Were I to get complete control (and I mean complete control) of a school or school system, there are a few things that I would like to change.  Probably the most important of these things would be the structure of the school day itself.

For one, our schools start too early.  Despite a plethora of studies that show that middle and high school students benefit the most from late starts to the school day, we continue to force students to be to school before 8am (let alone the recommended 9am).  Even college age students do their best to avoid 8am classes.  Yet we have some students who, due to practice schedules, actually have to be at the school by 6:30am.  When you add in hours of homework, after school activities going throughout the evening, and television studios putting their most attractive (to high school age students) shows after 9pm,  it is no surprise that many students are yawning through their school day.

To make matters worse, we throw too many subjects to them through the school day.  A full load at the college is between 12-18 credits (with 18 pushing the limit).  That's the equivalent of three to six classes a semester that meet between one to four times a week.  Most high schools run a six-class schedule, with students having to juggle the maximum subjects of most college schedules while meeting for five hours a week for each subject.  Despite what many politicians claim, our students are actually in school too long.

We also need more selection for our students.  Right now they are packed into classes that supposedly teach the same standards at the same time even though we know that students learn differently and at different paces, and even though we know that not all of our students will need the exact same lesson at the same time.

Later starts and a varied class system with fewer on ground hours is a program that has made our colleges and universities some of the best in the world.  I know that we would still need to supervise our students through the school day (something that colleges don't need to worry as much about), but we could do so by allowing students to pick tutoring centers during the time that they are not in direct instruction classrooms.  These centers could range from study halls that provide a quite place to work, recess areas to give some of our students that much needed activity that they are often denied, "reruns" of courses so they get a double hit of the info, student-led group study sessions, or even one-on-one tutoring.

There are flaws with my proposed system, but I think that it's better than most schools are doing right now.  Granted, any system is going to do poorly under the current financial and legislative constraints that public schools are currently under.  Still, it's nice to dream.

I have always like the smell of coffee, but until last year, I hadn't been able to stand the taste.  My first experience, that I remember, was my mother bringing my sister and I to a friend's house and having a "coffee party."  Then, as until recently, the coffee tasted like little more than warm water (which is not something that I like to drink).  Adding cream just made it taste like watered down water.  Adding sugar didn't give it the substance I wanted.

At Alex's graduation, Janelle decided to use a concoction called coffee bunch which is made out of a coffee syrup, whole milk, and even amounts of chocolate and vanilla ice cream.  Normally, I don't even like coffee ice cream, but I really liked this drink and have since made an effort to make it at least once a year.  I also have come to like some cakes and desserts that use coffee.

It was taking Alex up to college last summer that got me hooked.  Despite knowing that I had a ten-hour drive in front of me, I had stayed up entirely too late the night before.  Long drives can be difficult for me alone, but they are worse when the person riding shotgun is lightly snoring.  Unfortunately, that was the condition we were in on the drive up: I was feeling exhausted while Janelle and Alex were dozing.

When we stopped at a McDonald's, I decided to try a mocha.  Now, I know that doesn't count as coffee for you purists, but it got me hooked about the same as the chocolate punch.  My carpool ride last year was often started with a stop to pick up a couple of mochas to wake us up.  I had thought that caffeine didn't have much of an effect on me as I can fall asleep even less than half an hour after having a caffeinated soda, but I discovered that just a sip of the mocha kept my eyes from drooping while taking those long morning drives.

The sad news is that both I and my carpool compatriot are on austerity measures right now.  Stops to McDonald's (even just once a week) are now a luxury that we literally cannot afford.  Still, I'm usually able to convince my loving wife to set up the coffee maker (a machine that I have not taken the time to understand) on Fridays, and I've stirred up some lost cost mochas for us at least once each week.  It's funny how something I didn't care for just over a year ago is now something that I don't want to live without.

It was the first English ship to sail around the world.  It was captained by the pirate/privateer Sir Francis Drake who not only raided Spanish ships along the American coasts for the interest of the English crown, but also returned in time to delay the Spanish Armada from attacking England for a year, enough time for the English to prepare itself.

The Uncharted series of video games (a great set of stories in their own right) are focused on a descendant of Sir Drake.  Two of the games even suggest that Sir Drake had a role in finding some of the great hidden cities and treasures of history.

