Matching Tracksuits

Month: March 2022

Shooting

Thursday 31 March 2022

In a tragic first since I’ve been teaching in the Greenville County school district, a young man was shot and killed in a middle school less than five miles from the school where I teach. A twelve-year-old named Jamari Jackson was shot in the hallway during class change, from what I’ve pieced together from various news outlets. The suspect is also twelve years old, and he is now charged with “murder, possession of a weapon during a violent crime, possession of a firearm on school property and unlawful possession of a weapon by a person under the age of 18.”

There’s nothing more I can say than that. Twelve-year-olds killing twelve-year-olds. America 2022.

Testing

Wednesday 30 March 2022

We had today our third benchmark test, this time for ELA. Tomorrow we’ll have the math benchmark. Science will be Friday. Three days of testing. And this is not testing for the whole year — this is just testing to cover the third quarter. For English and math benchmarks, we run a special testing schedule. Students test with their first academic period, and that testing session runs from 8:30 to 10:30, though it usually goes in fact to 11:00. That’s over two hours of the day dedicated to testing. THe rest of the day follows a normal sequence of classes, but each class period is reduced to 30 minutes. Thirty minutes with tired kids (those tests are awful — 50-70 questions that, in the case of English, cover 5-10 texts of varying interest and complexity) is hardly conducive effective learning. The day is not quite a wash, but it’s close. The thing is, though, we did this at the end of first quarter, at the end of second quarter, and now again at the end of third quarter. At the end of the fourth quarter we do it a final time, but it’s not district-mandated tests like the benchmarks but rather state-mandated tests. It amounts to the same: three days of testing four times. That’s twelve days of testing. That’s almost thee full school weeks. That’s not all the testing, though: we also have two TDA (text-dependent analysis) tests that the district mandates, running the same extended testing schedule.

And this year, the state requires us to do another, third TDA before the fourth and final TDA which actually counts. Those three TDAs plus the final actual state TDA means we’re up to 16 days of testing. That’s 8.8% of the year doing testing. Nearly ten percent of the year we’re doing testing.

Putting Him to Bed

Tuesday 29 March 2022

“Will you come check on me?”

For a few years now, that’s been one of the last things E has said to me or K. We put him in bed; we snuggle with him; we grow sleepy; we realize we can’t fall asleep; we get up and leave. He hears us.

“Will you come check on me?”

Gradually, it’s become a little different: “Will someone come check on me?”

The answer has gradually changed, too.

“Sure.” And then we wait for a while, doing something in the kitchen or reading at the dining room table. “Will someone come and check on me?” comes a voice from upstairs.

Eventually, “sure” because “probably.” The response initially is, “No, I need you to check on me!”

Eventually, he comes to accept that, and usually, someone goes to check on him. Usually. But not always.

“Probably” becomes “maybe.” “Maybe” eventually becomes “I hope so.” And “I hope so” remains for a while with an occasional, “No. I have too much to do tonight.”

This process has taken a couple of years. And now he’s nearly ten years old. And I come to realize that putting him to bed is almost done. For good. It was about this age that L began putting herself to bed, and the Boy already does it occasionally. So the end is near. And so the answers start backing up. “No” disappears, as does “I hope so.” “Probably” appears occasionally, but simple “yes” makes its return. For a while.

First Day Back

Monday 28 March 2022

English 8 students began a new unit today on the Diary of Anne Frank, our final major reading selection for the year. We began with an anticipation lesson designed to get students empathetic to Anne Frank’s situation and the dangers she faced as the Nazis took over Europe and began their unimaginable efforts to commit genocide.

English I Honors students worked on a brief review of phrases (see notes above) before heading out into the wild world of clauses. We looked at the definition of independent clauses and examined several examples, touching additionally (and briefly) on subordinate clauses.

A good start to the final quarter.

Saturday in the Basement

Saturday 26 March 2022

The renovation is almost done — just the floor and outlets remain…

Orlando Arrival

Monday 21 March 2022

We made it to Orlando about nine hours after we left the house. With three breaks along the way, I consider that pretty good time to go a little over 500 miles.

When the kids saw the pool from our hotel room, they immediately decided that all else had to wait until they had time to swim. Only in Florida — swimming in an outdoor pool in March. When texting with K, she expressed some concern about the temperature, but we assured her that while it’s windy and thus cold out of the water, the pool itself is warm — a heated saltwater pool.

