Have Cheese, Will Travel

Badteacher. is on the road! Today we come to you from the little hamlet of Wausau, Wisconsin, known for having an insurance company named after it. Well, it's not so bad. The Great Dane Brewery (anyplace named after a dog is always good, after all) makes the trip all worthwhile.

Tomorrow, on to the mountains of Michigan.

Philip Pullman and the Phenomenal Phenomena

Thoughts while reading the His Dark Materials trilogy....

The job of the writer, frequently, is to take a boring idea and turn it into something exciting. In the case of Philip Pullman's The Northern Lights (The Golden Compass, if you prefer), he takes an amazing natural phenomenon, made dull by science, and breathes life into it once more.

Pullman's chosen spectacle is the aurora borealis - the titular northern lights. The aurora is something difficult to fathom, as evidenced by the woodcut to the right. It comes from a book by the renowned "I. Platt," and claims to show "...An Extraordinary Appearance Of The Aurora Borealis, Observed By Captain Parry In His Expedition To The Arctic Regions." Though Platt's imprint is a bit simplistic, we can still get the general idea of what Captain Parry saw: a semicircle of bright lights in the sky. A fantastic sight, to be sure, certainly unfamiliar to most people.

(Side note: this Captain Parry happens to be William Edward Parry, an English admiral and arctic explorer. Although I have not been able to find proof of such, he seems to be the basis/namesake for Pullman's character Will Parry. But on to more important things.)

Luckily, we are a creative bunch, we human beings. We just hate it when we don't know why something happens. The red, green, yellow lights dancing through the northern sky must have some sort of explanation. In medieval Greenland, for instance, one idea held that the ocean was surrounded by a massive, circular fire. No real explanation, just a big old fire!

Ok, not that exciting, but still, the aurora themselves, still great!

When we get to Parry's time, the early-to-mid-1800s, we start to get more science-y. Some theorized that meteors caused the aurora. Ben Franklin felt it had to do with electric particles concentrating and reacting in the frigid polar climate. Wrong-o, Benny! Well, maybe. We know now that the ultimate source has to do with solar wind blowing across the atmosphere. By "we," of course, I mean "scientists who specialize in this particular field." Still, it's hard to say exactly what makes a rainbow of colors dance across the night sky in Alaska, northern Russia, Norway, and other places far too cold for most sane people to take an interest in.

Still, it is decidedly unexciting to think of the reasoning. A stargazer and a scientist take in the aurora.

Stargazer: "Oooh, pretty lights!"
Scientist: "Yeah. It's just the solar wind."
Stargazer: "What? Look, purple!"
Scientist: "Hold on, I can explain it to you. It all starts in the magnetosphere. There's plasma up there, which..."
Stargazer: "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ."

While the whole explanation may be fascinating to the scientist, it really contains way too many words for most people. And while if you REALLY think about it, the idea that powerful winds blow through OUTER SPACE, flying BILLIONS OF LIGHTYEARS, only to collide with our planet to produce PRETTY LIGHTS is pretty fantastic, it's pretty dull when you get down to the nitty gritty. In short, science is awesome, but it's boring. Enter Pullman (Quotes are my own. Heck, it's all made up.):

Fake Pullman: "The northern lights are a zone of weakness in the fabric between alternative worlds."

Inattentive Blogger: "Oooh. Pass the popcorn."

Fake Pullman: "You see, at this moment, millions of tiny events are happening around the world. Choices are being made, branches are snapping in the wind, butterflies are flapping their wings..."

Inattentive Blogger: "Is this where Ashton Kutcher comes in?"

Fake Pullman: "I hate you. Anyway, everywhere, things are happening. While only a limited amount of things happen, a perfectly unlimited number of things could happen. Enter the alternate universes."

Inattentive Blogger: "The Butterfly effect. And only Ashton Kutcher can save the universe...."

Fake Pullman: "You know, if I believed in God, which I don't, I'd ask him to damn you right now. As I was saying, if a mosquito flies too close to a bug zapper and dies, it is altogether possible that there is another world where the same mosquito does not fly into the zapper. Or perhaps there's another world where bug zappers themselves have not been invented. Limitless possibilities exist, but only one can happen in each world. They may be minor changes, they may be large, but each one spawns a new plane of existence."

Inattentive Blogger: "Now about those pretty lights..."

Fake Pullman: *Groan*

And scene, with many apologies. Whatever the case, Pullman's explanation of what the aurora is definitely trumps science's. I want to read about multiple worlds separated by simple differences. It's fascinating, if frequently irrelevant, to think about how the world would change if things went differently. Would I be a teacher if I went to school to get a degree in music instead? Would Neil Armstrong have been as famous if he didn't play golf on the moon? If I didn't eat so much ice cream, would I be a professional baseball player? Maybe there's more to it than that, but this is a line of thought that can produce far more interest, and far more readers, than a simple, "...um.... it's the solar wind, silly."

Mea Culpa (and other unnecessary Latin phrases)

Ok. So, it may be time to face the music. I haven't posted on this blog in approximately a year. The real problem was concept. It's probably just best if I recognize this blog's bread and butter: entertaining black and white photos I find on these old interwebs. Mmmmm.... Aesthetically pleasing..... Nom nom nom.

Today's photo symbolizes my discovery that blogging, even when it's supposed to be about teaching, doesn't actually have to be about anything at all.

Oh, and random Latin, as promised (no, I don't care that "eureka" is Greek):
In nomine patris!
Natura abhorret a vacuo!

And an extra special, education oriented one:
Repetitio est mater studiorum!

Act of badteaching interrupting badblogging.

