Here’s a picture of our entire school staff — teachers, custodians, counselors, paraprofessionals, administrators, and cafeteria workers.
And here are all the people who were working here when I first started teaching at the school:
I am, in short, the seventh-longest serving teacher at the school at this point.
This is my new reading/focus corner. All those books? Mostly provided by the generosity of the state’s education department. But the state has also said all books I have students read have to be vetted. By three teachers. So I don’t know if it applies to these books or not. If so, I’ll hang a sign on the bookshelf:
I recently dipped into a social media feed titled “HELL IS REAL” to see what kind of discussion goes on there. Not much discussion — mainly just a bunch of disturbing memes.
The question that comes immediately to mind: why would an all-loving and omniscient god create a bunch of creatures he knew would end up in eternal torment that he himself created? It just makes no sense.
Two things struck me about this: first, the imagery is so disturbing. Second, “affirm yes”? Did the creator of this meme think that at some point we would be standing in front of God, and he’d patiently point out that we didn’t affirm “Yes” (redundant much?) in our social media feed so it’s off to eternal torment for us…
This one is so oddly specific. If we could hear the people screaming in hell, we might not fornicate. We might lie; we might do drugs; we might murder (see meme below), but we sure as hell wouldn’t fornicate.
Why is the devil eating this guy? And do hoodies lead you to hell?
If only this god who so wants to spend eternity with us had done a better job getting us to that point…
It’s disturbing that in 2023 people still have such simplistic, brutal, and illogical views. They pass this poison on to children and scar them for life. I just can’t understand how they can posit a) a loving god and b) an eternity of torment. It just makes no sense to me.
A favorite of mine, taken just weeks after K and I got married. Edited for the third time…
The meme — I couldn’t pass it up. The Crusades — not something one would joke about. So I said so.
In the end, the original poster devolved to this:
I’m not sure what he was referring to when he complained I deleted a comment: I didn’t knowingly delete any comment. Still, the rest of the comment left me wondering how someone like that can function in society. If you’re an adult willing to call someone stupid, who is willing to behave in such a juvenile manner, how can you hold a job? If it takes so relatively little to get you to behave like a pouting child, how can you keep your mouth shut when it really matters?
In the end, I left the conversation with the following final words: “Thanks for the wonderful Christian example. I’ll leave you to have the last word. Make it a good one!”
The start of the school year approaches — only a little over a week and a half from now, I’ll be starting my twenty-fifth year in the classroom. Or twenty-sixth? Or twenty-fourth? Twenty-somethingth. This is a year of changes in a lot of ways. My room layout has been, more or less, the same for the last decade. If it works, why mess with it? But now I have a new desk from K and a new bookshelf from our house, so things are getting a little bit of a shakeup.
I’m also planning some changes in the simple things we do every day in class. No more article of the week for on-level classes as the bell-ringer. More discussion in class, more discussions that are simple, shorter. More writing, writing that is less structured and more choice-oriented.
The Boy and I spent a good bit of the late morning and early afternoon in my classroom, arranging things, putting books back on shelves, wiping down a few things.
K changed jobs a few weeks ago, moving away from pure surveying and CAD work to something a little different: water-line inspection. Sort of. She works for Greenville Water now, which means she no longer needs the fancy desk she was using.
Which means, I took it to school today. When I walked into my room, this is the sight that greeted me: all the desks turned up, ready for the poor custodians to come and scrape gum off the bottoms of desks.
More changes when we got back home: our neighbors are going to be moving out at some point in the near future. They’ve lived there long before we arrived. It will be strange for someone else to live there.
I spent some time working outside; K stayed in the house. Typical summer Saturday.
The raccoons have left, heading back to New Jersey to catch a flight Saturday back to Krakow.
It’s so very quiet…
A member of a Catholic forum recently asked the following question:
Should we allow our observations of the material world and the universe to inform our interpretation of scripture?
To many of us, this seems like a simple issue — the cliche “no-brainer.” It’s literally asking, “Should the things we learn from humanity’s scientific endeavors affect how we view a 2,000+ year-old book?” Of course it should! In what common-sense universe would it not?
But the responses went the other way:
We should allow the word of God to inform us of the interpretations of the study of the material world.
I’m not sure what the hell would be the point of this. If we were to do this, we would be looking for the firmament of water above the earth, and our study of genetics would consist of putting striped sticks by mating animals to see if it produced striped offspring. Hint: it won’t. Yet both of these ideas are from the Bible…
Another response:
No, the opposite..we should view the world from a biblical perspective, seeing through the lens of the word so as not to be deceived
Talk about pots and kettles!
Spent the day in professional development, then mowed. Not much else to do other than include an image from this weekend.
Quite the change from the last week — three cars washed. Nothing else today.