Then the Boy saw the arcade, and the next destination was set — no question about it.

“Daddy, can we please go to the arcade?” What was I to do?

A good way to start our short spring break vacation.

Saturday in the Yard

Saturday 19 March 2022

Today was the first Saturday we really spent in the yard this nearly-spring. We still have a few days to go until the official start of spring, but it feels like spring.

I spent most of the early afternoon working one little bit of our yard — our newest flowerbed.

For most of the rest of the day, I didn’t really take the time to snap any pictures. It wasn’t until the end of the day, after dinner, when we were out for walk that I thought to take a few more shots.

All of them with my phone. The truth is, I use a camera less and less often. In fact, this evening I experiment with writing the whole post on my phone. I got to about here, but then switched.

And this is just another bit of nonsense to keep a ridiculous streak going…

Left Behind

Friday 18 March 2022

“Pick it up!” she yelled. We were at the end of class when A, who’s always a bit of an immature prankster, pushed K’s materials off her desk. K, who has issues with impulse control (i.e., she’s a chronic disrupter) doesn’t like when her world is disrupted, and she grows verbally violent when it happens. A was walking away smiling, which of course led to K feeling even more aggrieved. “I said,” she began, taking a deep breath, “pick it up!” He walked out the door. She walked out the door herself — not to accost him in the hallway, not to get help from an adult. No — she declared as she walked out, “Well, I ain’t pickin’ it up.” Bear in mind: these were her materials. She literally walked into her next class without her materials, thinking she was perfectly justified in doing so.

I picked her materials up and stowed them in my cabinet. Part of me was justifying it with the thought that it would teach her a little lesson; part of me did it, I think, just to irritate her further. That is, I’ll readily admit, somewhat childish, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking in terms of irritating her. I wanted her to go through the last two periods of the day without her materials to provide an object lesson to her: “Do you realize how many of your problems in school are of your own creation?” I’d planned on asking her when she got her materials back. “You had to go through two periods explaining why you didn’t have your materials, and I guarantee all your teachers responded the same way: ‘That’s your own fault.'”

Ten minutes into the next period, she was knocking at my door. A student let her in. She stormed back to her seat, and discovering her materials were missing, turned and yelled to the whole class, “Where’s my stuff!?!” She proceeded to rant for a while, completely disrupting what we were doing, but I just let her rant for a while. After about thirty seconds, I said, “K, I need you to go back to your class now.”

“But where’s my stuff?!?”

“I need you to go back to class now.”

“But I’ve got to get my stuff.”

“I need you to go back to class now.”

“I have to have my stuff. Where’s my stuff?”

“I need you to go back to class now.”

Her teacher came to the door, a puzzled look on his face.

“Mr. A says I need my stuff.”

“I need you to go back to class now.” I’ve found that the best way to deal with such situations is just to be a broken record, and as it always does, it worked: she huffed and started out of the room, then turned and walked over to a friend and started talking to her.

This is the kind of behavior teachers have to deal with every single day. Every almost single class. In some classes, every single minute.

Lukewarm War

Thursday 17 March 2022

Growing up in the eighties, I was aware that we were in the midst of the Cold War, but I never really gave it much thought. The ubiquitous duck and cover practice of the fifties and sixties was nonexistent, and it seemed to me that Sting’s song “Russians” was less a worry about nuclear war and more a song about the simple fact that, because the Russians actually did love their children (they’re human after all), nuclear war was unlikely. Mutually Assured Destruction to my mind seemed to be common sense, and all adults possessed common sense. That’s what it meant to be an adult, I assumed.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, I (and likely most everyone else) assumed that the threat of a nuclear holocaust was at last a thing of the past. The only possibility of a nuclear explosion somewhere on the planet was connected to Islamic terrorism. Communism seemed it would have more reasonable leaders to me, and the fact that at most such terrorists could gain possession of a couple of such devices seemed to offset the relative dogmatic irrationality that accompanies Islamic terrorism.

