Tinkerings

Thanksgiving used to be special.  Well, I suppose it still is in many ways.  But our culture has done its best to roll it into one, long, rolling holiday known as Hallo-Thanx-Mas.  It used to be a true time of family and giving thanks and reflection.  Anymore, it just feels like it is a day off to prepare for Black Friday (which starts at midnight this year).

I haven’t been posting daily messages of thanks to Facebook, but I’ve been reading the ones posted from friends of mine around the world.  They are reminders of how thankful I am for family, for a job, a house, food, a job and the paycheck that comes with it, and so much more including simply life itself.

Growing up, Thanksgiving seemed about as big as Christmas.  Most of my Thanksgiving memories stem from time around the kids’ table at Granny and Papaw’s.  I don’t really remember those meals, but I look at pictures of those days and think about what it must have been like to have all of my Dad’s brothers and sisters around the table.  They surely must have had to put a brace under the table just to hold it up from the sheer mass of food placed there.

And then there was that one Thanksgiving when Granny fixed a raccoon Papaw had killed…

I do remember days of food preparation in the kitchen.  Every pot and pan seemingly in use at the same time.  Ovens that may never have shut down in a 72 hour time period.  Turkey. Dressing.  Green beans. Corn.  Rolls.  Gravy.  And on and on and on.  Everyone made things at their own homes and brought them in for this one meal.

Before the meal the men would hunt and after watch football.  The women would talk and cook and wash dishes.  The kids…. well, we played and played and played like it was the only thing we would ever have to do in our lives.

Through the years I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving in Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Scotland, and England to name a few.  This year Thanksgiving takes a new turn.  My kids will be spread across the United States, and I suppose they are taking my grand kids with them.  So this year Thanksgiving will be me, mom, and my brother, Steve.  No big cooking schedule (so no big cleaning schedule either).  We are going out to dinner.

Oh, there will be football later (the obligatory Lions game should be great this year!).  And probably naps rather than playing.

But I am most thankful that my mom finally gets a break from years and years of spending days preparing for one meal.  A break from constantly cleaning up only to break out the next round of pots and pans that will need to be cleaned again.  A break from feeling like she has to get up every 3 minutes and get someone tea or offer seconds or dip out pie and cake onto a second or third round of plates that will soon need to be washed as well.

And like the Christmas of my 11th grade year when the totality of my gift receiving from my parents was a new pair of jeans, this year will create a special memory from its own sense of uniqueness.  After all, when its all said and done, the memories we make are the most important possessions we will ever have.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

I like to spend a lot of time alone.  Yeah, that’s me.  The loner.  Don’t get me wrong.  I like to have coffee at Starbucks in the morning.  I like to eat out (a lot).  I like to go hiking at times.  I jog a little here and there.  And while I do a lot of that with other people around, I’m just as comfortable being in those spaces by myself.

I have nearly worn out “my spot” on my couch from sitting down with my laptop and iPad and surfing / learning/ communicating / writing / and more while NCIS or Law and Order plays in the background.  I have a very nice flat screen TV that is really just a background noise producer on many nights (and sometimes just a really, really big monitor for my iPad).

But even I surprised myself on a recent Sunday when I realized I had been sitting and watching the TV for about 45 minutes… with the sound off.  There was some football game playing.  I have no idea who.  I just remember coming out of this deep, reflecting time of thought and thinking, “How long has the sound been off?”

Deep thinking.  Introspection.  I’m afraid it is becoming a lost art in an age where media bombards us 24/7.

It is difficult to be introspective, to ponder the deeper aspects one’s life, with NCIS on the TV, TED Talks on the computer, Words with Friends on the iPad, or ELO playing through one’s earbuds.

So what did I think about during those moments of unusual quiet?  At first, there was a flood of thoughts about nothing.  (Really, ladies, when you ask a man what he was thinking about he says “nothing” he really means it.  The brain is working, but none of it is really “thought”).

