Blue Bird

 It grinds on me, a little bit, that I can no longer automatically post these blog posts on Twitter. I used to be able to shout out to the world from my comfortable little corner of Al Gore's Internet using the amplification supplied by that little blue bird.

I still call it Twitter, but journalists and the like are now prone to referring to it as "X, formerly known as Twitter." And the benign and not-so-oft putting verb "tweeted" has been replaced by "posted." The fun, it would seem, has gone along with the thrill. Just like my automatic posts. 

It's a business deal. Much like the way Tech-Daddy Google swooped in way back in 2003 to devour Blogger. I am certain there were Blogger folks who reacted in a similar way to Twitter zealots when their machine was engulfed by a giant. This was just before yours truly began scribbling on this outlet, so I didn't notice the way the furniture was arranged or the wiring was any different. 

Until Elongated Mush paid four billion dollars to spoil everyone's good time. He took away that little blue bird and replaced it with an unknown quantity from an algebra book. He let the Nazis back on. He started using it to promote his own scary world view. This little corner where people used to gather to complain about the red carpet fashions and the red hatted fascists has been converted to a place where I now regularly get ads for The Epoch Times sprinkled into my timeline. For those of you were unfamiliar, as I was when it first started to appear, The Epoch Times is a media conglomerate that likes its news the way we drive here in America: to the far right. They like the unvaccinated, QAnon, election denier angle on things. I don't claim to know a lot about computer algorithms, but it seems to me that the clicks I click on the artist formerly known as Twitter should be bringing me kinder, gentler left wing content rather than the January 6 apologists and fans of a certain former game show host. 

Alas, the new owner of this former bastion of free speech is currently busy twisting this once snarky place into a snarling vision of his own ugly imagination. A place where lies get amplified and anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes or business doing so gets banished. And of course there are cat videos. 

Why don't I just leave? Because I don't want to leave when there is a point to be made in the name of truly free speech. There are still those who fight the good fight, calling out the nastiness and hypocrisy. It's free, after all.

And sometimes there are cat videos. 

Figures

 Over the last week I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. This wasn't a political vortex or a path down nostalgia lane. This was all about numbers. 

I have written here before about my love for teaching math. This came as a bit of a surprise since most of my enthusiasm for mathematics was knocked out of me by an ill-tempered high school instructor of elementary functions. He was not a fan of my approach to my senior year, which included a predilection toward the class clown end of the spectrum. But that didn't mean I didn't care about the math. This did not register on his end and he gave me the option of dropping his class before he failed me for my attitude. 

I dropped the class. 

And it was almost twenty years before I found my way back to math. 

Helping kids find patterns and connections in numbers and shapes and strands is fun for me. Watching them piece together the world around them through mathematics is a joy. This also gives me a chance to extend my own appreciation for figures and calculation. This past week had me sharing with fourth graders the fact that the product of any two even numbers is an even number, and the product of any two odd numbers is an odd number, but the product of an odd and an even number is always an even number. Which was intriguing enough for them, but after I was done with the class, I found myself wondering why there weren't more even numbers than odd if that was the case. I brought this dilemma home to my wife, and made my conjecture that this might have something to do with prime numbers. Together we imagined a sea of numbers and pictured the products of even numbers lighting up, then odd numbers in another color, then prime numbers in yet another. 

Later I turned to Reddit, where I found a thread of folks who had similar cogitations. I felt validated for having this somewhat vague quandary. And pleased that there was still some mystery left for me in arithmetic. Forty plus years after being kicked out of Elementary Functions, I was still thinking math thoughts. 

It felt good. 

Doubt

 I am going to try and give Katie Britt the benefit of doubt. Specifically I doubt that it was her intent to go on national television and create a ready-to-air parody of the Republican Response to the State of the Union Address. I doubt that she expected to spend days after her appearance on everyone's social media being roundly criticized and laughed at for her earnest and we assume well-meaning attempt to disagree with the other party's leader. I doubt that she would have imagined that this opportunity would put her team in defense mode, rather than being the ace in the hole she was anticipated to be. 

A little background: Ms. Porter is the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Alabama and the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the Senate. These accomplishments should neither be denied or ridiculed. Furthermore it bears noting that California, that liberal bastion, is about to slip back into that realm of states without a woman senator after more than thirty years. Alabama has one. Once again I doubt that it was her state's or her party's intent to have her become a laughingstock. 

How could this have happened? 

