Results of Ruminations

When younger, I read a lot of different genres of fiction. I stayed up late reading Goosebumps , like most kids of the nineties, but I also read Young Adult "classics" like Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Cay, and It's Like This, Cat.  I would try some of the bigger stories, but even Alice in Wonderland  was too strangely written for me to really engage with it. I read a lot of Redwall  books as I edged out of elementary school, and Anne McCaffery's world was large in my imagination by the end of sixth grade. Mr. Soto, my sixth grade teacher, read to us the first book of the Prydain Chronicles, which I instantly snatched up and read on my own. (That reminds me: I want to reread those books.) I read novelizations of video games ( Castlevania ftw) and movies ( Hook ). By the time I hit middle school, I was sometimes buying books of movies I couldn't see because they were rated-R, gaming the system as only a ninth-grader could. I picked up some Robotech  to go alon...

Our school has always had a "mentoring" period that ended up being, at best, a glorified home room. This year, we're having a shift in the mentoring program that's making me excited. I'm looking at the act of creativity--using imagination and skill to craft something new. As a basis, I'm considering the way in which Blizzard Entertainment (specifically) and video games and movies (generally) use collaboration and joint-contribution to a single vision. This vision is of a world in which all the students are building it up in some way. It's the act of world building--which I've done by myself for years--writ large. I'm excited because this is an opportunity to become more familiar with others' ideas, to have the spark of mutual ideas stirring and generating fresh concepts. Of all the parts of making a video game, that type of creative problem solving has always intrigued me. A decade ago, I took a classroom of kids up to a local video game st...

Thanks to the omnipresent (and omniangry) influence of the Twitter.com, I learned about the Nashville Statement . Rather than spend time summing it up for you, I'll let you follow the link and make your own decisions about it. For me and my part, I've already sounded off on this topic (broadly speaking), so I've not a lot too change here. I have thought a lot about the issues of LGBTQ+ rights, as I see them as a crucial point in the life of my church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) as well as the nation. The idea of allowing legal discrimination is puzzling to me, and though there might be some compelling arguments for areas of discrimination (say, disallowing a person with rage issues to work at a child care facility), the concept of sexual orientation isn't one that really computes for me. I simply can't see why it matters so much to people who don't participate in an LGBTQ+ lifestyle what those within the lifestyle do. From a doctrinal ...

Along with my analysis of buying books , there's also something about getting  and having  that are interesting to me. As my eyes rove about my office, I notice things that I have that I like to know that I have but don't know if I'll ever put a lot of time into using them. For instance, I love having more copies of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare . I don't need  another copy any more than I could use another car, but I'm not about to say no to one. (Since I started the new Shakespeare class , I had to get a new copy of The Complete Works . No choice in the matter. Greater good.) Even though I may not use the new acquisition, I'm glad that I have it. This isn't always the case. A student once gave me one of those metal statute kits. You know the type: They look like they're made out of tin foil but turn out to be razor blades embedded in metallic stencils? Y'know, these things: The only way this would be accurate is if the hand on the...

Virginia Woolf: The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays. (" The Decay of Essay Writing ") For the most part, I like Virginia Woolf. I studied her works a couple of different times in college, and though she's hardly a "beach read" type of author, she's thoughtful and significant. Nevertheless, the aforementioned essay smacks of "old man shouts at clouds"--you know, this old thing.* Perennial. ( Source )  Despite her crotchety take on "kids these days" and their "writings about themselves", Woolf has so...

A new meme has been circulating through Twitter in which a guy with his girlfriend is caught "appreciating" another girl's look. The mutability of the meme is that the labels of each part can vary. The one I saw that I liked the most, and what inspired this essay, is this one: Yeah, basically. I got it from this tweep .  There's an allure to a book. Bookstores are quasi-sanctified ground for me, with the library-esque reverential feeling of speaking in Sacrament Meeting whispers, the particular smell of books and (often) coffee invoking a specific attitude both putting me in a specific mindset. Bookstores are less places to buy and something and more experiences to be enjoyed. Because of where I live, I don't get to go to bookstores as often as I'd like (read: Daily), but I'm not so far away that I can't go whenever I really need to. My favorite was Borders, but that died the death a decade or so ago, so while I still pine for their weekly coup...