During the past three weeks, though, I’ve thought more about the possibility of a nuclear world war than I ever have. Probably because it seems more likely than ever. Putin combines the worst of both the Cold-War era Soviet Union (i.e., a ton of nukes) and the warped view of the reality of Islamic extremists (i.e., an alternate view of history complete with totally fabricated “facts” that fuels a contemporary grievance).  And he’s backed into a corner. The Russians are inflicting terrible damage, but three weeks in, they still haven’t taken the capital. Russian soldiers are abandoning vehicles daily and the advance seems to be slowed to a near-standstill. If this continues, Russian surrender is the only sensible option, but it’s the one option that so many of us cannot imagine Putin taking.

The thing is, I find myself thinking of this all the time. I’m standing in the hallway, monitoring students as they change classes, and I’m thinking about it. I’m mowing the lawn, and I’m thinking about it. I’m going for a jog, and I’m thinking about it. It’s easy simply to say, “Well, you’re an adult now, and you have children: you have a better grasp of the dangers, and you’re directly responsible for the well-being of two children.”

But this is fundamentally different: Putin is one man. He answers to no one. The premier of the Soviet Union answered at least to the Politburo. There was some sense of accountability. Putin, on the other hand, answers to no one. He’s been holed up in solitude for two years now fearful of Covid and ever worried about a potential coup (allegedly) — he has literally lived in a reality of his own making, and the notions coming from his speeches indicate that his reality and reality reality don’t have much in common.

And so I, like everyone else, go through my normal routine — teaching, running, mowing, laughing, fussing — with a nagging fear just under the surface. A fear that I tell myself is ultimately not founded in reality. “Surely,” I tell myself, “Putin won’t escalate this to the point of no return.”

Hydropiekłowstąpienie

Wednesday 16 March 2022

One of my favorite — if not favorite — Polish bands is Lao Che. Clever music, clever lyrics. Their masterpiece, in my opinion, is “Hydropiekłowstąpienie” from their album (titled in English) Gospel. From the title to the final line, that song is sharp.

It begins with what sounds like a squeaking door being closed as someone shrieks, “Jesteś wszechmogący więc jak mogłem / Obrazić Cię następującymi grzechami?” It’s a problem essential problem of Christianity: “You are all-powerful, so I could I offend you with the following sins?” Indeed, why would an almighty god be so upset with most of the silly things that Christianity calls sins? Upset enough to torture them for eternity as a result? It’s just silly.

The song itself begins with God addressing Noah:

Słuchaj, Noe
Chciałbym na słówko:
Wiesz, tak między nami,
To jestem człowiekiem zaniepokojonym.
By nie rzec: rozczarowanym.
Bo miałem ambicję stworzyć
Taką rezolutną rasę,
A wyście to tak po ludzku,
Po ludzku spartolili.
Jestem piekielnie sfrustrowany

“Listen, Noah,” he sings, “I’d like a word with you.” He explains that he’d had such high hopes for humanity but that humanity, in typical human fashion, screwed it all up. “I am damn frustrated,” he concludes, though the word he actually says (piekielnie) literally means “hellishly.”

Then comes what will develop later into the pre-chorus: “Płyń, płyń Noe płyń i żyj, a utop to kim byłeś. / Płyń, płyń Noe płyń i żyj, jak nawet nie śniłeś.” A simple command: “Swim, swim Noah swim and live, and drown who you used to. Swim, swim Noah swim and live, like you’ve never even dreamed.”

The second verse continues with the ironic commentary:

Wiesz sam, jak nie lubię radykałów.
Ale, na Boga, nie spałem całą noc
I podjąłem decyzję:
Zsyłam na Ziemię potop,
Mój mały Noe, mój Ptysiu Miętowy.
Zsyłam potop, potop!

“You know yourself how I don’t like radicals,” God explains just before declaring that after staying up all night, he’d made a decision to send a flood upon the earth.

Then the oh-so-clever wordplay begins: “Utopię waszą utopie,” he promises. “I’ll drown your uptopia,” punning on the fact that the first-person future of “drown” is only slightly different from the properly-declined “uptopia.” But the punning doesn’t stop there. Describing the flood, God declares “Zarządzam pełne zanurzenie” — “I’m appointing a full immersion,” a clever allusion to baptism. The masterpiece: God declares that his flood will be a “hydropiekłowstąpienie,” a smart play on the word “wniebowstąpienie“, which is the Polish term for Jesus’s assumption — The Assumption. Literally, it means “to heaven ascending.” “Hydropiekłowstąpienie” would then be translated “hydro-hell-ascension.”

