Matching Tracksuits

Saturday

Saturday 10 August 2024 |

I spent much of the morning working on school-related issues. My honors kids have turned in their first assignment (the famed/infamous 500-word introductory letter I assign the first day of school — “I didn’t know we’d have homework our first day,” some write), but it’s not for a grade (they don’t know that yet — I will apply it to extra credit later), so I read it as I would anything else: for information.

After lunch, which included (for me) a finely-sliced fresh habanero from a colleague at work, I started working to fix the pressure reduction valve that I had to take out a few weeks ago due to its leaking. I thought, “This should be a quick job. Just some Teflon tape to prevent leaks from the joint between the Shark Bite fitting and the valve itself…” but I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. It never is. Because the valve has 3/4 inch openings and our plumbing is 1/2 inch, I had to add a couple of couplings as well. And two of the four of the connections leaked when I put it all back together and turned on the water again. I turned off the water, pulled everything apart, and did it again, with more Teflon tape. The same thing. I tried a third time, putting an ungodly amount of tape. Finally, I got both of the leaks stopped and a third one started.

In the evening, when K and E went to mass to fulfill their Sunday obligation, I threw the bike on the rack and headed out for a quick loop at our favorite spot. It rained last night, but I didn’t quite realize how much.

Part of the boardwalk — K’s favorite part of the ride — washed out.

While I was gone, though, the Girl decided to bake. And my goodness, did she ever bake. Cupcakes topped with raspberry choclate ganache.

Second Day

Friday 9 August 2024 |

“Mr. S, you’re my favorite teacher so far.” We were lining up this morning to head out for related arts (or “essentials” as the new nomenclature dictates — people in education love to rename things to show supposed progress and improvement), and he said this out of the blue.

“You’ve only had one class with each of your teachers so far,” I laughed. “How could you possibly form an opinion that fast?”

“Well, your class was the only class we actually did something in yesterday,” he clarified.

I am not one to begin the first day of school with a long lecture explaining all the ins and outs of my classroom procedures. Sure, I have a specific way I want students to turn in papers, but I’ll explain that when they have their first papers to turn in. Certainly, I want them to know about my website, which I work hard to keep updated daily, but I’ll show them that when I’ve created my first update so they realize firsthand how useful the site can be. Definitely I want them to understand how we’re going to get into groups for collaboration, and I want them to know where each group is to sit, but we’ll go over that when we get in groups for the first time. So the first day, I always make sure we work. We do some writing, some reading, some chatting. We work in groups; we work in pairs; we work individually.

And the second day, we go over procedures.

Are you kidding? We have too much material to cover! Any procedures I’ve neglected will have to wait until that first time we need it!

First Day 2024

Thursday 8 August 2024 |

Last year’s first day — exactly one year ago — was a little strange. In here, I wrote it was a good day, but that was not entirely true. My two on-level classes were, in a word, hyper. Several students were immediately chatty, immediately disruptive, and there were several more students who fed into that. There was a bit of attitude at times, and while I tamped it all down quicky, it didn’t seem to bode well for the rest of the year.

I was right.

Last year’s eighth grade was tough. We’d heard they’d be tough from sixth-grade teachers; we’d heard they’d drive us to insanity from seventh-grade teachers; and we saw the difference immediately.

Most eighth-grade classes are pretty calm at first. Most eighth-grade students are reasonably relaxed those first days, trying not to push boundaries, trying to make a decent first impression. Those kids (rather, many of them) did not do this. And it was a harbinger of things to come.

“This year’s kids are better,” everyone said. We met them all today, and I would have to agree: a night-and-day difference.

One less stress.

Our kids started school with the usual excitement: the Girl is starting her senior year (how in the world is that possible?) while the Boy is starting seventh grade (how in the world is that possible?).

“Enjoy your last first day of school,” I said to her, though that’s not quite accurate. She’s planning on going into bio-engineering, and she’s already accepting/planning on getting a doctorate, so she has plenty more first days of school.