After having finished both But What if We're Wrong ?  and White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America , I've been thinking a lot about stuff I was wrong about. It led to the question of this post--what are you wrong about?--and, because it requires a level of self-awareness as well as a view of history and current events, it's not really something that I can throw at my students and mull it over with them. (Odds are good that I'll toss that at one of my coworkers, however, and we'll see where that gets us.) The thing about this question that makes it hard for me to get a grip on is that I know I'm not asking what I regret. "I was wrong to order from Burger King" is not my goal with this. Additionally, it's too superficial to say, "I was wrong about my assumptions of the book  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen; it was not a very good read at all, and I was miserable the whole time I tried to read it, eventually abandoning the thing...

I'm teaching a new Shakespeare class this year. I've yet to really teach the same one: When I first began, it was a co-taught class with a BYU professor who was only there every other day. Yet I learned a lot about teaching writing and showing students how to improve via revisions (so totally my strong point, don't you know) and hard work on their writing. The next two years I worked with another teacher, but he was in class even less frequently than the BYU professor. Each time was a refining of what had come before, and there was always a shift in the texts. (With Shakespeare, there's a massive crop to explore, which is exciting and a little intimidating.) Last year, Shakespeare was also fine arts: Shax on the stage and the page was our idea, with different terms focusing on one part or the other of the Bard's oeuvre. I learned a lot about the actor (and acting), which was fun for me, if a little stressful. I haven't taught a drama class before, and I don...

I'm not particularly tired today. Considering that today is the first day of school for my boys and the first worthwhile day for me, that's a bit of a surprise. Also, I made my wife a steak-and-potatoes dinner (with a nice spinach-and-strawberry side salad...I'm into hyphenated dishes, apparently) which we enjoyed whilst the boys played video games, so that added to the stresses of a complicated schedule, a lot of "getting used to working" vibe, and other typical minutiae, it's definitely a surprise that I'm not tucked into bed by 9:00. But I didn't title this post "Fumes" because I'm tired, it's because I'm mentally drained. There was a little more effort in the thought department than I am used to, if only because I tried a lesson plan I've never done before (I think it went pretty well), and my new Shakespeare class is going to keep me on my toes. These intellectual strains are taxing. I'm used to that, but only onc...

It is confusing that, despite being decades away from an agrarian America, we still use our agrarian calendar for schooling. It's easy to see how we got this way: The system that pushed us through the Industrial Revolution, and was retooled for the post-war baby boom has a momentum to it. As childhood increased in value, nostalgia for one's own childhood drives desires to keep the traditions enjoyed from the idyllic portion of one's life in the bloodstream of the next generation. "We always did this when I was a kid," is one of the reasons that twenty-first century children are hauled off to visit national parks, camp in the forest, or any number of other options. Entire industries build themselves off of this tendency. We're crushed by the weight of that history and tradition. We've codified the laws to ensure that there are a certain number of days on the school calendar (though, and I'm not advocating this, if we dropped all the breaks from the sc...

Note: This is part two in a three part analysis. Part one can be found here .  Second Assumption The pathways to understanding Truth are legion.  This posit would entail epistemological considerations that I'm not interested in following here, but anyone curious could start here for an overview of the philosophy. Rather, I'm interested in pursuing broader swaths of understanding and knowledge, recognizing that a lot of the road has been paved by philosophers and theologians, but focusing more on my own process of thinking. To begin, I think there's something to be said about prima facie  impulses about basic sensory data. The sun is hot, we can feel it and see it, and those physical stimuli come from a cause which we can point to and agree with. Intersubjective agreement may be necessary on one level, but once there, we're discussing common knowledge, verified through the senses. This kind of truth can be considered a rudimentary Truth--human senses are trigge...

When I talked about dual identities a while ago, I focused on the Batman and a little on the Hulk. I had originally planned on incorporating an analysis of how Peter Parker and Spider-Man intersect as identities, but the essay was going too long by that point. I cut the stuff--which, for me, means highlighting the text and pressing Delete . So whatever I was thinking about apropos of Peter/Spidey, it's gone now. However, I'm at the precipice of beginning another school year  and I've been feeling incipient stirrings of what I can only assume is the (apparently) real phenomenon of a mid-life crisis. My parents were pretty steady, stay-the-course kind of parents, so I don't have a lot of up-close context for these feelings, but I've been struggling a lot with what I understand of myself, my goals, my ambitions, my dreams, and my realities. One of the things that I've always used as part of my identity, with varying degrees of severity, is my obsession with Spid...

