fates; thus situations that put them in jeopardy are not as tense. However, this show has otherwise been not just great Star Trek, but fantastic television. The writing, acting, production design, cinematography, etc. have all been top notch with a clear reverence for the lore of Star Trek.
As much as I loved its first season, I have to say that this season far surpassed it and any of my expectations. I was particularly pleased with their willingness to take chances with episodes like the wonderfully hilarious crossover with the Lower Decks cartoon series and the highly entertaining musical episode. These lighthearted shows helped break up much darker and serious episodes that dealt with the loss of loved ones and post traumatic stress disorder. While I'm not a fan of cliffhangers at the ends of seasons (even though Star Trek shows have a history of them) nor some of the strange coincidences on which weaker writing often relies, I still enjoyed the concluding episode for this season. I had been concerned that the writers were going to "fridge" a couple of characters [killing off characters (particularly female love interests) as a motivation for main leads to take action] in this finale and was glad to find that I was wrong (although it is still a possibility for the next season's premiere). Instead, the plot went in directions that I did not expect but still felt (mostly) believable. With the writers' and actors' strikes and the studios' ridiculous refusal to meet their reasonable requests, there's a good chance that I will have to wait longer than a year for the third season to be made (let alone come out). It's going to be an uncomfortable amount of time to wait. I might need to hold more than one "marathon" to keep me satiated until then. In general, I don't like the time that we spend going through mandatory trainings. Some of them are excruciatingly long with little to no new information from one year to the next. I understand the reasoning behind the trainings, but the execution certainly doesn't follow best teaching practices. By far the worst one today was the 90 minute training that had a timer for each page that had to count down before I could click for the next page. The idea was to make certain that people taking the course could not just click through the videos; however, even when the video was over, I had to scroll through the entire written transcript to find the button to move on. Meanwhile, the videos were filled with unnecessary pauses, transitions, and other time sinks that made me quite irritated with its creators well before the session was over.
Even on the trainings that allowed me to quickly click through the slides, I still took the time to read through the information--catching numerous spelling and grammatical errors. Particularly painful were the district-made slides that were clearly just copied and pasted from a state source without any thought to formatting. This was especially an issue for long lists that should have been set up like bullet points for easier reading rather than clumping them all together into a single block "paragraph." Despite my frustrations with the district's learning packages, I was much more impressed with the DEED's required trainings this year. They finally updated their data, using information from as recent as 2022 rather than relying on facts that are a decade or more old. Unfortunately, that recent data was rather terrifying for the state of Alaska. Sexual abuse and assault, suicides, and drug abuse (especially alcohol) are all significantly higher since the last time I did these trainings. Over half of the women in Alaska have been the victims sexual harassment or assault. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder, a completely preventable disability, has been on the rise in recent years. Meanwhile, our underfunded public school system is supposed to be the main line of defense against these issues. Although many of the training programs felt like a waste of time, I have to admit that I learned a great deal of information today. If anything, I was reminded of the importance of our roles as educators in the lives of our young citizens. For me, it's a type of missionary work--not in the sense of proselytizing, but in service--that is sorely needed in our society. I was excited to be back in our school building for our first official work day of the school year. Classes don't begin for another week, but it was good to be back with my colleagues as we prepare for the year. Sure, I'm not a fan of some of the early training videos and programs, but it was fun to reconnect with my departments as well as meet some of our new faces.
I had one large surprise as our administration named me teacher of the month. This is a new concept at our school which awards the prize of our principal's prime parking spot for the given month. Future teachers of the month will be nominated by staff, but I was selected by our administrative team due to my willingness to go to the summer AP institute and to work on our school accreditation this year. I think that Mera will enjoy her new view--even if it is only for a few weeks. I made some nice inroads today despite still feeling the effects of my travels, but I still have a great deal to get ready. Yesterday's travel day (which went into this morning) was more frustrating than I would have liked, but there was little that I could do about it. I did have an interesting conversation at the Seattle airport with a man who had traveled "outside" to get a hairless kitten (only 8 months old). Coincidentally, they were in my same row on the flight. I ended up arriving in Anchorage at about 1 AM--well over three hours after my original arrival time. Thus, I stayed in the airport until Grant's first flight out at 5:45. That flight was interesting as it looked like the Kenai was covered in mashed potatoes due to the low hanging clouds. I took a couple of poor pictures that include the peaks of the taller clouds getting "blown back" by the rays of the sunrise and a semi-circular rainbow.