As for the Boy? A snippet of a conversation from a couple of weeks ago says it all: “You have to pay for college?! You have to pay to sit in school?!”

Turned Upside Down

Wednesday 7 August 2024 |

Our school district has a way of jostling teachers out of their comfort zones. Take this year, for example. We’ve known for a long time that we’ll have new standards for English. The logical way to let teachers transition to these new standards is to let them take their existing lesson plans and retool them as necessary to meet the new standards. True, they are, by and large, almost the same standards, but there are some new items on that list which will take some time to unpack and figure out how to teach. Perhaps letting us focus on that during the first year would be a good move.

We’re also getting new textbooks this year. This means that a lot of the stuff we’ve done in the past might not necessarily work with the new selections in the new textbook. A lot of it will, but not everything. The logical way to transition to this new textbook would be to give teachers a year or two to make the move over. After all, we’ll likely be using these books for six or eight years. We can take our time with transitioning and make sure we do a good job.

Or our district could manage these transitions as they actually chose to this year:

  • Provide new standards (actually the state did that, but…)
  • Provide a new text book
  • Provide a detailed unit pacing guide that we must follow to the letter
  • Provide a 35-question, 18-page mandatory test for the end of that unit, a test that has some questions that are not even covered in the unit
  • Demand all teachers make the transition immediately
  • And best of all, do all this the day before students return for their first day of the school year.

There are a lot of stressed teachers today. I had to talk an experienced teacher out of walking out and simply quitting today. This is her last year before retirement, and it’s not how she wanted to end her career. If she’d walked out, I wouldn’t have blamed her.

Reflections

Tuesday 6 August 2024 |

Why would there be any way to see hate in a text written by a completely benevolent deity?

Why would there be any way to see prejudice in a text written by a completely benevolent deity?

Why would there be any way to see malice in a text written by a completely benevolent deity?

Meet the Teacher 2024

Monday 5 August 2024 |

“Last year’s kids were a real challenge,” the seventh-grade teachers all admitted. And to be fair, they warned us about them this time last year: “This is some group!” We hear that a lot, and we put it down to a typical exaggeration: they’re never as troublesome as last year’s teachers make them out to be.

But last year, they were right. One-hundred percent accurate. Last year’s group was exhausting.

“This year is going to be so much calmer for you guys!” all the seventh-grade teachers have been reassuring us during these first days back. Today we met a lot of them.

It’s hard to tell after such a short exchange, but we are, indeed hopeful.

Band concert

Sunday 4 August 2024 |

Here’s a video of the Boy’s spring band concert.

Supporters

Friday 2 August 2024 |

Before Biden bowed out, a meme was going around among Trump supporters.

I’m not going to label his followers as this meme does, but anyone who can look at Trump and not see how completely unhinged he is almost all of the time, how uneducated he appears to be, how incapable of critical thought he seems to be — I just don’t understand.

I freely admitted that Biden was showing some mental deterioration. I never worshipped the man: I was only support him to do a job. Many Trump supporters, however, seem almost to worship the man. He literally can do no wrong.

And even if he does wrong they overlook it. The same individual posted this:

Nationals

Thursday 1 August 2024 |

Today, the Girl competed in AAU Nationals in high jump for the first time in her life, but it’s the fourth or fifth time she’s competed in AAU Nationals in general. It’s just that before today, it had always been in volleyball.

Unlike volleyball, though, these nationals did not take place a day’s drive away. Instead, they were a mere three hours away.

It was also by far the biggest track meet she’s ever participated in: three high jump mats with over 50 girls participating.

Talking to her coach

How did she do? She’d say “Meh” if you asked her that question.

But she placed twelfth out of fifty-one girls.

And of course, no matter how it ended, we’re all proud of her and her accomplishments this year.

