Eight Days a Week

Have you ever worn the same shirt for everything you had to do outside the house for two or three days in row? Have you ever had this great scheme ruined by seeing someone at Wal-Mart that you are supposed to watch a movie with the next night? Well, don't tell the world, but I only have one non-dress shirt left. Seriously. My luck has held out for like a month: I never see the same people twice outside of work, but soon the inevitable will happen and laundry day will be forced upon me once again.

The Walrus and The Carpenter

I read far too little. As I prepare to teach 2-3 authors per week to my eighth graders I read a lot of mini-biographies (of varying credibility) on figures like Jean De La Fontaine (a French fable-writer), Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, and Robert Service (the poet who wrote “The Cremation of Sam McGee). Learning that Lewis Carroll was reading Pilgrim's Progress at age 7 or that George Orwell had read every work of Charles Dickens before he was twenty, not as a matter of pride, but as a matter of course, I get the feeling that I'm already impossibly far behind. And I am.

I'm twenty-two and it's too late for me.

I could be content knowing that I probably read about ten times more than the average American (after all: it's not what you do, it's who you beat) but I'm not. I love the fact that I'm in a book club with friends from Hillsdale, but I'd like to doing a little more to close the gap between myself and the cultural standards of the past.

So, (and I'm especially talking to Mike, Pat, Kevin and Jose) I'd like to get something going where I can read great authors and discuss their works on a more regular basis. The idea came to me today of starting an “Essay of the Day” group, where we could each suggest one essay by a notable Western thinker every week and write a review to which the rest could respond. It wouldn't be much and definitely no more than one essay per week per person, but it would keep me intellectually engaged outside the classroom and I think I need something to get me involved in conversation with someone older than 14.

I took about 10 minutes yesterday (we were reading “The Walrus and The Carpenter”) to field all the arguments my students could come up with to prove to me that pigs didn't have wings. They were unable to overcome my logic,and the proverbial question of “whether pigs have wings” is still open for debate.

If you read this blog and would like to be a part of something like an “Essay of the Day” group, please leave a comment with your thoughts/suggestions and if there's an interest, I'll take the time to begin putting something together.

Also, I was looking through old files last night and, in addition to uncovering the full album of songs that I wrote in high school (I was emo before Death Cab was a twinkle in Atlantic Record's eye), I found the series of Microsoft Paint single-frame comics I made for my first (and ultimately ill-fated) blog. This was a favorite of mine:

On Holiday

With a week down and 35 more to go I feel a little bit like a 6 year-old starring down the bottomless abyss of formal schooling.

This Week The Trend...

...was to get myself up about 5am, take the few unconscious hours that I have to spend, and work away the rest of them.

My kids are great. They really are. I don't think there's a brighter 8th grade class in the country, and I'll prove that to you come standardized test time. Also, after taking a couple hours just to finish some grading and enter it into the computer, I discovered that the student who has been my biggest discipline problem so far (which just means that he doesn't sit up straight and tries in small ways to be a class clown) is the only student thus far with a perfect A. After 3 quizzes, 5 homework assignments, and a writing lab, he has yet to miss a point. These kids are really good, and, despite the fact that they are only in 8th grade, most have done a pretty good job of understanding everything I say, even in the moments when I'm teaching in a way that would be more appropriate for seniors in high school.

Gauging the level at which I can lecture and the level at which I can expect my students to perform is going to be one of my biggest problems.

Now I'm sitting in a coffee shop using craptop to get some internet-related work done. Craptop is Brad's old hollowed-out computer that has neither battery, nor floppy drive, nor CD drive, and to top it all off the cord is covered with an electrical tape coat in an effort to make it more likely that the power-supply won't be cut off (which in the absence of a battery shuts the computer off immediately). Despite all that I've seldom been more thankful for a machine as i've been unable to "borrow" internet at home as of late.

Someday I do plan to return that internet. My future business (constructed on the Mr. Whitford business model) entitled "Good Times" will have free Wi-Fi.

If you didn't already know, and I'm pretty sure only two of you did, I signed up for RCIA classes last Sunday after mass. Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults is a preperatory program for receiving the sacraments in the Catholic church. So, over the next several months, starting September 6th, I'll be attending weekly cathecism class with the intent of entering the church at Easter. So, if you have reading material or well constructed arguments for me either about the Church, or about why I should run the other way, I'd like to hear what you have to say.

Is it wrong to listen to my blog playlist while writing my next post? It feels a little perverse.

Once again, I know I say this every couple days, but you should really listen to The Good Word playlist. Each post is named for a song and those songs grace the sidebar of the page. You can't really know me without knowing my music and I'd like to think that you wouldn't mind adding some of it to your own personal collection.

I laid off coffee this week so that I didn't end up getting jittery in class. But in the future I'll keep this in mind:



There are probably about a thousand episodes, but I really should start getting together a complete collection of The Red Green Show on DVD. It's one of the few really materialistic goals I have in life - along with having a secret part of my house that you can only get to by swimming through an underwater tunnel.