Category Archives: strange and wonderful ideas about life

Why Being a Teacher in an All-Nude Middle School Would Be Easier than Regular Middle School Teaching

Yes, I survived all the Bible-belt monster hunters who came after me for writing my first naked middle school post. And I am no wiser for the experience. I mean to tell you why I would really like to do my whole teaching career over again in a middle school where mandatory nudity is the dress code. And if that makes me insane and somehow dangerous, remember, this is a humor blog, and we like to laugh at mentally warped individuals like me and their strange behavior.

Iris is an imaginary top student at Mintyville Experimental Middle School. History is her top subject, and she wants to be a lawyer or a political leader.

Although this essay’s argument is totally facetious and farcical, that doesn’t mean it lacks truth. Some things would obviously be easier for teachers if the school opted for a totally nude dress code. For instance, no gang colors could be worn in school. And Bloods, Crips, Ambros, Latin Kings, and future Skinheads would all be bare with their tattoos covered by the appropriate flesh-colored Band-Aids. Cell phones could be concealed in pockets only by students who had undergone painful plastic surgery to create kangaroo pouches in their thighs, and even then, they would be readily visible whenever the students stood up from desks. There would be no jealousy over expensive fashions for the rich kids or embarrassment for the poor kids with ratty clothes from Goodwill and smelly underwear that never gets washed in anything but quarter-hungry washeterias. School uniforms would be free unless you counted the expense of the original birthday suit. Textile coverings required by the outside world would remain in lockers all day along with all social media devices used for creating depression in others and suicidal thoughts in yourself. And AR-15s and pistols and other weapons would have to be left in parents’ cars for after-school Texas-style social interactions. All of these consternations and nightmares would no longer be things the teacher had to worry about.

Teachers would not have to worry about how they dress either. First, teachers would not necessarily be required to be nude. If you had an unmarried male teacher in a classroom by himself with lots of naked young ladies in all his classes, that could lead to things we hear too much about in the news already when the schools are full of textile-wearing people. If the teachers are dressed in the usual frumpy-dumpy suits and dresses from Walmart, they will not be the object of hormonal fantasies from students, as there are so many other naked targets to be fascinated by. And if the faculty decides that the only way to be fair to the students is to be nude in school too, perhaps that is an area where two teachers for every class is an optimal idea, one male and one female in every class to serve as a check on each other. Hence, both sexes have the appropriate adult role model. One English teacher and one Science/Math teacher to provide the learning guidance necessary for a truly intellectual, discovery-method curriculum where they would learn problem-solving in depth. Students would become accustomed to seeing their friends, enemies, and teachers nude and it wouldn’t take long for everyone to be desensitized to the sexual aspects of everybody being naked. Of course, there would have to be detailed “no-touching” rules enforced constantly by teachers, administrators, and fellow students. It is an opportunity to master behaviors that students don’t really get detailed instruction in during their real lives, either at home or in school.

So, what’s that red sash thingy that Sasha has in the library? Miss Shortwheeler suggested it’s the twirling ribbon she will use for the halftime performance in Tuesday’s basketball game.

In real-world middle schools where everybody wears clothes and conceals the truth and gets lots of practice at lies and prevarications, students are metaphorically naked all the time. They reveal inappropriate details about their lives at inappropriate times daily. And if the teacher tries to ignore it, they will reveal it much louder and with more inappropriate words.

Nude students, on the other hand, are more open to sharing intimate ideas and feelings in more positive discussions where everyone is equally vulnerable, and can be trained to be equally sensitive to the feelings and needs of others. It is the appropriate place to learn things like proper consent, permission, respect, safe spaces, personal spaces, and appropriate sharing of things that might’ve been too personal to consider discussing in a world hidden beneath clothing. Naked people are more vulnerable and therefore more aware of the world around them and their relationships to everyone and everything. So, I am actually saying literally naked kids are easier to teach than kids who are only metaphorically naked.

Again, naked schools are not a thing in the real world of public education. This essay is only foolish speculation and idea mangling. But I really do think that a nude school is worth studying experimentally. When you come to my house after midnight again spurred onward by the religious fervor of the Westboro Baptists, remember, I will be the one laughing loudly as I flee full speed for my very life.

