The Week That Was

Busy, busy couple of weeks.

Just finished my first week of my second student teaching placement. I am in an 8:1:1 Special Education classroom in Spencerport, which aside from the commute time is not that different from teaching at Freddie Thomas.

The days are busy and there are a million things going on. The hardest part for me is that I am actually only teaching social studies for about 40 minutes a day. The experience is great and my cooperation teaching has been awesome. I just have a hard time seeing myself taking over the room and doing all she does in a few short weeks.

Avi has been awesome. We are taking her ice skating this evening so I should have some new video and pictures up soon.

The teaching portion of my Master's degree is quickly coming to a close. I have a lot of loose ends to tie up so that I can say when this is done is a few months that I am going to be certified by September.

Went to go see "How to Train Your Dragon" last night with D. Not to name drop but my best friend is a producer for Dreamworks and he strongly recommended we go see it. Absolutely loved it.

Not sure if I would put it ahead of "Kung Fu Panda" as far as Dreamworks animated movies go. I really loved the Fu. But I would place it ahead of a few Pixar films on my list of favorite animated films.

The visuals were just amazing. It was almost the Anti-Eragon (don't get me started on my hatred of Eragon). I loved that the kid needed the dragon as much as the dragon needed him, it made for a very touching story.

I love leaving a theatre feeling content with the cash we just laid down.

As far as what is exiting me right now.

Check THIS OUT

Best. Thing. I. Have. Ever. Seen (thanks Drew)

Those who know me know that the list of things that I hate consists of the following in no particular order:

Aliens
Robots
Vamipres
Zombies
and Diseases

(Although I love Alien Robots)

But if there is an alien I love, it's Predator. At least Predator makes no excuses about what he is going to do to you. He is going to kill you. And if you put up a good fight, he is going to tear your skull and spine out of your carcass, he is going to polish it, and he is going to hang it on his wall with all his other trophies.

Unlike Aliens, who impregnate you with thier offspring and use you like some twisted incubator, Predator finishes you quickly.

And, Predator loves to kill Aliens, which is awesome.

This movie is going to be awesome. (Which is exactly what I said after seeing the trailer for Alien v. Predator Requiem, which failed, epically)

The Deathly Hallows

Just put Avi to bed, settled onto the couch and was flipping looking for something to watch. Stopped on Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban for lack of anything better to watch.

During the first commercial break, these scenes came up as part of ABC Family's Harry Potter Weekend.

Fool me once with bad Harry Potter movies, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on me again. Fool me three times, and I must really loves this series of books.

I love that it looks like they got the Shell Cottage scene correct. There is no more important moment in any of the books than when Harry makes the decision while digging Dobby's grave, Horcruxes, not Hallows.

More Funny or Die

Presidential Reunion: Bush Sr. vs. Bush Jr. from Will Ferrell

Thank You, Bill

Bill Maher's New Rule: FIRE THE PARENTS!

When there are no books in the house, and there are no parents in the house, you know who raises the kids? That's right, the television. Kids aren't keeping up with their studies; they're keeping up with the Kardashians. We're allowing the television, as babysitter, to turn us into a nation of slutty idiots. By the way, one sign your 9-year-old may be watching too much One Tree Hill: if she has an imaginary friend with benefits.

It is too easy to say that all the problems that we have in education are based in bad parenting.

But it is a lot closer to the truth than it being the teacher's fault.

Thank god, as I am writing this Avi is reading a book.

Speaking of Race in Sports

Continuing the theme from the other day and the Torii Hunter comments. I ran across This... while I was drinking my coffee this morning and found it very interesting.

I bookmarked the website The Mo'Kelly Report

Wide receiver and father Plaxico Burress ... jail (Home recently foreclosed) Star guard and unwed father (2 children) Gilbert Arenas ... on his way to jail. Rapper Lil Wayne, unwed father of 4 children (two born simultaneously to different women) ... just finished tucking himself in ... you got it, prison. Black male pathology is in full swing. It's not funny and it's not a figment of one's imagination. It's true and we should recognize it for what it is.

I am using the Torii Hunter statements as a mini lesson on Race today, as Sid said, this is either going to be very good, or very bad.

Avi Pictures

Impostors

I love Torii Hunter

But he said some really stupid things about race in baseball.