Ths song continues with God promising to drown everything: roads and bridges, tax offices, households. Everything.

Clever, clever song.

A live version:

Model UN

Tuesday 15 March 2022

Every now and then, a friend from my first three years in Poland sends me a picture that I’d forgotten all about. This was with a friend C, who lived in Nowy Targ, the nearest town to my little village. We were returning from a trip to Gorzów Wielkopolski, where some of our students had participated in a Model UN session.

I can’t remember what the concerns were at that Model UN meeting, but any that are going on right now have only one concern: what to do about Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine.

Hard Sayings and Sunday Conestee Walk

Sunday 13 March 2022

I’m still working my way through Trent Horn’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. I encountered two passages this evening that just left me shaking my head.

The first was about Lot’s behavior in Genesis 19:

The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. 2 “My lords,” he said, “please turn aside to your servant’s house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.”

“No,” they answered, “we will spend the night in the square.”

But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. 4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

“Get out of our way,” they replied. “This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door.

But the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. Then they struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door.

How can Lot be considered righteous when he offered his daughters up to be raped?

Ice from last night’s freeze

Trent explained it, in part, thusly:

Lot’s righteousness is also seen in his hospitality toward strangers, which was a sacred duty in ancient Mesopotamia. In a time when you couldn’t go to a department store for clothes or check in at a motel when you needed shelter, the kindness of strangers could mean the difference between life and death. Lot understood that anyone who slept outside in Sodom was in grave danger of being attacked. Therefore, he offered the city’s visitor’s shelter and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

That, I admit, is at least somewhat reasonable. It seems to be the bare minimum as far as morality goes, but it’s at least a step in a good direction.

But what about Lot’s offer to give the crowd his daughters to be raped? How can that be justified? Surely it can’t.

But that doesn’t stop Horn from trying. The very next sentence:

Even Lot’s misguided decision to offer his daughters to the mob can be seen as an act of hospitality meant to protect the guests dwelling under his roof.

Go back and reread that sentence.

It’s unlikely you’ve ever read apologetics so preposterous. It’s hard to take this book seriously after reading that.

Yet the second passage that floored me this evening makes it clear that the book is not even meant for me, however seriously (or not) I take it.

Crumbling pot

Horn closes one chapter with a quote from Karl Keating:

The Bible appears to be full of contradictions only if you approach it in the wrong way. If you think it is supposed to be a listing of theological propositions, you won’t make heads or tails of it. If you think it is written in literary forms you’re familiar with, you’ll go astray in interpreting it. Your only safe bet is to read it with the mind of the Church, which affirms the Bible’s inerrancy. If you do that, you’ll see that it contains no fundamental contradictions because, being God’s word inspired, it’s wholly true and can’t be anything else.

I have so many issues with this that I don’t know where to begin.

Making new friends

First, I take umbrage with the assertion that there are only three options to approaching the Bible:

  1. reading it as “a listing of theological propositions”
  2. reading it assuming “it is written in literary forms you’re familiar with”
  3. “read[ing] it with the mind of the Church”

None of these approaches accurately describe how I’m reading it. I’m reading it with the claim that it is the word of a god firmly in my mind and then seeing what kind of god appears in its pages.

What Keating (and by quoting him, Horn) is suggesting is that we first assume that the Bible is the word of the Christian god, read and interpret the Bible as the Catholic church instructs, and that will clear up all our difficulties. I’ve never seen such an obvious, almost-celebrated example of begging the question in my life.

And it’s that notion that makes it clear that I am not the intended audience of this book. This book is not intended to respond to skeptics’ concerns; this book is for Catholics who’ve discovered those skeptics and are starting to have doubts. Thus Horn is leaning heavily on his shared assumptions with his audience. He knows that they, at one point or another, at least gave lip service to the proposition that the Bible is inerrant. He’s just calling them back to that notion. He even once admitted that he’s not trying to answer these objections but simply to show that there are possible answers out there. Well, sure, there are possible answers out there, but they’re not terribly convincing — unless you’re a believer starting to feel pulled under by doubt, then they’re a lifeline.

Final Room

Saturday 12 March 2022

Soon, very soon, we will have renovated in one form or another every room in the house.

The only thing we can do more is an addition.

Which will not happen