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Filed under artwork, education, humor, nudes, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Good Words We Never Use

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My attempt to draw “synesthesia”

Xanthophobia (from Greek xanthos, “yellow”) is fear of the color yellow. In China the color yellow was feared, specifically receiving the yellow scarf, which was an imperial order to commit suicide.

http://phobia.wikia.com/wiki/Xanthophobia

Yes, “xanthophobia” is a word I have never used in my life before now.  I have no doubt that I will never need that word again in my life.  You, dear reader, will probably never need that word either.  But the derfy space-ranger part of my brain thinks it is neat that I was able to correctly answer a trivia question about the meaning of “xanthophobia”simply because my background as an artist who has shopped for exotic oil colors in artist supply stores helped me to recognize that the “xantho” part of the word meant yellow.

Are there other totally useless words that my space-ranger brain thinks are cool to know?  Of course there are!  How can you ask such a silly question?

Ouzel may refer to:

hobbledehoy

noun hob·ble·de·hoy ˈhä-bəl-di-ˌhȯi
Popularity: Bottom 30% of words

Definition of hobbledehoy

  1. :  an awkward gawky youth

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hobbledehoy

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So, what is the actual use of knowing so many words that you can never functionally use?  Besides as a topic of a goofy post like this?

They become like the pebbles and rocks at the bottom of the briskly rushing stream of my mind.  They are not moving with the water, but they are affecting the ripples and splashes on the surface above them.  They cause eddies and backwashes and undercurrents in the complex flow of my space-ranger brain.  They make life more interesting on the surface.

And besides, knowing useless words can make me sound smarter than the fool with a derfy space-ranger brain that I truly am.

a phrase that you can tell some one when they are being so perfect. since you don’t feel like using the whole word “perfect” you use this phrase.

can also describe a human being/inanimate object and can replace someone’s name.

i just ate a thousand candy bars.
omygod. that’s so perfy derfy.

hey looks it’s perfy derfy!
where?!?!
over there! by the perfy derfy mailbox.
wow. such a perfy derfy.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom, word games, wordplay

Making Portraits

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My biggest regret as a cartoonist and waster of art supplies is the fact that I am not the world’s best portrait artist.  I can only rarely make a work of art look like a real person.  Usually the subject has to to be a person I love or care deeply about.  This 1983 picture of Ruben looks very like him to me, though he probably wouldn’t recognize himself here as the 8th grader who told me in the fall of 1981 that I was his favorite teacher.  That admission on his part kept me from quitting and failing as a first year teacher overwhelmed by the challenges of a poor school district in deep South Texas.

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My Great Grandma Hinckley was really great.

My great grandmother on my mother’s side passed away as the 1970’s came to an end.  I tried to immortalize her with a work of art.  I drew the sketch above to make a painting of her.  All my relatives were amazed at the picture.  They loved it immensely.  I gave the painting to my Grandma Aldrich, her second eldest daughter.  And it got put away in a closet at the farmhouse.  It made my grandma too sad to look at every day.  So the actual painting is still in a closet in Iowa.

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There were, of course, numerous students that made my life a living heck, especially during my early years as a teacher.  But I was one of those unusual teachers (possibly insane teachers) who learned to love the bad kids.  Love/hate relationships tend to endure in your memory almost as long as the loving ones.  I was always able to pull the good out of certain kids… at least in portraits of them.

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When kids pose for pictures, they are not usually patient enough to sit for a portrait artist.  I learned early on to work from photographs, though it has the disadvantage of being only two-dimensional.  Sometimes you have to cartoonify the subject to get the real essence of the person you are capturing in artiness.

But I can’t get to the point of this essay without acknowledging the fact that any artist who tries to make a portrait, is not a camera.  The artist has to put down on paper or canvas what he sees in his own head.  That means the work of art is filtered through the artist’s goofy brain and is transformed by all his quirks and abnormalities.  Therefore any work of art, including a portrait that looks like its subject, is really a picture of the artist himself.  So, I guess I owe you some self portraits to compare.

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Yeah, that’s me at 10… so what?

