Calling on Parents

The truth is that I have always hated talking on the phone. I do it as little as possible. My cell phone minutes usually run in the single digits each month. But part of my job as teacher is to call parents. Unfortunatley this has not helped cure me of my dislike for using the phone. Of the twenty or so parents I’ve called so far this year for help with unruly students, only one has been helpful. This is just the latest in a trend. It seems to get worse every year. Instead of trying to help me make the student accountable for their actions, 95% or parents (as judged from this sample) want to argue on their child’s behalf that inappropriate behavior is excusable. This is not only not helpful, it is doing a disservice to the child.

Politics

More and more I read about people who are tired of the political ads and of the election in general. You hear the same thing in the course of every election. I’m not one of those people. I actually enjoy politics and political ads. Of course I don’t take any of them at face value. I like to check them out at http://www.factcheck.org/ and see how much bending of the truth they do. I think though that you can tell a lot about a candidate from what they say about their opponent. Since my students are checking out my blog, I’m not going to list who I’m supporting until just before the election, but I have made my contribution, both by caucusing, and by giving funds (to a candidate not shown here).

Happy Birthday Victoria

Please join me in wishing a very happy birthday to my lovely wife Victoria. Happy birthday sweetheart.

Writer’s Block? Writer’s Fatigue and Writer’s Fugue

Writer’s block? Not really. What I have is writer’s fatigue and writer’s fugue. I’m just so tired by the time I get home after a day in the classroom, I don’t feel like doing anything as mentally strenuous as writing. Plus, I’m just not very motivated right now. When people are reading your writing and giving you feedback, it’s easy to stay motivated. I was writing up a storm this time last year. Now, waiting for replies from agents and publishers, I just can’t seem to get into it. I have only about a chapter and a half left of the first draft of His Robot Girlfriend, so I should be able to whip it out. Maybe next week.

This is Why There are No Time Travelers

If time travel is invented some time in the future, we would have already seen time travelers. And no, they couldn’t have just been careful. Despite what conspiracy theorists think, humans are really never very careful. But just think about it for a moment. Imagine there was a great event you wanted to witness, and you had a time machine. Say you went back to September 1776 to watch the First Continental Congress meet. Already you have time travelers squeezed into a small room along with the 55 delegates. For the sake of argument, say only one time traveler was there and he was invisible. And let’s say that there is a rule that he is the only one that gets to visit that time period and that place. Somebody else can’t show up while he’s there. Even if that is the case, sooner or later, somebody is going to want to go back and verify his findings. Or maybe recording technology has advanced so much that they want to go back and get better footage of the event. Now you have two time travelers there. Even if a time traveler only went back to that particular time every 500 years, within 10,000 years of time travel you would have enough travellers to outnumber the delegates four to one. But I expect that people would travel more often than that. Tourists would want to see the First Continental Congress. And if it was really interesting, they would want to see it again, and bring the kids. Soon, Independence Hall would explode at the seems. We should not only have seen time travelers already. We should be seeing many multiples of them.

Why Aren’t There Any Time Travelers?

There will never be time travel. There won’t. People will never be able to go back in time. It’s too bad, but that’s just the way it is. Of course string theory says that time travel is theoretically possible, but it will never happen. There will never be time travelers. I’ll tell you why tomorrow.

Wallpapers

I’m always looking for new desktop wallpaper to spruce up my computer. Here is a source for some very cool ones. http://innovativewallpapers.blogspot.com/

Blogging Fun

I am still new to blogging, having only been doing this for a couple of months now, but I’m really enjoying it. You may notice that my blog topics appear promptly at 9:00 AM. This is of course because of the scheduling feature at blogspot. I can write several entries one day, and have them appear one at a time on schedule. Even more fun than writing my own blog is finding new and interesting ones to read. I try to find at least one a day that I can add to my daily reading list.

My Late Lamented MP3 Player

My beloved Philips GoGear MP3 player has died. It was suffereing from a lingering illness for some time now, showing boxes instead of words on the screen, but it still played. Now it is gone. I’m going to get a new player sometime soon. I’m not sure which one I should get. I could get one comparable to the old one for a fraction of the $229 I paid for it, or I could spend another two Franklins and get an iPod Touch which will play games too. What do you think?

Computer Crashes Suck

I suppose I have to say that I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been using a computer gradebook of one variety or another for fifteen years, and until today I’ve never had a problem. Unfortunately today I did have one. My gradebook file has been corrupted. The data from one class is gone, both in my original file and in the backup. My very wonderful Education Computing Strategist is online with the tech support people to see if we can unscramble the data. Barring that, well, I have the overall grades recorded on paper, just not the grades for individual assignments. I’ll still be able to assign grades. The sad thing is that most of my students don’t care what those grades will be.