Ideally, this would've been a recap of the first week's lessons and it would've been posted this past Friday. Unfortunately, it isn't, and it wasn't. No, this whole school thing is getting in the way. There was the grading, oh yes, the grading, which is not even close to being done. And there was the @(%#@* yearbook, which refused to be finally put to bed despite my best editorial efforts. I swear I'll be haranguing students about next year's edition while making inconsequential edits to the old one. Then there were the peaks and valleys of planning three brand new courses to start the year.

Of course, here I am complaining about how my time has been ill-used over the past week, and I just spent about fifteen minutes finding this picture to the right. Look at it, though. Worth every second. Is that an alligator he's holding? And what's going on in the background there?

Suffice it to say that the school year's off to an invigorating start.

Also, John Oliver is awesome. If he's coming to your city, or even a city near you, and you enjoy things that are fun and entertaining, go see his show. You'll never feel so indebted to the British Empire.

And now, a Haiku about New Teacher Orientation.

Orientation:
Your meetings and paperwork
Drown me in sorrow.

Okay, so it's not all bad. Alas, teachers are not free from the soul-sucking meetings that singe the backsides of cubicle jockeys the world over. Today, for instance, my interminable desk-carrying was interrupted by six hours of chair meetings, training, accreditation seminars and semi-mandatory meals. I spent so much time sitting and listening that my legs hurt. That's definitely a new one.

Of course, some of this time was well spent. I spent a thrilling two hours in a life-altering behavioral management seminar that may threaten my status as a Bad Teacher (not likely). Everything starts with stability (of the classroom environment) and significance (of the material taught). If students find either of these elements lacking, they will surely immolate even the nicest teacher, no matter how many stickers he/she doles out. That's what they apparently teach at Michigan State, at any rate. Maybe without the burning and the fire.

But did all of this sitting and listening and hand-cramping note taking help me finish my course outlines? No. So I'm working on them right now. Yes, late into the evening. Hey - even the worst teachers have to do work sometimes.

badmanuallaborer.

Why, you might ask, is this young lad smiling so joyfully while sitting at his desk? Because he didn't have to carry the damn thing down three flights of stairs, that's why.

You see, it's that time of year when teachers artfully arrange their classrooms so that this jolly whippersnapper and his ilk can destroy them within a matter of weeks. For me this meant lugging ten desks from the fifth floor to my classroom. No elevator, only a winding staircase slanted to promote the highest potential for plummeting to your death.

Why was I doing this? I arrived at school this morning to find that oh joy, oh rapture, enrollment was up up up. Which is good for the school, allowing us to stay open and so forth. But it is not good for my classroom, which is not meant to hold upwards of thirty morose fourteen-year olds at one time.

My room is very nice. It stays cool in the caustic days of late August and warm in arctic January. Still, its maximum capacity is, oh, twenty-four desks. It is small, which is not something I am upset about. It's good for everyone involved when a class's size is kept as low as possible. More one-on-one time with students, etc. But the kids will be packed in my room like yuppies at a street festival, and I only have twenty desks. Well, had. Now I have thirty. Thirty antique, gum coated, sticky scoliosis-inducers ready for my students' displeasure.

Four hours of this and other similar pack-mulery also means that I did not have time to work on my lessons today. Will I be working on them tonight? Probably not.

Why?

Do I really have to tell you the answer?

Classroom Management: Idealism vs. Reality.

One of the biggest challenges for any new teacher is drawing up an effective, above all useful classroom management plan. I have never done one, not really. Oh, there was the crap they have you do in teacher school, but none of that stuff is actually applicable in real life. But you have to have one to be a real life teacher, even if you don't have a model to work from. Because that would just be too easy.

I typed the words "classroom management" into Google, hoping to find a model written by someone who is NOT a Bad Teacher. Unfortunately, most seem to be penned by Dirty Hippies. These tend to call for lots of sitting in circles, holding hands and talking about feelings. One of the first links I pulled up included the following gem:

"The best rule that I have heard and I would believe to be my attitude towards classroom rules is that I need a classroom where learning takes place, and if we can respect each other then we don’t need any other 'rules.'"

This is a wonderful sentiment. I love this idea, that I could walk into a classroom and quantify "respect" in such a way that teenagers will automatically give it to a) me and b) one another. I also like how the author puts "rules" in "quotes." Is he/she implying that "rules" are in fact "cookies" or "dinosaurs?" Will they wander the room feasting on "plants" and "smaller dinosaurs?"

Okay, you're right, I'm just being unreasonable because I don't have any "rules" of my "own" to put in a "classroom management plan" yet. So here's another wonderful sounding, but completely suicidal idea:

"I may try to create a class constitution if behaviors in the class are inconsistently out of control."

I feel terrible for the author of this line. You see, they have probably been stuffed into a locker by their students at this point, if by some miracle they are still alive. It is one thing to start the year with a class constitution. Then it's already in place, the students know it's there, etc. But to draw one up because the students are throwing a Boston Tea Party in the back of the classroom... now, that just doesn't seem wise. And what does the author mean by inconsistently? Wouldn't it make more sense to try to change rules if students are consistently out of control? What the hell is going on here?

The inclusion of the words "may" and "try" on behalf of the teacher seems to suggest that the students have already seen the whites of his/her eyes and have opened fire. The minutemen are burning the supply depot while the red coats try to enforce the rule of law.

Here's hoping I can come up with something in between an idealist's wet dream and the "nefarious scheme" suspected by Calvin. Not that there's anything wrong with idealists - you kind of have to be one to be a teacher, after all.