Looking for stuff to organize into a post today led me to realize that I currently exist swimming in a tidal wave of goofy images that I myself have created.
So, lazy and goofy old me will now show you some of these things.
I don’t even remember why I drew some of these things.
Some of it, is obviously because I was a teacher.
But some of it is merely wacky.
Though some might be considered inspirational.
While some of it is just meant to be appealing.
But all of it provides me with an easy post that you can read fast, but still get plenty to think about from. It is even good for a re-post if I add something newer.
This is an old artwork I have never shared before.
There are many things that I have noticed about being a blogger that are the opposite of what you might expect. Let me list a few…
Listing stuff makes a daily post easier.
I have posted something on WordPress as a blogger ever day for twenty two and a half months. I will soon hit two years without missing a day.
Writing every day makes the ideas flow more easily rather than running out of ideas. The well refills faster than I can drink its waters.
My most popular post is Be Naked More , which gets views practically every day, but including artistic nudes randomly in a post does not increase its views and popularity even when I put “naked” and “nude” in the tags.
Reproducing artwork on a blog is difficult when you draw things too big for your little scanner/printer. No matter how good the camera and how bright the lighting, white becomes gray and the sparkle and luster of good colored pencil color is lost.
Good writing becomes more about writing less. But it also has to be more carefully crafted. The more I brew prose in my black cauldron of a blog, the more it seems to boil down to poetry.
Readers don’t seem to object to metaphors and purple paisley prose as much as editors and book reviewers do.
I like writing purple paisley prose (over-complicated grammatical structures with alliteration, metaphor, and asides that interrupt the flow like this one… taken to the extreme for humorous effect).
Art pieces can be manipulated and re-used or re-combined to make something new out of something old. Computers make art-editing infinitely easier.
Most people don’t actually read your blog all the way through. Some just like it for the pictures. If you actually read this far, you can let me know with a smiley face in the comments.
There are many, many good writers on WordPress… as I am sure there are on other blog sites as well. I despair of being able to find and read them all. If you are reading this bullet point, you are probably one of the ones I have found and read and liked. Blogging becomes a mirror that shows you your own self more naked than naked… not just what is under your clothes, but what you look like to yourself in your own head. And the more you walk around WordPress naked like that, the more you want to show it all off. (How’s that for an idea that will pull in the readers from the lonely parts of Siberia?)
When I feel like I am losing my battle with six incurable diseases, I often fight back against the depression by doing some big-picture thinking. How does one little insignificant speck of carbon-based lifeform living on an apparently doomed planet fit into the vast over-all thing that is the universe? Well, I can shift my point of view from the macro to the micro. To the tiny little liver cell that just split off an older cell, the great big organism that is me is rather a big deal. To the tiny germinating thought in my brain that will evolve into this essay, the collection of thoughts and experiences that is my mind and soul are a matter of life and death. What does it all mean, anyway? What value does it all have?
I have been a public school teacher who touched more than 2000 lives in my time. I invented moose bowling. I have written and published more than one novel. I have somehow managed to reproduce and father three beautiful children in spite of my many flaws and geek-o-riffic tendencies. I have achieved success in so many ways. Even if it all ends in the next hour, it will be okay. I will continue to resonate through this little world in one way or another for quite some time. I have affected this world for both good and ill, but mostly for good, and that affects the solar system too because I have been a part of it… and the Orion Spur of the Saggitarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy too because I have been a part of it… and the local cluster of galaxies… and probably even the realms beyond that.
To paraphrase The Desiderata ; “I am a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, I have a right to be here.”
Yes, some days when I don’t feel well, I live here… my house and my neighborhood.
So, Lord, this is not about regret or guilt or longing or pain. This is about celebration. It is good to exist. Thank you for every day of life I have ever had.
When learning to write, you have to learn the rules. And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well. But what do I know? You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey. After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.
Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing. That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid. Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid. Okay, that’s mostly true. But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself. I’m talking to Mickey after all.
So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.
I try to write posts of no more than 500 words. I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about. Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion. Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay. I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one. Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is. What does “pithy” even mean? It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.
That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it? See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.
So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today. Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines. And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose. And there’s the knot in that bow.
