Get On Your Bikes And Ride

 Then, one morning, I woke up and it was school again. Not the full day in the classroom with kids and meetings, but the wake up and be ready. Ready to read, respond and connect. This is the way we slide into the new year: professional development. A quarter of a century into this teaching gig, I'm still leaning how to help kids learn how to read. And write. And respond. 

It came with a dream about a flat tire on my bike. Trying to get to school by pushing my bike over hill and dale immediately puts me behind what I know will be a hectic day. This year I didn't have to jump on my bike and go anywhere beyond my laptop where the new curriculum was bein unveiled for us to see. Hundreds of us on the call, watching and listening as the reading revolution continues. 

And somewhere in the pit of my stomach, I feel that creeping anxiety that I might accidentally teach kids wrong. This feeling goes away somewhat abruptly once the scholastic ship has sailed, but it is during this leadup time that I fret about giving students the wrong path to take them on the lifelong love of reading. What if what I do to these kids kills that sense of wonder?

That would be worse than a flat tire. 

How can I deliver the joy I experienced sitting in the corner of Miss Stuart's fourth grade classroom, curled up with Charlotte's Web? Or the way I plowed through the entire World War II section of the Columbine Elementary library all those years ago? I'm still reading. Not just for learning. For fun. 

Which brings me back to my bike. There was a time when riding my bike was for amusement. Now it's for exercise. And commuting. The joy doesn't always find its way into those trips to and from school. With or without a flat tire. It sometimes makes my family sad that we don't have bike rides together as adventures. I would hate to think that kids would start to feel this way about reading. Books as chores. Sadly, there is something wickedly connected to leaving the comfort of your nice warm bed, prying your eyes open and staggering to that place where books await. Full of expectations and people with expectations. 

Teachers, mostly. The ones who want to teach you how to read. How could that dynamic possibly go wrong? 

Summer's over. Back to work. 

Quick Pitch

 Generic Baseball Team: Players and abilities may vary but should be suitable for everyday use. 

Cleveland finally got around to picking a new mascot for their Major League baseball team. The owners and management landed on Guardians for their new nickname. The Indians and Chief Wahoo are now officially a part of the past. This comes as a bit of a relief for those who were concerned that the team might endure the same fate as the Washington Football Team which has decided to be just that. For the time being. The selection of a three syllable name does present its own set of concerns, but the Cleveland Cavaliers have made it work for them for the past fifty years. Happily, the city's name itself works in a pinch for those two syllable cheers. "Here we go Cleve-land, here we go!" and "Let's Go Cleve-Land!" Seem quite serviceable. 

Meanwhile, I am certain that the marketing division is working overtime to try and figure out how best to present art deco statues in a format to be worn by a hyper-kinetic clown as a suit to amuse the kids. Just as everyone wants to be the first on their block to own a Cleveland Guardians T-shirt, there was a knock on the door: It was the local Roller Derby team. As it turns out, the stroke of genius that brought this new mascot to Major League Baseball had already visited the folks who run C-Town's Mens' Roller Derby Association franchise. And they've been around since (checks notes) 2016, so there's quite a lot of history there. 

Expect a lawsuit. 

But you won't have to worry a lot about that, since there will be plenty of additional fuss raised by those who wish that things would never change, even if it means egregious racial stereotypes and continuing the cultural appropriation continues in the most uncomfortable way. Why should we care? We're white male sports fans, and we wouldn't know appropriate if it landed right in front of us and began giving us high fives to the forehead. Worse still are those non-sports fans who just need something else to be terrified by as "cancel culture" seeks to cancel all the culture that had originally been appropriated by slow-witted white folks. "How am I supposed to find that rice I like now that they've taken the 'Uncle' off the front of it?"

And so on. 

Across town, the Cleveland Browns are wondering if they can't get themselves a little bit more exciting mascot than their old coach's last name. 

Schadenfreude

 Literal translation: bad joy. Dictionary definition: pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.

I am guilty of this emotion more often than I tend to relate to you all, but in this case I must reflect on what I believe is a frightening trend. The stories that have been emerging over the past several months about those people who have refused the COVID vaccine and then become very sick with the virus. And some of them die. And this is the moment where we might shrug our collective shoulders and say, "Well, it serves them right." 

