Out of Context

Ville To Ville: 2019: Already Signed up for 2020 Mom and Sister: BOSSES I started this blog two years ago to document my marathon training for the 2018 Flying Pig - and any educational thoughts or stories I had while doing said training I was going to write down.  If you go looking for theses posts you will find nothing.  Nada.  Zip, zilch - zero .  They do not exist because I never actually wrote any.  I had every intention - I even started one.  I deleted it.  I eventually went on to answer the age old question - "can Aaron run for over 5 hours straight?"  The answer, is a resounding yes.  Also - I totally got a sniper picture of myself with my sister and mom finishing the race.  Awesome and . . . *shudder.*  It was fun!  I don’t delete posts any more – instead spend a little time tidying them up before I just let them hang out there in Internet, hoping they either get better with age or fi...

This is a long chapter.  I'll probably write two or three posts about it - I counted the pages.  It is nearly twice as long as the rest of the chapters and involved too - a lot going on.  It brought a lot of moments to my mind, took me to a lot of places in my timeline and so things to write about.  Here's Part 1.  The opening paragraph caught my attention for a while - I just sat thinking about if it would be useful for students to ponder as future educators, or if I could work it into a lesson about seeing the classroom.  How do we see the classroom - we can't see everything at once, we are not able to see that fourth dimension like Tralfamadorians, but can we develop a critical eye that lets us see the past, future and present all within a larger sociocultural context?  At least an imagining of the future we want - again I return to the use of  Currere .  Seeing the classroom as an active conversation, not a passive info dump - t...

I have a text from a former friend of mine.  It just reads- "Hey hope your week was a little less stressful, and you have had some lovely fall weather!!!" I say former, because two days later she was dead.  So it goes . We were not close friends, probably more acquaintances.  She worked at the local around the corner from my Cincinnati apartment and we chatted most Sundays while I drank coffee and did the crossword before Tammy could get to it.  Sometimes I'd order goetta and eggs, dry wheat toast... but mostly just coffee.  I have my own mug there, thanks to Heather- another worker- it has an "A" on it for my name.  It's chipped, but its mine.  I'm very proud of my coffee addiction.  I love coffee.  But coffee addiction to my knowledge is never deadly.  I could be wrong. Yes... I have a reserved coffee mug at a bar.  You wish you were that special. She was a kind soul- addicted to drugs- but a kind soul.  She was nic...

Ive been cleaning a few boxes in my office, and I keep coming across piles of my doodles and in class sketches from the past 15 years of teaching and learning.  One of the ways I have always stayed focused in any class, meeting, or lecture/conference is to doodle.  Often it takes on the persona of the content itself - whatever I draw representing in some way the content of the day, but not always.  The margins and extra pages of my books were always full of my current friends groups, Animaniacs - or other Super Hero related characters - and often the people talking or sitting nearby. In college, I began to develop the stories of Achmel and Rahim, co-adventurers modeled off of my friend Ruble and I, based on our ICQ conversations.  We traveled through time with a pair of corduroy pants ( Dos Pantalones ) created by the Nazis in World War Two, but hidden away in Argentina until we stumbled upon them once on a vacation.  We beat up Nazis, met famous educators, l...

As humans, we often ask the wrong questions about ourselves and the world- Eugenics and Race science are two examples of this.  Vonnegut challenges us to think about this too, as Billy Pilgrim is watching a war movies backwards, taking us from the end of a bombing run back to the beginning - everything backwards including the bombs, to their manufacture, and firstly the digging of elements once hidden in the ground- up to make a bomb.  Using nature to destroy humanity.  The audacity of man - to use whats buried in the earth to harm other humans instead of something greater.  I lived near a uranium processing plant growing up - Fernald  - about 11 miles away.  It operated until 1989, so it functioned during my childhood - making cores for weapons, I think - something with weapons.  You can read about it.   I remember my dad and others having to get check ups, since they grew up and lived there longer than I did when it was really active....