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Filed under art criticism, artwork, autobiography, humor, kids, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life

The Silent Sonata

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Being a writer is a life of music that happens only in your head.  You hear voices constantly.  They pulse rhythmically with insights and ideas that have to be written down and remembered.  Otherwise  the music turns clashing-cymbals dark and depressing.  Monday I wrote a deeply personal thank you to the Methodist minister who saved my life when I was a boy.  I posted a YouTube music video by the acapella group Pentatonix with that essay in a vain attempt to give you an idea of the music in my head when I composed that very difficult piece to give myself a measure of peace.

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I realize that I am not writing poetry here.  Poetry can so easily slip into melody and music because of rhythm and meter and rhyme.  And yet, words to me are always about singing, about performing, about doing tricks with metaphor and meaning, rhythm, convoluted sentence structure, and other sneaky things that snake-oil salesman do to get you to think what you are hearing is precisely what you needed to hear.  The Sonata of Silence…  did you notice the alliteration of the silvery letter “S” in that title?  The beat of the syllables?  Da-daah-da a da-da?  The way a mere suggestion of music can bring symphonic sounds to your ear of imagination as you read?  The way a simple metaphor, writing is music, can be wrapped into an essay like a single refrain in a symphonic piece?

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A sonata is a musical exercise in three or four movements that is basically instrumental in nature.  You may have noticed that the movements are loosely defined here by the accompanying pictures, of which there are three.  And it is silent only in the way that the instruments I am using themselves make no noise in the physical world.  The only sounds as I type these words are the hum of an old air conditioner and the whirr of my electric fan.  Yet my mind is filled with crescendos of violins and cellos, bold brass, and soft woodwinds.  The voice saying these words aloud only in my head is me.  Not the me you hear when I talk or the me I can hear on recordings of my own voice, but rather the me that I always hear from the inside.  And the voice is not so much “saying” as “singing”.

Writing makes music.  The writer can hear it.  The reader can too.  And whether I croon it to make you cry, or trill it to make you laugh, I am playing the instrument.  And so, the final notes of the sonata are these.  Be happy.  Be well.  And listen for the music.

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Filed under imagination, insight, inspiration, music, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Reading Twain for a Lifetime

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I wish to leave no doubt unturned like a stone that might have treasure hidden under it.  I love the works of Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

I have read and studied his writing for a lifetime, starting with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which I read for myself in the seventh grade, after seeing the musical movie Tom Sawyer starring Johnny Whittaker as Tom.  I caught a severe passion, more serious than a head-cold, for the wit and wisdom with which Twain crafted a story.  It took me a while to acquire and read more… but I most definitely did.  I took an American Literature course in college that featured Twain, and I read and analyzed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I also bought a copy of Pudd’nhead Wilson which I would later devour in the same thoroughly literate and pretentious manner as I had Huck Finn.  Copies of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Mysterious Stranger were purchased at the same time, though I didn’t read them cover to cover until later during my years as a middle school English teacher.  I should point out, however, that I read and re-read both of those, Connecticut Yankee winning out by being read three times.  As a teacher, I taught Tom Sawyer as an in-class novel assignment in the time when other teachers thought I was more-or-less crazy for trying to teach a 100-year-old book to mostly Hispanic non-readers.  While the lunatic-inspired experiment was not a total success, it was not a total failure either.  Some kids actually liked having me read parts of it aloud to them, and some borrowed copies of the book to reread it for themselves after we finished as a class.

marktwaindvd2006During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi.  I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious claymation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.

I have also read and used some of Twain’s most famous short fictions.  “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” are both masterpieces of Twain’s keen insight into the human psyche and the goofy and comic corruptions he finds there.

And now, retired old me has most recently read Tom Sawyer Abroad.  And, though it is not one of his finest works, I still love it and am enthralled.  I reviewed it and shared it with you a few days ago.  But I will never be through with Mark Twain.  Not only is there more of him to read, but he has truly been a lifelong friend.

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Filed under book reports, book review, goofy thoughts, happiness, heroes, old books, sharing, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tricks With Lazy Goals in Mind

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As a writer, my goal is to create wisdom and new ideas and stuff that makes a reader feel happy, or sad, or angry, or even slightly insane.  But thinking is hard when your head hurts and your body aches and your 68th birthday is just around the corner.  (Yes, this Mickey is nearly 68, but can you believe that that Mickey is going to be 96 on the day after I turn 68?)  Sometimes you just want to say, “Never mind that I wanted to post every single day for the past two years.  Just curl up in a ball and go to sleep.”  But there are ways to get something done even if your mind is full of the Sandman’s leavings and old, rotted dreams.