I am here to say, "No. It doesn't." As big a fan as I am of things breaking to the fair side, I can't see that this is something about which we should be rejoicing. Instead, it should give us all pause. Like the case of Joshua Garza, who passed up his opportunity to get a shot that  might have kept him from catching the disease that has killed more than four million people. This man from Texas caught COVID in late January, he had to be rushed to the hospital in early February because his lungs were failing. He ended up needing a double lung transplant. Mister Garza would like to tell everyone who will listen that it's a lot easier to get the shot.

Those who see this as leveling karma on individuals who make bad choices are probably missing the big picture. The strain on our health care system currently is almost impossible to describe. True, we are no longer hearing stories of morgues that are spilling over into hallways and refrigerated trailers. The battles we are currently fighting are more like wildfires. As variants pop up, our response needs to be quick and decisive before another surge occurs. This will allow the most and best medical care to be given to those who need it most. Anti-vaxxers dropping dead isn't a win for anyone except for the trolls who live a couple notches below where I hang out. 

I am suddenly reminded of the public service announcement Yul Brynner filmed shortly before his death. "Now that I'm gone I tell you," Yul says to the camera, "don't smoke." Hindsight is twenty-twenty and voices from the grave are probably worth listening to, but we all know someone who is still smoking. That big label that adorns every package of cigarettes is there to read as you light up. Nobody takes a puff imagining the double lung transplant in their future. 

And so it can be said of those who refuse to be vaccinated. It would be so much easier if they would, but you can lead a horse to water but you can't cry over the milk that they spill. The vaccines are here when they are ready. Now we need to figure out a way to tear down the wall that makes it so hard to imagine that this could be a good thing. For everyone. 

Reefer Madness

 The police chief of Washington D.C. has declared that, “I can tell you that marijuana undoubtedly is connected to violent crimes that we are seeing in our communities.” Chief Robert Contee made these and other remarks last week during a press briefing following a series of recent shootings in his city. One of them occurred right outside Nationals Park as the home team was preparing to take on the San Diego Padres. The game was cancelled amid the fear and excitement. 

Odd that Chief Contee didn't choose to blame baseball. He blamed weed. "When you have something where people get high reward — they can make a lot of money by selling illegal marijuana — and the risk is low, the risk for accountability is very low, that creates a very, very, very bad situation, because those individuals get robbed,” he added. “Those individuals get shot at. Those individuals get involved in disputes all across our city.” 

So here's the deal: Recreational use of pot (marijuana) is legal in the District of Columbia. Selling pot (marijuana) for recreational use is not. Makes perfect sense. So does the solution: decriminalize pot (marijuana). 

The idea that violent crime is being carried out by pot (marijuana) smokers is basically flawed. If the crimes involved large amounts of Pringles, that would make more sense. Instead, the Chief seems to be onto something when he suggests that it's the money that's the problem. People have been shot over tiny amounts of money throughout history. I have it on good authority that our first Secretary of the Treasury was shot and killed by Aaron Burr over a fifteen dollar bar tab. Or maybe it had something to do with those fields of hemp that George Washington was managing. 

Or something like that. Unfortunately, Chief Contee is pointing his finger at the prosecutors who choose not to go after those caught with more than two ounces of grass (marijuana), the legal limit in his city. He says he's "not talking about mass incarceration," he just wants to hold people accountable. Fair enough. How about making it legal and taxing it. Like alcohol. Like cigarettes. Like Washington, you know the state. 

Before somebody ends up getting shot. Again. 

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

 "Thanks for bringing home the death chips, dad."

I knew my son was addressing me, but I had no idea about what he was referring. So I asked him. "Son, what are you talking about? Death chips?"

"We're not supposed to be buying Frito Lay." My look did not reflect understanding. "Another guy died on their assembly line. We're supposed to be boycotting them."

This was the first I had heard of such a thing. Not the boycott. Or the idea of a boycott. I was unaware that working conditions at the Frito Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas were so horrible and a strike had been called after an employee had collapsed and died. Management had them move the body out of the way and shifted another person in to keep the line rolling. 

Death chips. 

So I can completely respect the reasoning. I'm a union guy who has been on strike, and I asked people to respect our picket line. Nobody died while teaching in our district and asked us to shove the corpse out of the way. I felt bad.