Today I need to take some deep breaths. My computer betrayed me just now. I had been working on today’s intended post for a week with pictures and posing dolls and writing dialogue. Then, as I was one more panel from the end, the computer pulled another one of its malfunctioning fits. In a matter of two seconds it highlighted everything I had written on the WordPress writer, deleted it, and saved the changes. This is now the seventh time the computer has done this. And I have gotten used to it enough that I have bits and pieces of the work saved. I can re-construct the piece for tomorrow. But I was almost angry enough to dash the stupid word-munching machine against the far wall. So I need calming thoughts.
Here is a recent picture of a visitor to the park across the street. A snowy egret… well, in Texas, more properly called a cattle egret. I snapped this picture while walking the dog. Jade the dog did not even spook the thing, since she is littler than it is and timid of birds with glaring yellow eyes. I didn’t realize I had a use for this picture until now.
Calming thoughts are doubly necessary today. While I was composing my post, and ignorantly being unaware that my computer was about to eat it, I got a phone call from Page Publishing. They have looked over the manuscript for Magical Miss Morgan, and have approved it for publication. Of course, this is not only not a publisher that pays anything up front, they also require the author to invest money in the book’s production. But they did tell me they do consider using the author’s own artwork for the cover. And I do have credit again for the first time in three years, at least until Bank of America bankrupts me with their lawsuit. The dawn photos I put into this post are particularly appropriate. Calming thoughts with a bit of turbulence in the background. And the computer tried twice to delete this while I wrote it. But I foiled it each time.
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
I have lived a lifetime with the words, “Well, you are smart, alright, but you don’t have common sense like me.” When they meet me for the first time, other people always know that I am some sort of absent-minded-professor type who solves calculus problems in his head but forgets to wear pants to school. (Sorry, Darrin, for using you as an example of what they assume all geniuses are like.) They always know that their two-plus-two-always-equals-four common sense makes them superior to me. They don’t have to feel intimidated by my smartness because common sense is a universal equalizer.
Bullies have loudly assured me of the truth of this right to my face. Classroom wise-guys and know-it-alls (like the radioactive humanoid yam with a comb-over currently running for president) remind me that anybody can accurately remember sources for points brought up in an argument. And since anybody can do it, if they just take the time to look stuff up, or actually learn it, then it isn’t such a big deal. The guy who can pull the right answer out of the air, the answer that everybody else likes, is the one to listen to. When that guy is a billionaire, then he can always hire someone like me to look stuff up for him.
Notorious common sense advocate Sarah Palin has been campaigning in defense of common sense tea party candidates like Tim Heulskamp because she fears that absent-minded-professor types are going to undo his good work of blocking a path to citizenship for hardworking immigrants who have been here for many years and stand to be deported because their paperwork has expired while Heulscamp automatically votes “NO” on any and all immigration reform. And it is common sense to not raise taxes on the millionaires and billionaires who create jobs even though it seems like a majority of those jobs are created overseas because, after all, workers who don’t demand high pay, or any pay at all, are better for profits. And poor Timmy lost his seat in the House, even after the miracle that is the State of Kansas trickle-down economics experiment. He lost it to a rival in the GOP primary. A rival that will work with “ugh!” Democratic absent-minded professors to actually pass legislation that even Republican voters seem to want… despite common sense. How can you work with people who tolerate smart people with no pants on?
So, what have I really learned from this rumination about common sense? Nothing, of course, because I am merely smart. I have no common sense. At least, not in the sense that it is always used as a club against me.
But if I were pressed to come up with something, I might be persuaded to say, “Common sense is an oxymoron. It is certainly not common any more. And most of the people invoking it, don’t make very much sense.” Let me just sit here for a while and think about that with no pants on.
No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.
When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.
You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.
But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.
I cringed through a few of the speeches in the Republican National Convention. Speech after speech talked about how bad Hillary Clinton is, how terrible ISIS is, how Obama has betrayed us and failed us, and other warm fuzzy stuff like that. They make me sick to my stomach with fear.
Was there anything to like about the RNC in Cleveland? Well, their logo was nice.
I could complain about the plagiarism thing, the Ted Cruz booing thing (although that actually made me smile), or Donald’s deep, dark speech of the coming apocalypse. But I would rather do like the Democrats seem to be doing this week. I would rather talk about the good things they can and will do if only we are smart enough to give them the chance.