Even with a couple of long naps, I am exhausted. I had a great trip! I have so many ideas coming away from the conference, but the best part was getting to spend time with family and meeting up with friends. However, I am quite glad to be back with Janelle, the boys, and our pets. I'm also happy to return to our cooler temperatures, calmer traffic (even with the crazy tourists), and my bed. The lack of sleep is one thing, but I'm clearly affected by the jet lag too--it feels like 1 AM. I stopped by the school briefly to get my keys, pick up Connor, and arrange my tables (I don't have enough for my current class sizes); however, tomorrow is our first official day back (for faculty--not students). I should probably get some rest. We went to mass at St. Gregory the Great which is just a mile from my brother’s home in Chicago. I was particularly impressed with the homily, in which we were informed that the Transfiguration takes place just 6 days after Jesus asks His disciples who they think that He is. Peter replies that Jesus is the Messiah, but almost immediately rejects the suffering that Jesus tells him about. Peter wants a conquering Messiah, and this is revealed again when he mentions pitching tents for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. To this, God says from the cloud “This is my beloved son. Listen to Him.”
The homily focused on this phrasing, saying that parents tell their children to listen when they are not, in fact, listening. This is certainly the case for Peter; he has twice proved that he wants Jesus to be a different kind of Messiah than He has said He will be. Maybe this is why Jesus chose Peter to be one of those standing with Him who “will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom”—a prophecy made those six days earlier. As for me, after another meal of amazing Italian beef sandwiches, my parents dropped me off at O’Hare airport. At that point, my travels have been filled with delays to the point that I will spend more time in airports than on airplanes. My plane that was supposed to arrive in Anchorage at 9:30 PM isn’t even boarding until 9:25 PM in Seattle [edit: they’ve JUST delayed it again]. There were not earlier flights that I could take as all four of them were delayed as well. This means that I will miss the last flight out to Kenai today by hours. I have already rescheduled my flight with Grant to their first flight in the morning. At this point, I just want to get home. Today was my niece’s baptism, and it turned out wonderfully. Both of my sisters and my brothers-in-law were there to join our brother and sister-in-law in this celebration of their first child. My sister-in-law’s family (who lives in the area) had an impressive showing as well.
While the weather was not cooperative, we still had an enjoyable after-party in my brother’s home. There were over 35 people there, but it didn’t feel crowded. It’s nice to have that sort of gathering for such a positive occasion. Tomorrow, I head back to Alaska. I’m concerned about the last leg of my flight as I don’t have much time to get to the last plane to Kenai that day. I’m placing it in God’s capable hands. This morning, we packed up and headed out to Chicago. I had to turn off my “avoid toll roads” function on Google maps to find the faster route, which made it so we arrived at New Star Chinese (and more) Restaurant. It is probably my favorite place to eat.
Often, when we have fond memories of a restaurant, we are let down by the actual experience when we return. This has not been the case for New Star. Each time it is as good or better than I remembered it. There we met up with my uncle and aunt, Jon and his new baby Abigail, and Katie and Sam. It was a wonderful lunch even if it was a little hard to hear as the place was so busy. From there, we headed to Jon’s house where we also met up with his wife, Laura. We set up some hanging shade, ate pizza, and prepared for Abigail’s Baptismal party tomorrow. As part of that, Jon and I went to a local multi-level grocery store (also owned by Kroger). It has escalators for the carts. I went into full tourist mode, taking pictures in amazement. Tomorrow is the Baptism and the excitement around it. |
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