My Thanksgiving weekend, like much of my life, was a little soured by my tendency to obsess over those problems that often cause me grief. I fretted further that November, perhaps my favorite month, was going to end with stains of stress on it. But I hope that I’m learning a lesson to ameliorate that bad [...]
Archive for November, 2008
Not With A Bang, But A Whimper…And Then A Hymn Of Praise
Posted in Living well, Religion, tagged deliverance, journals, Lead Kindly Light, stress, trusting God on November 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Journal FAIL
Posted in Humor, tagged Deseret Book, irony, journals on November 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Several years ago, I bought this binder at Deseret Book to hold pages for my journal. If you can’t read the Bible verse on the cover, it’s Isaiah 30:8, which says, “Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for [...]
Bad Parent Stories
Posted in Education, Humor, tagged academic achievement, CCSD, cultural criticism, Las Vegas, parenting on November 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
After my most popular letter to the editor appeared last year, a letter venting frustration about the lack of rigorous, involved parenting in Southern Nevada and the subsequent failure of students to achieve, I wanted to compile a book of bad parent stories for teachers to enjoy. I planned to collect anecdotes about the clueless, [...]
Fun With Nature Documentaries
Posted in Random on November 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Satirical social commentary, theological inspiration, political analysis, and artistic appreciation are all fine and good, and I’ll get back to that right quick, but for today… A little while ago I found myself wanting to bond with my 9-year-old boy by having some goofy fun. Solution: cool clips of nature documentaries courtesy of YouTube. Specifically, shots of [...]
Gay Marriage “Twilight” Protest?
Posted in Humor, Politics and Society, tagged gay marriage, LDS Church, temple protest, Twilight on November 22, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Just wondering: since a lot of people have decided, in light of the LDS Church’s advocacy on behalf of California’s Proposition 8, to boyott anything even remotely Mormon (including the Sundance Film Festival, because it’s held in Mormon-heavy Utah), will proponents of gay marriage also boycott the new movie Twilight? The Twilight books were written by [...]
“Work Smart” Myth Exposed
Posted in Education, Politics and Society, Religion, tagged contrarian wisdom, Doctrine and Covenants, effort, old fashioned, work on November 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The popular maxim “work smarter, not harder” is pure hogwash. It implies that clever tricks can supplant sustained effort. While effectiveness is unarguably a virtue, nothing can take the place of sweat. In teaching, we can implement all the cutesy activities, routines, and fads that the educrats can imagine, but the bottom line is that no [...]
Future News Headline, Thanks To Congress Throwing Our Money Away For Bailouts
Posted in Humor, Politics and Society, tagged bailouts, Congress, economy, unsustainable temporary solutions on November 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
“Last Rich Guy Finally Broke: Befuddled Congress Scratches Head And Wonders, ‘Now What?’”
Computer Game Classics
Posted in Living well, tagged Beyond the Forbidden Forest, Electronic Arts, electronic music, Skate or Die, video games, Whitley Strieber on November 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Though I do rail on the juvenile obsession with electronic entertainment in our society, I won’t deny that many video games are just pure, clean fun, especially the older games that I remember from my childhood. The miracle that is YouTube now allows us all instant trips down hyper-nostalgia lane. 1987 gave us Skate or Die, [...]
Letting Me Make Mistakes
Posted in Living well, tagged development, growth, leadership, learning, patience, self improvement, teaching on November 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Not all trial and error is learning the hard way. I’ve found that some of my biggest progress in life came after some wiser, older person over me let me stumble along and find my own way. As a student teacher, my mentors looked over more than a few lesson plans that they knew wouldn’t [...]
Teenage Tragedies
Posted in Education, Politics and Society, tagged censorship, drinking, drugs, materialism, mourning, reckless driving on November 18, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The Las Vegas Review-Journal is reporting today on a 16 year old girl who died Sunday when the car she was in rolled over. It rolled because the drunk teenage driver was racing another teen. The driver, the son of a local judge, is on suicide watch. This tragedy is heartbreaking enough, but what makes [...]
The Kind Of Day This Teacher Lives For
Posted in Education, tagged academic achievement, Anna Karenina, bagels, effective teaching, grammar, Mozart, Oedipus Rex, Paris Hilton jokes on November 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Friday was productive. I didn’t plan anything special, but by about the middle of the day, I realized that it was a really good one. After a simple error identification and correction exercise on the projector for a warm up (courtesy of Yahoo!), most of my classes were studying Oedipus Rex, which I’d perform aloud [...]
New LDS-themed Humor Blog
Posted in Humor, Religion, tagged guide to stuff, irony, Mormons on November 13, 2008 | 5 Comments »
For the last few weeks, my friend Steve and I have been putting together a new blog poking fun at the foibles of Mormon society (target of our first entry: the tendency of Mormons to poke fun at the foibles of Mormon society–because what the world really needs now is more self-referential irony.) It’s starting to [...]
Attention Parents: We Are NOT A Correspondence School
Posted in Education, tagged attendance, cultural criticism, parents, personal responsibility on November 13, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Is this a Las Vegas thing? A week never passes without a student coming into class to declare that they’ve been absent for the last two or three days, and then stare at me expectantly. I try to draw out some civil cooperation from them by saying something like, “And…..” Then they will usually ask [...]
Jim Carrey’s Legacy, Perhaps?
Posted in Humor on November 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
This link goes to the comics page from the October 2008 New Era, my church’s magazine for teenagers. Now, I understand that the cartoon at the bottom is a baseball player trying to be slick and intimidate a base runner from bolting by making a reference to “stealing” as a sin, but…why is it his [...]
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