Finally, I settled on my job.  Not just the idea of being a Technology Coach.  My job as an educator.  That job is being ripped from our tightly clenched fists in the name of making us better teachers.  We are holding on to the last vestiges of what teaching meant when we started in the hopes that we can maintain some meaningful interaction with students, parents, and other teachers while others mandate meaningless work and effort that distracts us from the core of who we are.

It is a depressing time to be an educator.  But there may be a silver lining tucked away inside this gray, rainy cloud.

As we mandate high stakes evaluations for teachers, we are seeing the exact same response from educators that we have seen in students for the last decade: Tell me what I have to do to be Proficient or Advanced.

In the same way we find students failing to learn because education is too focused on making sure every student is above average, teachers are now running down the same rabbit hole in an effort to be 4s and 5s rather than actually improve teaching.

Teachers are depressed.  They are stressed.  They are overwhelmed.  They are frustrated.  They are sick.  They are tired.  They are angry.

And they are getting angrier.

At some point that anger will come boiling to the surface, and in a single Howard Beale moment, real education reform can begin.

It has been just over a week since I began the second round of the HCG diet.  I have now officially lost 10 pounds in 10 days.  Yeah, OK, it was 10 pounds in 9 days, too.  And that’s why I’m writing today.

I knew my timing wasn’t too bad for starting again.  I’ll be done with the injections in time for Thanksgiving, and although I can’t just dive in and eat whatever I want, I won’t be too concerned if I over-indulge just a bit.

However, one thing I did forget was a dinner party I had agreed to cook for last night.  I love to cook (except when I’m just cooking for me), and that probably explains part of why I have a weight problem.  Basically, I like to eat.  But I digress…

I started preparing food on Monday.  The meal was simple: a small appetizer, salad, chili and cornbread, and cake for dessert.  So Monday night I put the chili together and let it sit overnight in the refrigerator so all the flavors would have time to come together.  And I put the cake together.  Yeah.  That cake.  Nanny Ogle’s North Carolina Raw Apple Cake.

Tuesday I planned my eating around the fact that I was going to go over my calorie intake.  I ate a 1/2 grapefruit for breakfast.  Snacked on an apple later.  A simple side salad for lunch.  So far so good.

I allowed myself a few crackers with cream cheese and red pepper jelly while we were waiting for people to arrive.  Oh. My. Gosh.  The sensation of carbs and fats and sugars and… well, I allowed myself to have a few more.

The salad was a blend of assorted greens, thin Honey Crisp apple slices, blueberries, cranberries, mozzarella shreds, and roasted peppers.  Not too bad for my diet.  I even allowed myself a thin slice of cornbread with my bowl of chili.  It may be the first time in history I stopped myself at just one bowl of chili.  It was tough.

And then, it was time for cake.  Yeah.  That cake again.  Nanny Ogle’s North Carolina Raw Apple Cake.  I doled out squares for those at the table and listened as the “Oh. My. Gosh” moments started to buzz.  Its like mainlining cinnamon and sugar.

As I looked at the last plate (mine) I was faced with a simple choice.  Small piece or large piece?  The next thing I knew I was sitting at the table with an empty plate.  I may have blacked out.  I’m not sure.  I definitely remember not choosing the small piece.

I was totally prepared for the consequences of putting back on 2 or 3 pounds overnight.  But, when I got on the scales this morning I weighed exactly what I weighed yesterday.  After one indulgent meal, I was extremely happy to be holding my own.

And at the end of the day, sometimes that’s all you need to pick up and get back on track.

With few exceptions (Will Ferrell and Darrell Hammond come to mind), Saturday Night Live has never been as funny as when it first started in the ’70s.  I was an instant fan.  Of course, back then I was young enough to stay up late enough to watch it without relying on re-runs on the montage of clips that outline the Best of Saturday Night Live series.