I blame the patriarchy. For all the victories women have had over the course of our history, they continue to fight their fight in a rigged game. Who makes the rules? Men. Who calls the shots in the Republican Party? Men. Who said, "Katie, I think we should shoot your response in the kitchen. Not in your office. And if you wouldn't mind delivering all of your lines in a hushed whisper, that would be great." That advice came from a man. I know this because I have spent a lot of time hanging out with men and I know that so much of what they say about "fairness" is predicated by the scraps they are willing to toss around after they have finished gorging themselves on what they can force down their power mad gullets. 

Katie Britt was there as a counterpoint to the women who have been horrified by the man who sexually abused E. Jean Carroll and then defamed her to the tune of eighty-four million dollars in defamation penalties. The man who proudly boasts that it was he who overturned Roe v. Wade. The man who cheated on his pregnant wife with a porn star. The man who bragged about walking around backstage at the beauty pageants he owned, leering at naked women. 

Does it surprise me that Katie Britt was set up for failure by the party that has chosen to go all-in on this monster? Not a bit. But unfortunately I doubt that she is fully aware of how badly she was played. 

The Two Houses

 Two towns in Texas, separated by three hundred miles: Eagle Claw and Brownsville. Consistent with every bit of branding established over decades and especially over the past eight years makes it clear which would be the landing zone for Republican candidates and where the Democrats would show up. The difference came clear to me as I reflected on Cobra Kai. 

If you missed this little gem of retro-fun on Netflix, it is based on the Karate Kid films, and tells the story of two Karate Guys: Daniel and Johnny. One grew up following the path of his late sensei, Mister Myagi. The other lost the state championship by following the ways of the Cobra Kai dojo, and his fortunes have gone in another direction. He now drinks Coors. But once the series gets rolling, Johnny picks himself up and starts to put himself back together again. Eventually he runs afoul of his old sensei, the guy who instructed him to "sweep the leg" back in the eighties. Danielsan revives his master's style and begins training the area's youth in "Myagi-Do." Johnny takes his troubled band of teenagers to his new dojo, which he names "Eagle Fang." While the two middle aged Karate Guys try to work on their own middle aged crises, their young charges regularly trash one another's social gatherings and school functions, putting countless innocent extras at risk. 

This all came to me in a rush the morning after the State of the Union address by Joe Biden. The leader of the "for defense only" dojo who came out and spit the fire that an eighty year old man can. And the name-calling response from somewhere in South Florida where the former game show host continues to beg for money to help him pay off the half billion dollars he owes in fines. The Brownsville Dojo versus Eagle Claw. All the talk of revenge and retribution makes good TV I suppose, but it doesn't go very far when it comes to solving the problems facing us. 

Brownsville Joe called out his "predecessor" in hopes of getting him to tell his supporters to pass the bipartisan immigration reform bill that was quashed by the aforementioned Eagle Claw leader. This feels like a pretty empty gesture, but it's exactly the kind of thing that takes place during an election year, not unlike the brinksmanship being played with our country's budget. It's not about coming together to solve problems, but rather to stick a finger in the problem and exacerbate it. If you keep picking at it, it will never heal. 

Tune in this season as Eagle Claw and Brownsville continue to square off in anticipation of the Battle Royale in November. Don't expect things to get a lot better in the meantime. That's bad TV and bad politics. 

The Angel

 Approximately a million years ago, a man walked into our school asking what he could do. This happened before I got here, so it's really pre-history we're talking about here. This man was a graduate of Oakland public schools and in the wake of yet another flurry of violence in the streets of cities across the country, he decided to devote some of the time he had to giving back to the people and places that made him the success that he had become. 

He could have written a big check to the district or swooped in to pay for everyone's lunch, but instead he asked if he could get a regular gig coming in to read with students who were struggling. Which he did. For several years. When budgets were being cut and help was hard to find, he was there, doing his part and then some. 

Which didn't keep him from writing an occasional check. Like the one he wrote to help revitalize our tired old school library. New books. New tables and chairs. And suddenly it was a place where kids wanted to be, not a place they were sent when they hadn't finished their work in class. It was a great place to pull up a chair and read with a student who needed just a little of that one-on-one magic.

When I arrived as the new Computer Teacher, I was introduced to our "business partner," a title that never fully described the commitment he had to our little corner of East Oakland. After a year or so of working with a room full of ancient Mac LCIIs and a bunch of tractor feed printers, he came to me and asked "what it would take" to get a new computer lab. Initially I gave him a lowball estimate that would allow us to get a marginal replacement for the tired old equipment in my room. He smiled, patted me on the shoulder and asked if I could try again. "What would you really like to have in here?" He pointed into the room that I had brought back from the brink of extinction, and I started to imagine. 