Dinner

Wednesday 31 July 2024 |

The Girl has decided she needs to be cooking more, to learn how to cook more than mac and cheese and quesadillas. She’s done chicken alfredo a couple of times, but when K asked L to cook dinner tonight and suggested she just make the tried-and-true chicken alfredo, the Girl demurred. She wanted to try something new. Something different.

Something Asian.

Long, long ago, when K and I were dating, she wanted to do the same thing — try something new, something different. She decided on something decidedly non-Polish, something from southern Europe. She chose lasagna.

Mother and daughter both chose pasta. They both had similar issues with the pasta. And in both cases, those they cooked for ate the dish with enthusiasm.

Signs 3

Tuesday 30 July 2024 |

During our three trips to Florida this summer, I noticed a lot of interesting billboards. I also saw a sign on the the trailer of several semi trucks.

I’m not sure what that image is supposed to evoke. There are hints of Uncle Sam draft posters in the overall design, but the wording would have been something like “I want you to pray.” Additionally, given the right’s strong feelings about the necessity for clear gender boundaries, this person seems unexpectedly androgynous. Finally, there’s the feeling of aggression inherent in the shadows and pointing finger. It’s like it’s daring you not to pray.

Christian Virtue Signals

Monday 29 July 2024 |

The bruhaha about the opening ceremony in Paris offers an instructive insight into the minds of fundamentalist Christians. It was everywhere. On friends’ feeds:

Post A

Post B

It was on public figures’ streams:

Post C

Post D

It was on Polish streams:

Post E

Even the parish K attends got into the action:

And those public figures not posting about it were commenting to the media.

Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop with a large online platform, said,

France felt evidently as it’s trying to put its best cultural foot forward, that the right thing to do is to mock this very central moment in Christianity where Jesus at his last supper gives his body and blood in anticipation of the cross.

It’s presented through this gross or flippant mockery. France which used to be called the oldest daughter of the church. […]

France has sent Catholic visionaries all over the world. France whose culture and I mean the honouring of the individual, in human rights and of freedom is grounded very much in Christianity. […]

What’s interesting here is this deeply secularist, post-modern society knows who its enemy is, they’re naming them, and we should believe them, because this is who they are.

But furthermore we Christians, Catholics, should not be sheepish. We should resist, we should make our voices heard.’ 

Daily Mail

Trust me, Mr. Barron, your voices are heard. Some of us are just a little bemused at the ignorance behind it all.

What makes more sense? That the organizers would choose to satirize a Renaissance painting or portray something distinctly Greek, specifically the Feast of Dyonisus?

Whatever their intent, the

[o]rganizers of the Paris Olympics have apologized for any offense caused by a skit in the games’ opening ceremony Friday that featured drag stars in what many viewers saw as a parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous “The Last Supper” masterpiece, a similarity that drew the ire of Catholic leaders and conservatives like Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.

Forbes

They also pointed out that

[r]ecreations of “Last Supper” are not uncommon and have not often been met with the same kind of backlash as what followed the Olympic opening ceremony. Popular TV shows like “Lost,” “House,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons,” among others, have posed their actors in similar photos, and art with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Freddie Mercury and Bill Murray portraying Jesus are readily available online.

Forbes

Heck, the MAGA people who are so upset were decidedly less upset about a different recreation of the painting:

At its heart, though, I can’t help but see this as an example of Christian fundamentalist ignorance and hypocrisy. They are all “America first!” in everything else, but here they’re willing to refuse to support American athletes who had nothing to do with the planning of the opening ceremony because in their ignorance they’ve confused the Feast of Dyonisus and a Renaissance painting which isn’t even part of any religious canon at all. Davinci’s painting was itself a derivative and unrealistic interpretation.

Birthday Surprise

Sunday 28 July 2024 |

After Polish mass today, the women of the choir (which K more or less leads) had a birthday surprise for her.

“I’ve never had so many flowers,” she said when she got back home..