No one made me laugh more than Gilda Radner.  She had such a large cast of characters in her head, and they will all hysterically funny.  One I looked forward to more than most was that of Emily Litella.  Emily Litella was an elderly woman who did opinion pieces on the Weekend Update skit with Chevy Chase.  She would start with a classic question like, “What’s all this fuss about having too many violins on television?”  For the next three or four minutes she would go off on a rant only to be interrupted by Chevy.  “Miss Litella, that’s violence.  It is too much violence on television.  Not violins.”  Radner would look at him in bewilderment and then say, “Oh!  That’s different!”  And then look straight at the camera, smile, and in her crackly old-woman voice give her signature line.  “Never mind!”

This weekend I must have been channeling Emily Litella.  I had spent a couple of days in Nashville listening to and testifying before the House Education Committee about teacher evaluations.  I’ll admit I’ve been pretty worked up over the fact that we have this great evaluation tool from TAP, but our state has decided to use it in such a way that makes it cumbersome, time consuming, and somewhat meaningless.  Teachers and principals alike are frustrated.  Yet we continue to work through the kinks in hopes that we can, over time, morph this tool into something meaningful.

So, when I read an article in the Tennessean that the Tennessee Board of Education had made a change that would allow principals to double up on classroom observations in-between conferences, I definitely had my Emily Litella moment.

I immediately posted the article on Facebook.  I talked to leadership in our district.  I talked to people at the Professional Educators of Tennessee.  I talked and talked and talked.  I even sent out an email to our local members outlining what the paper said and calmly explaining why this was a bad idea.

Thankfully, on Sunday two or three people channeled Chevy Chase to me.  The Tennessean had it wrong.  Like so many others, the paper obviously does not understand the TEAM Model and wrote a story that was totally inaccurate.  It was suggested that I look at the Board of Education’s website and read the policy change for myself.  And I did.  And I blushed with embarrassment.

The Board of Education had approved allowing principals to do a totally separate observation (like that on the Environment rubric) while also doing the Instructional Observation.  This would, indeed, save by principals and teachers time in the model.  It appears to be a win-win for everyone.

And my immediate response was, “Oh! That’s different!”

And so to those who read my Facebook post, or received an email from me, or sat through rants I must have had over the weekend….

Never mind!

If you’ve read this blog or any length of time, you know that I spent six weeks on the HCG diet and lost about 35 pounds.  But 35 pounds was not my goal.  That was my resting place.  I’ve been off of the diet and eating however I felt like eating (within reason) for a few months now.  I ended up at about 210 pounds.  I’ve been between 210 and 215 since then as I monitor my weight and make adjustments along the way.

I know I eat out too much.  I eat larger portions than I should.  I’m addicted to fried catfish Fridays.  But I keep getting on the scale and as I see the weight inching up, I adjust for a few days and watch it come back down.  And now, after knowing that I can control this weight, I signed up or another four-weeks round of HCG.

I weighed in last Friday and spent the weekend eating anything and everything.  My instructions were simple: Eat a minimum of 3,000 calories each day, and make sure it has plenty of fat.  It was a glorious weekend.

Monday was my first 500 calorie day.  But Tuesday and Wednesday I was in Nashville and my schedule was of right off the bat.  As you can imagine, when you are limited to 500 calories, you plan your meals.  And you have to not only plan what you will eat, you have to plan when you will eat.  I tried to keep that in mind as I snacked on fruit and kept my meals to a salad with either grilled chicken or fish.  I knew I had more than the 500 calories, but at least I wasn’t eating the wrong things.

That was two days of no weighing.  On the HCG diet I weigh every day.  I need all the data points I can get to understand the trend line of my weight loss.  So, when I went in this past Friday to do my weekly weigh-in at the clinic and found I had actually lost a little more weight than I thought I had, I was ecstatic.

I was asked how I was doing.  And I responded that I was doing ok.  The worst time I had was actually that very morning when all I could think about was food.  Her response took me by surprise.  “I’m going to increase your HCG injection.” I didn’t know that was an option.  Or that I needed it.

And then she said, “Remember, if you blow it one day, the next day is all apples to get you back on track.  But if you find yourself getting stuck, we want you to eat five apples and a 6 to 8 ounce portion of a lean steak.  That will jump start the weight loss again.”