It took a while, a couple years, but when all was said and done there were twenty-eight student PCs, a new laser printer, and furniture for it all to sit on. Our benefactor even showed up to plug them in and help sort the trash. 

Best of all, this was an Internet-ready room. As we began to drag CAT-5 cable around the hallways to connect us to Al Gore's invention, we began a new era. We were connecting to a whole new world of potential curriculum and possibility. The same Internet that students now don't think about when they sit down in my room and read a book from a library they have never seen. They just know it's there. 

Time passed and our generous angel stopped making his regular visits. Which is sad, but he paved the way for so many kids, making a smooth path where it wasn't always smooth. 

On behalf of all us Horace Mann Jaguars past and present, Thank you Jeff Schwartz. 

Darling Nikki

 Prince, god rest his purple soul, once wrote a song with the title, Darling Nikki. I warn you before you click on the link that it is naughty. So naughty, in fact, that it was one of the very first to garner a warning sticker from the Parents Music Resource Center way back in 1984. Interestingly, there is a backward vocal track toward the end of the song that when played forward says, "Hello, how are you? Fine, fine, 'cause I know that the Lord is coming soon Coming, coming soon." I'm not guessing that Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President Al Gore probably caught that subtlety, what with their minds being filled with the thoughts of becoming President one day. 

Al never became president. Some believe this was because of some malfeasance connected with ballots being dumped in swamps and eventually the Supreme Court got mixed up in it. When the ruling came down Al was out and George W was in. Then the World Trade Center came down and we went to war for more than a decade.

All because of the distractions created by that little ditty by Prince. 

Okay. Maybe it was a little bigger than the fourth track on Purple Rain.  

But I can't help but wonder if Al Gore had his mind on the big picture instead of getting Congress to put stickers on records, maybe things would have been different. No ballots in swamps. No Supreme Court ruling. Al wins and navigates the world through the troubled waters of the early twentieth century where peace and prosperity reigns. Purple. And he is able to focus on climate change, which was his central focus for all those years. 

Now Nikki Haley has bowed out of the Republican race for President. To say that she fought a good fight would be a little like saying that the Denver Broncos "fought a good fight" when they were beaten by the Miami Dolphins seventy to twenty this past season. The twenty points the Broncos did manage to score suggested that there was another team on the field that day. They brought their uniforms and everything. The just weren't ready to play in the same way the Dolphins did. 

In this analogy, Nikki Haley is being portrayed by the team from Denver. Her miniscule delegate count suggests that she was not able to withstand the ugly momentum of the MAGAts. And now she will be stepping aside to allow the matchup between old white guys to carry on at full volume. 

I suggest you try and drown it out with some Prince. 

Get That Cat Out Of The Cradle

 Miss Walsh's baby was born just a few hours after Miss Walsh made a very Miss Walsh-ish appearance at the school just to "drop a few copies off" in hopes of helping her substitute be just a little more prepared. This is precisely the odd level of dedication that we have come to expect from Miss Walsh. 

And once again I want to appreciate and validate her choice to take a year off to spend with her burgeoning family. They should not grow up wondering when mommy is coming home or just exactly who mommy is. 

Which got me to thinking about my own voyage through parenthood. I was there in the delivery room. I was there for the first three months of my son's life. Much to the periodic chagrin of the boy's mother. Then, just as abruptly as my life had changed in oh so many ways, I was dropped into my career as a teacher. My wife has described the post-partum terror of being left alone with this incipient human and how lonely she was trying to figure out how this thing worked. 

I already knew how I worked: nose to the grindstone. Dedicated and loyal. I was the breadwinner and though there wasn't a lot of bread to win back in those days, I wanted to provide in the way that I could. This included working year-round at my year-round school, becoming that mythic fixture of an employee about which stories have been written and songs have been sung. 

But I really wanted to be at home with my son. 

A fairly large conflict of interest there. 

As milestones and anecdotes stacked up, I continued to work and come home in time to spend as much of our child's waking hours as possible together. Which seemed like a lot at the time. But looking back I wish that it had been more. I benefit from a very close and forgiving relationship with my son, who found room in his heart to forgive my absences and allow me the opportunity to make up for those lost moments when our schedules permit it. The same can be said for the woman I left in a hostage crisis with a newborn. 

I am only now becoming clear about the regrets I stacked up back then. And I'm working on the forgiveness. From them and from me.