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You can always get by with posting somebody else’s wisdom… somebody else’s thinking.  You don’t have to work too hard to paste things together.  After all, why else did you have to look at so many cut-and-paste essays over the years in middle school and high school as an English teacher?

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And you can rely on the work you have already done collecting computer files full of colorful crap and stuff you like enough to steal to complete your cut-and-paste scrapbook post.  You don’t have to feel like you erred and are about to have your head cut off by an angry Groo.

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And you know you can get a lot of cheap likes on Facebook with some of the stuff you have available to put in this post.  You have been working at the “Be funny!” thing for a long time, and have gotten almost good enough at it to be funny on the fly.  And when you’ve gotten more than halfway to the goal, you can rest a bit.  Take a nap.  Regenerate the crazy things in your head so you can do this all again another day.

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And if you can have a laugh before you are finished, even if no one else in the world gets the joke… well, at least you will feel a little bit better yourself.

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Filed under battling depression, blog posting, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, healing, humor, illness, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

Tom Sawyer Abroad (Book Review)

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Yep, I read about being an “erronort” traveling in a balloon while sitting in a parking lot in my car.

Believe it or not, I read this entire 100+-year-old book in my car while waiting for my daughter and my son in school parking lots.  What a perfectly ironic way to read a soaring imaginary adventure written by Mark Twain, which has been mostly forgotten by the American reading public.

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My copy of this old book is a 1965 edition published for school libraries of a book written in 1894.  It tells the story of how Tom and Huck and Jim steal a ride on a balloon at a town fair from a somewhat mentally unhinged professor of aeronautical science.  The balloon, which has space-age travel capabilities due to the professor’s insane genius, takes them on an accidental voyage to Africa.

Of course, the insane professor intends to kill them all, because that’s what insane geniuses do after they prove how genius-y they really are.  But as he tries to throw Tom into the Atlantic, he only manages to plunge himself through the sky and down to an unseen fate.  The result being a great adventure for the three friends in the sands of the Sahara.  They face man-eating lions, mummy-making sandstorms, and a chance to land on the head of the Sphinx.

The entire purpose of this book is to demonstrate Twain’s ability to be a satirical stretcher of the truth, telling jokes and lies through the unreliable narrator’s voice of Huck Finn.

Here is a quoted passage from the book to fill up this review with words and maybe explain just a bit what Twain is really doing with this book;

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Notice how I doubled my word count there without typing any of the words myself?  Isn’t the modern age wonderful?

But there you have it.  This book is about escaping every-day newspaper worries.  In a time of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, global warming, and renewed threats of thermonuclear boo-boos with Russia, this proved to be the perfect book to float away with on an imaginary balloon to Africa.  And the book ends in a flash when Aunt Polly back in Hannibal wants Tom back in time for breakfast.  I really needed to read this book when I picked it up to read it.

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Filed under book reports, book review, foolishness, good books, humor, imagination, Mark Twain, old books, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Mickey’s Secret Identities

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Yes, there is very definitely a possibility that there is more than one me.

If you look carefully at the colored pencil drawing above, you will see that it is titled “The Wizard of Edo” and signed by someone called Leah Cim Reyeb.  A sinister sounding Asian name, you think?  I told college friends that my research uncovered the fact that he was an Etruscan artist who started his art career more than two thousand years ago in a cave in France.  But, of course, if you are clever enough to read the name backward, you get, “beyeR miC haeL”.  So, that stupid Etruscan cave artist is actually me.

It turns out that it is a conceit about signing my name as an artist that I stole from an old episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show and have used for well over two decades through college and my teaching career.

And of course, the cartoonist me is Mickey.  Mickey also writes this blog.  Mickey is the humorist identity that I use to write all my published novels and blog posts since I published the novel Catch a Falling Star.

Michael Beyer is the truest form of my secret identity.  That was my teacher name.  It was often simplified by students to simply “Mr. B”.  I was known by that secret identity for 31 years.

Even more sinister are my various fictional identities occurring in my art and my fiction.  You see one of them in this Paffooney.  The name Dr. Seabreez appears in Catch a Falling Star as the Engineer who makes a steam engine train fly into space in the 1890’s with alien technology.  He appears again in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius as a time-traveler.