Wait.  What?  I’ll admit it.  The whole HCG thing sounds like some kind of weight loss voodoo.  But I went back to it for the same reason I chose my Mac, my iPad, and my iPhone.  It just works.

I have mulled over these things since yesterday.  Track my weight every day.  Count the calories I eat daily to know if I’m within the 500 limit or not.  Immediately make adjustments if I blow the number of calories or stop dropping pounds.  By doing these things I set myself up for success.  And they are the same kinds of things I have to practice after the weight loss is over and the HCG injections are a long forgotten memory.  Constantly evaluate progress.  Immediately make adjustments.

These are the two mantras we learn as teachers.  Constantly evaluation.  Immediately adjust.  In fact, our new TEAM Evaluation model stresses constant, continual assessment of knowledge and mastery by insisting on a minimum of three different types of assessment (not including being portfolio-based and involving students in extended writing activities).

But my clinic also has a responsibility here.  They know more about the process than I do.   They have more experience and monitor multiple people to know what works and what doesn’t.  And I need that weekly appointment with them to get feedback on how I’m doing.

As a teacher being evaluated, we also need the feedback of our evaluator.  We need it immediately in order to make adjustments before we are evaluated again.  In order to “save time,” we have also weakened the system.

Charlotte Danielson was right in talking about the framework she developed on which TEAM rests.  The minute you make this process a high stakes requirement, everybody starts doing exactly the opposite of what it takes to improve instruction.

I don’t know about others, but I paid too much money for the HCG diet to only weigh in when the 4 weeks are up.

Imagine I’m a classroom teacher and you are the parent of one of my students.  Stop reading for a moment.  Close your eyes.  Be the parent…

I have taught my students a few SPIs over the last couple of weeks and its time to give them a test.  I send a note home to let you know that there is a 100 point test coming up and it counts 1/4 of all their test grades for the year.  Its huge.  So you help your child study (in between times of muttering about what an idiot I am as a teacher for requiring something so simple to count so much).  And you can tell that your child is probably not prepared to get an A, but with some feedback from me, perhaps a parent conference or after school tutoring, your child can improve on the next few tests and that will help his or her average in my class.

Your child takes the test and comes home with another note from me:

Dear Parent:

I have graded the tests from today.  I hoped I would have time to go over them with my students before I have to give another test.  However, there are a lot of other things I have to do besides teach your children.  I have meetings to attend.  I have to plan our next field trip.  And I need to get ready for the next RTTT day at school.

As a result, I have found that I do not have time to go over the test results with your children at this time.  Instead, I’m going to wait until after the next 100 point test and talk with the students about both of them at the same time.  It will also count 1/4 of their total grade for the year, so it is very important that they come to school prepared.

Unlike the first test, this next one will be unannounced.  Your child will need to be prepared every single day.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter.  Please understand that I am totally committed to helping your child learn and improve in my class this year.

What is your gut reaction having imagined getting that letter from your child’s teacher?

That is probably the same reaction I had when I read this article in the Tennessean this morning.

Sigh.

There are times when life is a lot of fun.  Weddings.  Births.  Birthdays.  Christmas.  You know the days.

And there are times when life is…well, just life.  Like at weddings, births, birthdays, Christmas…

I’ll be honest with you.  (OK, I’m blogging about life here, honesty is probably just expected.  Especially from me).  Lately, life has been a lot more like those other times.  Not so great.  Maybe just south of not-so-great.

I have come to realize there are basically two roads available when life gives you lemons.

Sometimes you can add sugar and create a tart, but sweet and somewhat satisfying lemonade that refreshes as it cools you down.

But most of the time you just have to squint your eyes and drink in the mouth-puckering acidity of a lemon slice.  There’s no sugar.  No water.  No ice.  No glass.  You can’t dilute it in Southern Sweet Tea.

How do we teach that in school?  How do you convince kids who have grown up having every adult in their life squeezing lemons in order to make them the best glass of lemonade-tasting life that they need to just do that homework.  Take the F and lean from it.  Show up on time next time and you won’t have to go back to ISS.  Turn in your work and you can go on the next field trip.