They contrasted their policies in favor of ending discrimination based on race, gender, and orientation with the anti-crime and anti-terrorism howls of the Republicans. Instead of talking about how satisfying it would be to throw the other side’s candidate in jail for imagined crimes, they told us about Hillary’s record of standing up for women, children, and the handicapped. They gave us specifics about what she has done and who she has helped and what she has learned from Bernie Sanders. Sanders graciously made her the unanimous choice by throwing all of his delegates behind her. There was peace and harmony (beyond a few former Bernie supporters who were so mad about the DNC email leak that they may vote Trump out of spite). Cory Booker’s speech suggested that instead of talking about what we are afraid of, we should be talking about working together in a spirit of love and friendship in order to do great things. Trump, of course, had an angry tweet in response to that, suggesting he knew things about Booker that could shame him. Booker replied that he loved Donald Trump and felt honored that the orange one considered him worthy of an angry tweeting.
Now, I am not saying that Democrats are perfect and Republicans are evil… am I? I don’t believe that when I am rational and not dreaming up nightmares… do I? But loving one another is what I think the default position should always be for Christians. So why are the nominally Christian conservatives so much more keen on the righteous wrath of God stuff and punishing those they hate? Shouldn’t it be the opposite of that? And my severely Republican friends are always suspicious of just how Christian the godless communist heathens in the Democratic party really are. If the Democrats are so totally wrong, shouldn’t the facts line up against them?
But it all boils down to facts versus feelings, doesn’t it. Republicans have reason to be angry, especially the poor ones, because of the raw economic deal they have been given. Their righteous indignation deserves redress. But is that best served by punishing Democrats in the more liberal party that more generally favors less income inequality? What about the capitalist billionaires who drive the Republican agenda? Are they really saints and deserving of everything they have taken for themselves?
I am smart, but not smart enough to have ultimate answers to the biggest questions. I have Republican friends who agree whole-heartedly with that last sentence, especially words five, six, and seven. But I know the DNC made me feel good while watching, and the RNC made me ill. I definitely choose love over hatred and politics.
I discovered a new artist today. I was reading posts in the Facebook writer’s group, 1000 Voices for Compassion. And there in a post by Corinne Rodrigues was a YouTube video by Andrew Peterson. And it was a miracle. I clicked on the video and he sang my soul. Here is the original blog post. And here is the video.
Yesterday I posted a self-reflected goopy bit of nonsense about how I write and draw. Today, I realized I haven’t explained whyI write and draw.
You can capture it in words. You can capture it in pictures. Like Andrew Peterson did, you can capture it in music. It is deep and profound and eternal… and you can’t really explain it, but it is the singularity… the right word… the way to caress the very face of God.
This music from Andrew Peterson is musical poetry that expresses love in terms of romance and religion. Love of the significant other is equal to and intertwined with the love of God. There is a truth in that, and a fundamental reason why despite how religion has let me down, I will never be an atheist again. Through the right words I have come to know God. I speak to him daily. I spent twenty years as a Jehovah’s Witness, even to the point of knocking on doors and sharing the little pamphlets that are supposed to contain the capital “T” Truth. I can’t do that any more, though. The thing is, they believe the chosen of God, the only people who can reach paradise, are the people who all say and do and believe the very same thing, the very same words. Anyone else is left to destruction. No paradise. No life after death. And they clearly tell you what the words are, and you must repeat them like a magic spell. Peterson’s music is forbidden. JW’s don’t want you to listen to anyone’s words but their own. So, since this is Christian music, but not JW Christianity, it is the work of the devil, trying to lead you to destruction. What kind of selfishness is this? And yes, I have repeatedly been shown the words in the Bible that say that this is so. But I have stopped believing that all words in the Bible are the right words. When the Bible speaks of love… those are the right words. When the Bible speaks about what you must hate and who is condemned… those are not.
You may have noticed that I have obsessively searched out and shared this Andrew Peterson music. I do that when I find the right words… good words… I obsessively want to find more and more. I did that once with butterflies. When I was a boy, I chased them down with nets and collected them. But you have to put butterflies in killing jars and then mount them on pins and Styrofoam boards to collect them. I realized too late that this was not the right way to treat them. You have to let them flutter in the sunshine and float on the breeze. You have to let them live. And so must you do with the right words when you find them. You must use them and share them and let them live.
Yes, the reason I write is because my life has been lived and it is coming to an end. But it is a good life. A life filled with wisdom and love and the very best of those words I have collected in butterfly nets over time. And I must share those very right words… and let them live because they are beautiful and true… and it is simply who I have to be.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why School Should Be Cool
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, education, humor, insight, teaching
Tagged as education, Finland's education system, humor, lessons learned, teaching, teaching better