Saturday

Saturday 27 July 2024 |

K spoils us — she really does. We all get up to freshly made racuchy topped with homemade blueberry preserves. Why? Because we asked for it? No — because K just wanted to do something nice for us.

In return, L trimmed some of the hedges at the side of the house. To be honest, it wasn’t really in return: K asked her, and L obliged. I’m not even sure she had any of the racuchy because got up late and ended up going out for lunch with her friend.

“But I’ll gobble them up later,” she assured me.

They’re still in the fridge.

Still, the Girl did the trimming, and even put aside her teenager I-know-everything-why-in-the-world-are-you-explaining-this-ness and let K walk her through what she wanted.

In the afteroon, Ciocia M came for a visit (her girls — L’s and E’s cousins for all intents and purposes — are still in Polska) and we went for a walk in our favorite park.

A lovely day, in other words.

In the evening, we watch some replays of Olympic events — beach volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, the individual time trial, and some tennis.

Friday Insanity

Friday 26 July 2024 |

I’ve had the matchingtracksuits.com domain registered through the same company for as long as the website has existed, which is around 19 years or so. I’ve had the actual website hosted at a few different providers, but for the last few years, I’ve used Host Gator because their cloud VPS hosting is a good value for all I do online. I also have my school site hosted here (ourenglishclass.net) as well as a Moodle installation for class content (no URL provided because only students have access). I decided it’s about time to move the domains to the same company that provides the hosting (it made sense to keep everything consolidated), so a week ago, I began the process of changing domain registrars for two of the three domains we have (kingary.net being the third). It finally went through today, and much to my surprise, it broke the two websites. Completely. And totally.

So I spent most of the day going through using phpMyAdmin to move all the necessary records from one MySQL database to another. One of the tables has 519,000 rows. Another table has a more modest 49,736. But the catch is this: I had to do massive search-and-replace operations on every table to make sure it would continue working when moved everything to the new database that now runs this site.

The upshot is this: while the site might not look all that different than it did 24 hours ago, what’s going on under the hood is completely different. It still uses WordPress, to be sure, but it’s a totally different installation in a totally different directory with a totally different database.

That was the day portion of Friday.

The evening was so much better. We took K out for her birthday dinner: she chose pho, which we all love. When we came back home, we played a family game, something we’ve never played before: a Polish game called Pytaki.It’s likely made with younger children in mind, but the premise is as simple as can be: there’s a bag of questions from which you choose a random question and then talk about it. They’re questions that show you how well you know the other people (one for K was, “What is the best way to make the person on your right happy?” she answered immediately: “Cigar and whiskey.”) or give you a chance to share a little about yourself (“What’s your favorite movie.”) Some where about family history, like “How did your parents meet?” A lovely game that we played for an hour and led to a lot of much-needed laughs.

K’s Birthday

Thursday 25 July 2024 |

Today is K’s birthday. She is more beautiful than the day I married her, forever youthful and filled with smiles and grace.

We’ll be having a celebratory dinner tomorrow — she wants pho — but today, we went to Furman for an informal concert as part of their Music by the Lake summer series. Since today’s performance included Rhapsody in Blue (?!?!), it was held indoors: a piano wouldn’t handle South Carolina humidity very well at all.

Working on the Room and the Trail

Wednesday 24 July 2024 |

The Boy and I spent a little time working on my classroom. I head back in a week; the kids go back in two.

I was toying with the idea of changing things up in my room, but everything has been as it is for about the last six years and it works — so why change it?

Sequence

Tuesday 23 July 2024 |

“Let’s play a family board game tonight!” the Boy declared. The Girl was at track practice, and the three of us were going to head out for a mountain biking adventure before it began raining. But the Boy still wanted to do something together.

He wanted Monopoly (as always); we agreed to play Sequence.

It’s a game we’ve played a lot over the years, and somewhere, I have a picture (and a post) of us playing it with Nana and Papa.

Perhaps this will be a game we play together when the kids come back home for a visit…

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