As my Papaw used to say, “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on sucking until you do suck seed.”  Maybe he was talking about lemon seeds.

This past weekend I visited my second, or third, or fourth hometown of Wynne, Arkansas.  When I tell people how many places I’ve lived the question is inevitably, “Was your dad in the military?” or “Was your dad in the ministry?”  No.  As admirable as those professions are, my dad was a simple man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to go from factory worker and night time janitor to Chief Chemist (a difficult feat without a college degree), then Plant Manager (without an MBA), and finally Factory Owner (with the help of a lot of cheap and free family labor!).

Apart from Steve Jobs, my dad may have been the smartest man I ever encountered.  He and my mom come from that generation that sprang up in the Great Depression.  They knew how to get by on next to nothing, save every penny possible, live well within their means, not get sucked into every great advertising ploy on TV, work hard for everything they had, and still have fun every once in a while.  My mom still does.

I was actually born in Marion, Indiana, but I’ve lived in Rochelle, IL, then Richmond, IN, then back to Marion, IN, and on to Bennettsville, SC, and finally on to The City With a Smile: Wynne, AR.  I spent the last two years of high school there.  I was a shy, backward kid in those days (as opposed to the shy, backward adult I’ve become).  Fortunately, I had an “in” at school.  My cousins Jeff (dad’s family) and Robbie (mom’s family) had been there their whole lives and were both in my classes.  Believe me, after a short agonizing ten months in South Carolina, I needed every advantage I could get.

So it was with just a little hesitation that I attended a 35th reunion gathering.  We had no expectations of who would show up.  Some had to cancel at the last minute.  Others may have forgotten.  But those of us gathered around two end-to-end tables in the back room of Kelly’s Family Restaurant surrounded by the classes of ’61 and ’71 talked as if we had just left American History on our  way to English.

The 1976 edition of the Wynne Stinger was passed around.  I was not only amazed at how many people I had forgotten, but by how many I knew.  Lots of memories flooded over me that had been long ago shelved in some forgotten warehouse among the billions of dendrites and synapses of my brain. I used to like math.  Who knew?  And suddenly, high school was more fun than I had allowed myself to remember.  Friendships more valuable than I had considered.  And lessons learned more powerful and life-changing than I had realized.

So, here’s to the Bi-Centennials, the Class of 1976.  Thank you for the part you played in crafting this thing I call My Life.  I am forever changed because of you.

And, yes…that’s a good thing.

Tomorrow my mom and I will get into her car and make the 7-hour trek from Cleveland, TN, to Wynne, AR, for my 35th high school reunion in “The City With A Smile.”  Thirty-five years.  Just being thirty-five sounded so old in 1976!

I only spent two years at Wynne High School, so I don’t have all the memories of growing up there my classmates have been sharing on our group page in Facebook.  But I have to say that living in Wynne for a few years was a great experience in many ways.

Oh, I visited there through the years.  It is the area where my mom and dad grew up and married.  Both of them had family still in Arkansas when we lived in Illinois, Indiana, and South Carolina.  So I had spent a lot of time there before finally moving in 1974.

A lot of my memories are tied to music.  I’m not sure why.  When we moved to Wynne, I was listening a lot to Elton John and Steely Dan.  During my last two years of high school I was bouncing back and forth between the sounds of Larry Gatlin (thanks to my Uncle Don), the Kingsmen Quartet and the Dixie Echoes (thanks to my South Carolina church friends), Alice Cooper (thanks to my own sense of weirdness), the Eagles, Billy Joel, Harry Chapin, Electric Light Orchestra, Cat Stephens, and more.  And nearly all of them on 8-track tape!

I drove the family station wagon on some of my first dates.  Later, it was the pick-up truck we used for work.  My parents finally bought a new car just days before my first prom in the 11th grade: a Cadillac Seville (the original body style…sweet!).