Now, like the author of the post quoted above, I do not assume to know more about race and baseball than Torii.

What I do know, is that African slaves were brought from the West coast of Africa and brought to locations all over the New World.

Ask my U.S. History classes, we covered this topic in depth.

Someone being Dominican, or Costa Rican, or American, is just an arbitrary function of where their African ancestors were brought.

The author of that post pretty much sums up my feelings on race and athelets in baseball.

Happy Birthday Daddy

Plastic

Which only fuels my don't use plastics fire:

Exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) during pregnancy can cause permanent abnormalities in the uterus of offspring and the reprogramming of genes, said new research from the Yale School of Medicine. The study is the first to show that exposure to the chemical, commonly found in the epoxy linings of food cans and in polycarbonate baby bottles, may permanently affect sensitivity to oestrogen, said the team led by Professor Hugh S Taylor.

BPA, like the kind found in plastic drinking bottles

My Dream Job

I could absolutely be a stay at home dad.

Last week of first placement. Birthday tomorrow. Busy week.

Reflection

As part of my student teaching seminar, we are asked to write reflections about our experiences. I will have more to share in this space regarding what I have encountered when time and energy permit. For now, I would like to share my most recent reflection, where we were asked to write about a student who has had an impact on us, either good or bad. This is what I had to say:

There is a line at the film “The Devil’s Own” starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford, where Brad Pitt’s character is telling his father figure Ford that their story was always going to have bad ending. Pitt, who is Irish and a member of the IRA tells Ford “Don't look for a happy ending. It's not an American story. It's an Irish one.” What Pitt’s character is saying is that we want so desperately for every story to have the miracle ending that we as Americans have come to expect, that we forget that so often in life, there are no happy endings. For people all over the world, they spend their whole lives, and then die, waiting for that miracle ending. In literature it is called Deus ex Machina, or “God from the machine” where no matter how desperate the situation, things will find a way of working out for the protagonist. I have made this mistake when working with my students at Hillside prior to starting my student teaching. Sometimes there are no happy endings. After talking with a student and a parent about the issues that are going on in the home, it is my expectation that from week to week, day to day, things will begin to get better. The harsh truth however is that sometimes things don’t get better. Sometimes a young person who is struggling against all that they are dealing with in their lives, will simply continue to struggle.

Sometimes, even though we are in America, the stories don’t have a happy ending. I would like to sit and write about my student who in three weeks I have turned from an underachieving problem student, into a social studies whiz-kid (it’s not as if I don’t have a few of them) but the harsh and brutal reality is that this is by and large not an American story. The students that I have spent the last month plus working with will go on after they are done with me, and I them. Some of them will succeed in both school and life, and some of them wont. The hardest part is that there is shockingly little that I can do to alter that course. I am not so naïve to think that in seven weeks I could alter the course of all 45 or so student’s lives. But I do also realize the impact I am having, if only for an hour and a half five days a week for a month and a half. Do I have students who have made an impression on me? Do I have students who I will remember long after they have forgotten about me? Of course I do. I far under estimated the impact that student teaching was going to have on me as a professional and as a person. Having worked in my school for two years, I arrogantly believed that I knew more about this than I did. This has been the single greatest learning experience of my life, and I say that knowing full well that I have two weeks left where I am now, and seven weeks at my next placement.

I am sorry for the negative tone to this, the ironic thing is, I write this after having what has been my most successful week here. You asked me to write about a student who has made an impression on me, and I could easily have filled these few short pages with stories about this young person or that, who has surprised me in a good way or a bad. I could talk about the young lady who has shocked me day in and day out with her ability to think at a higher level. Or the young man who is so confident in his abilities in social studies, but is so close every day to exploding on me that I have had to navigate a mine field with him. I could have written 10 pages on each and every one of them. But it would not have been enough. Instead, let me take these pages to talk about the group as a whole. They are wonderful, awful people, just like all of us, who for the most part are doing the best with what they have, and what they have been taught. I cannot move heaven and earth in 7 weeks, but I can alter the course of a young person’s life, even if just slightly. Maybe after all is said and done, it will be an American story after all.

The Ghosts of Presidents Past

Saw this last night and literally laughed out loud (lol as the kids say)

"If the Moon Were Spare Ribs, I'd Have Seconds"

Yesterday was Harry's birthday. Will Ferrell is a classic.