I'm starting my tenth year as a teacher--all at the same school--which feels arbitrarily momentous. I mean, being a base 10 culture means that something like a decade "means something" and the thing that it means is that we've decided that it means something. There isn't anything inherently powerful, wonderful, or noteworthy about ten consecutive years, but it does feel like I ought to mark it. Thinking back to what I was doing that first teacher training week in 2008 makes me smile. I was so enthusiastic and ungainly, like an evangelizing foal. I mean, I love my job--and I've loved it since the beginning--but I was a pretty lousy teacher back when I started. I cringe at the mistakes I made, the assumptions I had, the poor teaching choices I selected. One of the things that I remember about that year was when I had to take charge of a break-out session for the students. Back then, we gathered the two hundred or so students for a welcome assembly, then sent...

I finished reading In Defense of a Liberal Education  by Fareed Zakaria. Having read two books now by different authors (coming from very  different backgrounds) about "the classics", I have to say that I much preferred this second one. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison by any stretch--one book was a quasi-manual for teaching in a prescribed way, the other was an argument for why liberal arts and the humanities ought to be invested--and, in a sense--believed in. The fifth and final chapter of Zakaria's book really made me happy. Perhaps it was an echo-chamber effect--I'm not above confirmation bias--but I felt optimistic about the students I teach and my role in the world. The other book left me disgruntled, abused, and pessimistic; this one made me hopeful. And the last part of the book is where it made the most sense to me. In it, Zakaria goes to great lengths to describe the accusations against the "millennial generation", of which I am bare...

I'm clawing through my memories, trying to remember the books that I loved as a kid. See, my two older boys love listening to audiobooks (whilst reading along) when we're in the car. It's a great pacifier, too--they don't argue or fight or wiggle too much, because the books keep them occupied and focused. Plus they help them improve their reading, and it gives me something to do whilst driving. Since the daily commute equates to about an hour a day, that's pretty good. Though there are more Pern books, I kind of don't want to revisit McCaffery's special planet again for a while. The emotional ending of All the Weyrs of Pern is so perfect I'd rather let it rest for a while, as I mentioned before . Being "done" with the series for the nonce, we scoured the library for the better part of an hour, trying to find the next set of books to read/listen to. I managed to score a digital audio copy of Redwall , by Brian Jacques. Frustratingly, there wer...

My boys and I have spent the summer listening to (and they, reading) All the Weyrs of Pern.  It is, to me, a culmination of eight books (three of which we read) that build toward the dragonriders of Pern finally eradicating their age-old enemy, Thread.* The ending (spoilers) has the deaths of some beloved characters, and it's written with such loving tenderness that, despite the fact that I hadn't read the book since I was in elementary school--maybe middle school--I still remembered some of the moments. After the book was finished, I asked my kids if they thought it was a good ending. "No," said my seven year old. I could hear a hitch in his throat. Glancing in the rear view mirror, I saw that his eyes were plastic wrapped with tears that hadn't yet freed themselves. Now, my middle son is a sensitive soul; he cries anytime he feels a little too much emotion. But I could tell the ending was getting to him. My older son, who is 10, confessed that he had cried a l...

Note: Since the new film version of the book is coming out soon, I'll put a spoiler warning on this post, if only because someone may be planning on watching the film without having read the book. So here it is: As I mentioned before , I'm reading Stephen King's It. The book is massive--clocking in at over 1,400 pages--and tells the story of a haunted town called Derry, set in King's home state of Maine. A handful of kids end up being compelled to defeat the evil entity known as It (or Pennywise the Clown), and then, when they get older, they have to return to Derry in order to defeat It once and for all. So the set up is pretty straightforward, but part of what I found so interesting was how  the story was told. Despite its sprawling size, the book is tightly connected. Small details ripple through the narrative, which spans a summer in 1958 and a spring in 1985. Even the paper boat that kicks off the tragedy and terror and leaves by the end of the first chapter...

Macbeth , act 5, scene 5: I have supped full with horrors. Heather Heyer has become a martyr, killed by domestic terrorism, though it ought to be noted that the hatred on display in Charlottesville has claimed many lives. The heritage that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists claim to be defending is one of barbarism, slavery, mutilation, rape, and death. I have walked among the concrete coffins meant to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Nestled in the heart of Berlin, within walking distance of both the Brandenberg Gate and the rebuilt Reichstag--the building whose burning gifted Germany to Hitler and set history's course for genocide, nuclear devastation, and more--I shivered as much from the weather as from the location. There is a specter that haunts Berlin: One of regret, of shame, of unwillingness to forget but also one of determination to create a new definition of what it means to be German. Berlin struck me as a place that had woken up from a nightmare that s...