There were nights and nights and more nights of playing Spades and Hearts with Donna, Robbie, and Jeff.  Hours of it.  Those hours came in handy while serving as a Christian Serviceman’s Center Director in Dunoon, Scotland.  They Navy loves Hearts and Spades!

I worked 2nd shift for my parents during my senior year.  Forty hours and more.  I got paid $10 a week.  That wasn’t much even in the 70′s.  But my mom and dad were getting their business off the ground and they weren’t taking much of a paycheck either.  And then, when I finally graduated in 1976 my dad took me car shopping.  He said he had been putting my salary back each week to save it up for my graduation gift.  He bought me a brand new 1976 Cutlass Supreme.  That was one fine car.  I drove 200 miles the first day I had it!

It will be fun this weekend.  I look forward to a lot of laughter and memory lane trips.  We’ll start at the Homecoming Game tomorrow night.  From there… the sky’s the limit.

Maybe I should buy a new deck of cards and crank up a little Alice…

Like most people in America, and possibly around the world, I remember where I was when the towers were hit.

I was doing some free lance work as an Institutional Researcher for Tennessee Temple University in Chattanooga.  I was in a meeting discussing some of the data they wanted collected when someone stepped into the room to say that an airplane (not a jet) had hit one of the Twin Towers in New York City.

Our first reaction was that a small private or commuter plane had gone down.  I expected to see something on the evening news later.  We asked this person for other news, but that was all they knew.  A plane had crashed into a tower.  We talked about it for a few minutes and then went back to our meeting.

It didn’t take long for the world to turn upside down.

Our meeting was interrupted a second time to say that it was a passenger jet and that a second one had just hit the second tower.  The floor seemed to drop out from under us as we all experienced this sucker punch to the gut of our nation.

Everything stopped at that point.  People gathered around television sets as we sat glued to the news.  At first we had some hope that this attack would be minimal in terms of loss of life.  The Towers were hit, but they were standing.

The news just continued to get worse.  Throughout that day we saw people jumping from the building; preferring to die from the jump than be burned alive.  We saw the Towers fall.  The Pentagon was hit.  A plane went down in Pennsylvania.  My God! Just how bad was this news going to get?

The news start talking about the 50,000 people that work in and around the Towers.  How many had died in the crushing debris was still speculation.  It could have been like my entire town was wiped out in one swipe of an angry arm on a chess set.  It was incomprehensible.

There was a sadness that settled over us that day.  Over the next few days we watched as the brave men and women known only as the “First Responders” ran toward the danger time and again.  Our hearts revived somewhat when our President stood with them speaking through a megaphone and declared that those who had struck us would “hear from all of us soon.”

Maybe it is a generational thing, but one of the events that helped me see that we could stand strong in the face of an attack on our own shores was when Saturday Night Live brought in the Mayor and dozens of First Responders to start a show within days of the attack.  I wondered how they would handle it.  It didn’t take long to find out.  Lorne Michaels asked Mayor Guiliani if it was OK for them to be funny that night.  Guiliani turned and said, straightfaced, “Why start now?”

That was the night the healing started for me.

I stayed glued to the TV news for weeks, even though there wasn’t anything new to report.  As a nation we stood together.  Building a resolve.  Music started to help.  Alan Jackson made us stand and reflect as he sang, “Where were you when the world stopped turning…”  While some thought it was inappropriate, Toby Keith inspired many of us with his homage to the troops when he sang, “We’ll put a boot up your ass, its the American Way.”

We’ve been through a lot since 9/11.  Too many wars that have lasted too long.  Financial meltdowns.  Scandals.  Politics where the fringe left and the fringe right have the loudest voices while those in the middle from both parties try to keep things on an even keel.  The list is long.

Today, none of that is important.  Today, my thoughts are with the families and friends of the innocent victims of one of the most cowardly acts in the history of our nation.  Today, I again applaud the brave men and women who ran toward the Towers.  Today, I am again reminded that our country is a proud nation with a powerful heritage.  Today, I am proud of all those who have served our country in the face of such severe adversity around the world.

As a much older but still powerful song says, “I’m proud to be an American….”