Death chips.

The tough part was, I had purchased that bag of Wavy fried potatoes because my son, like his father before him, was a brand name guy. I could have bought some locally sourced fried potato product but went to the big cardboard display with the expressed intent of getting us some brand name Wavy chips.

Death chips. 

I have got to start reading more of Al Gore's Internet. 

WWHMD?

 Just thought I'd pop in here and remind y'all that there is a global pandemic. Yes, that's right. It did not just go away as so many "experts" had predicted. People across the globe are still dying. By the thousands. From the disease. 

Not from the vaccinations. In case there was a question about that. Turns out they're pretty effective. Like in the ninety-five percent range. So, if you're on the fence about this vaccination thing, remember that the government is giving them away for free. Free medicine. Think about that for a moment, and consider how much you paid for that last prescription. I wonder how many people who have chosen not to get their shot chose not to cash their stimulus check. 

I'm also wondering how much furor we will have to endure once school begins again about masks. Currently California has issued a mask mandate, maskdate, for the coming school year. Already there are parent groups and concerned "patriots" up in arms about what goes over their children's faces. A group in San Diego called "Let Them Breathe" is suing the state saying that it should be a choice for families and not an order from the government. I wonder how many of these folks are all about choice when it comes to the government's oversight on women's reproductive rights. And how many of them cashed their stimulus check. 

What would Horace Mann do? Horace Mann was the father of public education in this country, and it seems as though he might have some wisdom to clear up this confusion. How about this one: "Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge." This provides a nice complement, I think, to the lesson of Maslow's hierarchy of needs which teaches us that learning takes place only once a student feels they are in a safe environment. Wearing a mask seems like a pretty easy path to get that. And if you can avoid having crowds of sign-carrying, shouting parents outside insisting that they know best what is safe and what is not, that would probably help a lot too.

The pandemic is not over. The virus did not go away. But we are clever monkeys and we will figure out what we need to do in order to stay alive. 

The clever ones, anyway. 

Follow The Bouncing Ball

 The Raiders left. 

The Warriors left. 

Now it looks likely that the Athletics will be leaving. 

Sports. Who really needs them, after all?

Ask the families of the folks who work at any of the venues at which these teams play their games. The security. The parking attendants. The lady who sells those foam fingers that every kid has to have once. Revenue that used to come pouring through the pipeline into Oakland-based coffers has now ceased. A couple of preseason and eight regular season games for the Raiders. Forty-one regular season NBA games are now being played across the bay in San Francisco. The Oakland A's are the holdouts. But for how much longer?

Not every city with a major league sports team has a relaxed and supportive relationship with one another. Tax breaks and zoning and all that fiscal stuff has to be discussed and agreed upon in order for a show as big as major league anything to take place on a regular basis. Anywhere. There are plenty of cities that are anxious to see an established team move from its home and take up residence in their back yard, even if means a little inconvenience like constructing a new stadium near public transportation and existing revenue streams that won't get choked with all that sports money when it starts flowing through. 

I was never a fan of the Oakland Raiders, but I did find my way to a few games over the years. I was a lot more interested in the Golden State Warriors. I confess that they did "The Town" proud by bringing a few championships home, and they generally seemed interested in their place within the community. The Oakland A's were the first major league sports team that I made a habit of attending their games. It became a bit of a tradition that my son and I would catch at least one game a season, around Father's Day, at which point we would drag home a couple souvenir plastic tumblers to add to our collection. Maybe even a bobblehead. 

Now the city and the Athletics' ownership can't seem to figure out a way to stay together. It's not like this was a forever thing in the first place. The team was established in Philadelphia back in 1901, where they played until 1955 when they made the jump halfway across the country and landed in Kansas City. It wasn't until 1968 that they became the Oakland Athletics. Fifty years and a few World Series later, it would appear that it may be time to pack up the bats, balls, and gloves and head to more favorable climes. Somewhere like Portland, or Nashville, or Montreal. Or maybe just down the highway to a new baseball only stadium on the Oakland waterfront. How hard could that be? If you could figure out the infield fly rule, why couldn't you figure out a way to stay put? 

To paraphrase Robert Frost, "nothing green and gold can stay."