The young writer in the novel Superchicken, Branch Macmillan, is also me.  As is the English teacher Lawrance “Rance” Kellogg used in multiple novels.

So, disturbing as it may be to realize, there is more than one name and identity that signifies me.  But if you are a writer of fiction, a cartoonist, an artist, or a poet, you will probably understand this idea better.  And you may even have more than one you too.

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Filed under autobiography, foolishness, humor, irony, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

How Learning Takes Place

So many people in this society seem to think they know better how to do what a teacher is supposed to do than those people they actually pay tiny amounts of money to for doing decades worth of the job of teaching. “Drill and practice!” “Teach them to pass the sacred State test!” “They need to diagram sentences!” “Endless practicing of math problems like long division!”

I need to be clear about this. Those people who have never stood in front of a class of thirty to thirty-five kids who are immensely stupid with a criterion-referenced State test hanging over their heads and no help with the cannibals and criminals embedded in every class need to shut up and hear this;

You need to know WHAT TO TEACH, WHY THEY NEED TO KNOW IT, AND HOW THEY WILL LEARN IT!

Was that said clearly and loud enough? I wrote the important parts in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!

By the time they reach second grade, they should all be reading at the second-grade level. Memorization of the alphabet, addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables should be reinforced, but pretty well mastered by that time. So, mere memorization skills need to be firmly in place, ready to move on to higher-order thinking skills.

In the third grade, they should already be moving on to applying reading strategies, like rereading, looking for main ideas, and interpreting compound and complex sentences (like this one.) Also, they should use the application of simple formulas in math, (2+3) x 5 = 25, and apply the directions in a recipe to the successful baking of chocolate-chip muffins.

By fourth grade they should be moving on to being able to think more abstractly, using deduction, inference, prediction of outcomes, and synthesis of ideas.

In fifth and sixth grades they should already be moving from concrete and literal thinking to abstract and metaphorical thinking.

The emphasis should not be on creating semi-competent minimum-wage workers at McDonald’s and Walmart. It should be on teaching everyone to think critically and be capable of complex problem-solving. They need to be capable of telling fact from fiction and evaluating their own conclusions and solutions to problems. In other words, they need to be ready to form unions, demand higher wages at Walmart and Dollar Tree, and tend to their own interests in the business world, just like no corporate CEO ever wants them to do.

What makes a fact a fact is that it can be verified as either true or false in a consistently repeatable manner. Every fact needs to be tested and retested. Even proven facts need to be doubted, re-proven, and even nuanced when new evidence or random anomalies occur.

Again, I hope I am being clear and loud enough to get the point across. This is the whole basis of the Scientific Method which you need to understand before we proceed to WHY THEY NEED TO KNOW IT in Part Two. That follows logically because we just finished discussing WHAT THEY SHOULD BE LEARNING.

So, bear with me as I continue to pontificate and elucidate things all good teachers know about teaching even if they only know it by instinct. I am going to be preachy and unkind just as stupid people who think they know the teaching job better than I do tell me about it constantly, only with a strong wind blowing in the opposite direction. I taught middle school and high school English for 31 years, taught every subject except foreign languages as a substitute teacher for three and a half years, and was both the head of an English department and a Gifted and Talented program for a good portion of the thirty-one years. I was even an ESL teacher for well over a decade, teaching English to non-English speakers. I am probably not as dumb as you think I am, and certainly as certain that I am right than any of the people who argue with me have any ghost of a chance of being.

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Filed under angry rant, education, grumpiness, humor, kids, Liberal ideas, strange and wonderful ideas about life, teaching

Humble Pie

The difference between who you want to be and who you are is humbling.

The recipe for humble pie requires good, clear eyesight.

And you need a reliable mirror that only shows the flaws in the reflected image, not in the mirror itself.

And you need to look at every detail in the whole of you. Even the secret things that you tend to conceal from everybody, especially yourself.

And writing a novel, if you do it right, is a form of baking humble pie.

The good and the not-so-good is reflected in reviews, which are often written with mirrors that have flaws.

But what you see, if you are honest with yourself, can show you that, even though you are far from perfect, you are exactly what you are supposed to be.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, irony, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life