In short, the Golden Hind is one of the ships in history that I have been interested in since at least high school.  I even wrote a short outline of two young time-travelers who stow away on the ship during its famous voyage around the world.  That was even before I read the journal of the Hind's chaplain, Francis Fletcher, for my class on exploration in the Pacific.

So, when I saw a model kit for a miniature version of the Golden Hind while on our vacation, I had to get it.  I just got around to putting it together, and I am ridiculously happy about it.  It wasn't a massive ship, but it was only the second ship to make it around the Earth, and I have a small version of it that I put together.

I am often asked why I chose to go to college in Alaska.  I have, of course, several set answers of varying degrees of importance and truthfulness:

I wanted to get as far from my parents as possible and still live in the continental U.S.  This one is depressingly true, but not a major motivation.  I have obviously changed my view on this as I now live only a few miles from them which places me closer to my parents than any of my siblings.

I was given a scholarship.  Also true, but I actually received better scholarships from a few other schools.  In fact, some of the scholarships offered to me were full-ride scholarships, and that was without my solicitation.  Who knows what I could have qualified for if I had actually put forth an effort.

I wanted to get away from all I was and reinvent myself.  While this is mostly true, and at least partially successful, I was also terrified of the idea of leaving the familiar.  I suppose part of my decision to leave was to challenge my fear of the unknown.

The school had a well-ranked engineering program.  While true about the school, I had no real desire to be an engineer, even though I took engineering focused courses for my first year.  While I tell people that I changed my major after taking the engineering courses, the truth is that I never had a real desire to go through the program to begin with.

The real reason I went to Alaska was because I didn't feel like I belonged in Michigan, or Minnesota, or Illinois, or most of the other places I had visited.  Yet, when I got the envelope from UAF, I felt Alaska calling to me.  For that matter, it still does.  I remember being told by a couple of veteran Alaskans that usually out-of-state college students seemed out-of-place in Fairbanks, but for some reason I seemed liked I had been born there.

Today, we walked around the county fair.  A large part of my mind kept looking around me and feeling out-of-place.  I didn't feel a connection to the people around me.  Even though I was born and raised in this county, I feel like a stranger, an outsider.  While I know the streets, the place is foreign to me.

On our vacation, I kept picturing moving to some of the locations that we visited, but none of them felt right.  Many of the places attracted me more than where I live and work now, but they still seemed slightly out-of-phase with my being.

There are many things that keep me from moving back to Alaska, but I feel a hole in my existence while I don't live there.  Who knows?  Perhaps this is a case of the "grass is greener" as there were certainly times while I was in Alaska that I missed Michigan (particularly my family and the seasons).  Perhaps it's part of a mid-life crisis.  I just don't feel like I belong here.

When I first started teaching college courses in the evening, I was desperate enough for money that I taught classes at more than one school.  There was a stark contrast between the two.  One had a friendly and welcoming staff, a shorter term period, and composition classes that included literature.  The other had a staff that rarely responded to my questions, paid better per term but with longer terms, and had composition classes filled with "real world" readings.  There was no question as to which one I preferred.

A couple of years after devoting myself wholly to the first institution, it decided to change the policy of its composition courses.  Too many instructors devoted too much of the course to teaching literature rather than teaching composition through literature.  It's a subtle, albeit profound, difference.  To my horror, the sins of the few brought about a change in policy and literature was dropped from our composition classes.  I say "to my horror" because I had seen so many students open their minds as they were exposed to literature in my courses.  Many had only been exposed to great literature in the spoon-fed manner now common in so many middle and high schools.  For older students, this was their first reintroduction to literature in decades, and they found that life had refined their tastes to readings they had long discarded.  Unfortunately, my concerns were not enough to stop the machine, and literature has been removed from most of our students' lives.

Exposing people to great literature expands their minds and their vocabulary.  It gives them avenues of thinking that are otherwise unexplored.  It helps them to think of the greater world around them, to look a viewpoints other than those with which they are already too familiar.

We need literature, grand literature, in our lives lest they become pale imitations of lives.  We need literature to invigorate our senses and imaginations.  This cold, factory-like approach to teaching reading and writing rather than composition and literature is taking the soul out of our collegiate degrees.