Catch a Falling Star

May 16, 2015 · 1:58 pm

Teacher-Wise

So, does this title have more than one meaning? Of course it does. This post is about being a teacher and having wisdom. And I know you will immediately think, “You dumb guy! I know teachers who aren’t wise at all! Some teachers are stupid!”

You are especially saying that if you are a student.

You are not wrong, either. Some teachers have no business being teachers. It is especially difficult to find good science and math teachers. After all, those who are good at math and science can make so much more money in the private sector, that they would have to be born to be a teacher… and realize it, to go into teaching. There are very good science and math teachers out there, but many of them are wilting under the weight of a difficult job being made constantly harder by social pressures like truly dumb people who say things like, “You can’t solve our education problem by throwing money at it!” I guarantee no one has ever thrown money at the problem. If teachers were paid what they were worth so that we could retain good, competent teachers, you would see education make an amazing amount of progress in a very short time. What Wall Street firm fails to pay their star players what they are worth? Do bankers and lawyers get punished for doing a good job by asking them to produce more with fewer resources for less pay? Those folks in finance and law always pay the price for the best because that always produces the best result. If you want schools to routinely produce critical thinkers and problem-solvers, why would you complain that we are spending too much money per kid? Of course, there are those with the money and the power (especially in Texas) who really don’t want more students coming out of schools with the ability to think and decide for themselves. Smart people are harder to control and make a profit from. (Out of Control is a book they don’t want you to read.)

So now I have totally proved the point that smart people who are looking out for their own interests should never go into teaching. Still, among the unwashed, unloved, and incompetent that do make the mistake of going into teaching, there is still a great deal of learning and gaining of wisdom going on. After all, if a fool like me can become a good teacher, anybody can do it. You just have to learn a few bits of wisdom the hard way that have very little to do with what we call “common sense”.

As Dr. Tsabary points out in the book I plastered on the front of this post, discipline is not what you think. We all remember that teacher we had that nobody listened to. She was always yelling at us. She made threats. She punished us. And even the good kids in class would shoot spitwads at the back of her head. Why did we not respect and learn from this teacher? Because she never learned these profound truths.

1. Kids are people. They want to be treated with respect and even love. Their ideas matter as much, if not more than the teacher’s ideas. Good teachers will;

a. Get to know every kid in their class as a human being, knowing what they believe in, what they care about, where they come from, and who they think they are.

b. Ask them questions. They will never have an original idea if you do not make them think. They have insights and creativity and strengths as well as weaknesses, bad behavior, and wrong ideas. You have to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.

c. Laughing and talking in the classroom is evidence of learning. Quietly filling out worksheets is evidence of ignorance, and most likely the ignorance of the teacher.

2. Tests don’t matter. This is always true for these reasons;

a. Tests are a comparison, and nothing is gained by comparing kids. Comparing the scores of my bilingual kids in South Texas with upper class rich kids in Chicago and college-bound kids in Tokyo has no value. Their lives are completely different and so are their needs. If we don’t score as well on the tests as the kids in Tokyo, what difference will that make to what time the train arrives in the station in Paris? (Especially if Pierre has chosen the bullet train that goes south at a rate of 200 miles per hour. No trains in Texas go that fast without crashing and blowing up.)

b. If I spend time in class teaching students how to read and making them practice reading critically, they will do just as well as the kids who drilled extensively from specially made State materials preparing for the test on the reading and vocabulary portions. The only way that outcome changes is by cheating and giving them the actual test questions before the test. (I should point out that teachers caught doing this last thing are shot in Texas and buried in a box full of rattlesnakes. Dang old teachers, anyhow!)

I know I started this little post by convincing you that I am not wise, and very probably mentally unbalanced. And now that I have made my arguments, you know for sure. But over time, there is wisdom to be learned from being a teacher. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true. (I don’t know how many times I used that phrase out loud in a classroom over 31 years, but I am guessing you couldn’t count them on fingers even if you used the hands of every kid I ever had as a student.)

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as advice, being a teacher, book mention, education, humor, paffooney, philosophy, reference, teaching, wisdom

May 15, 2015 · 11:06 am

Crummy Times

I am down and out again. The rain keeps coming down in Texas, when the wind isn’t trying to blow us away… And the pollen is higher than ever, with a really high mold count (to which I am very allergic). I am not the only member of my family suffering right now, and I just finished compiling fifty dollars worth of paperwork for my health insurance company because there are claims they don’t want to pay for. I am not an insurance-scammer. I really have been ill. I really have avoided expensive medication and referrals to specialists because I can’t pay for them. The pirates are actually the ones who have collected all the insurance premiums and then don’t intend to pay anything out. Sure, we are talking about pre-existing conditions, but the law says they can’t hold that against me any more. I could take them to court, but lawyers cost money too, and WHAT PART OF BROKE DON”T THEY UNDERSTAND?

This post is a place-holder. I have been religiously posting every day in 2015 and this post answers that particular quest today. But don’t worry yourself, Ol’ Black Timothy (the pirate pictured below in red, beside his best friend Scruffy Bill, who has two wooden legs, two wooden arms, and a wooden head)! I promise you, I will get to the humorous post where I skewer the evil buccaneers at (I won’t disclose the name, but it rhymes with Aetna in the way that orange rhymes with orange) and the evil swashbuckling freebooters of (rhymes with Bank of America…and possibly Providian). But for right now my head is hurting, I cannot breath, and I have a sick child to take care of at the same time. (How’s that for typing with one hand and fighting with a saber in the other?)

4 Comments

Filed under humor, illness, Paffooney

Tagged as colored marker, humor, illness, paffooney, Pirates, Threats and counterthreats

May 14, 2015 · 12:10 pm

Wide-Eyed Wonder

There is no doubt about it, being a writer is like getting naked in public. It never used to really sink in before I published books, and when no one read my writing or listened to me when I talked. Suddenly, I am being read… and even… frighteningly, being believed.

I now have 678 followers, a number of whom actually read and comment on my posts. I do my best to entertain and make them laugh, but it is the nature of real writing that the contents of my life as a whole spill out for all to see. I try to keep private things private, but it is becoming more and more obvious that I need a much bigger purple teddy bear. Readers of my blog know that I was a public school teacher for thirty-one years. They also know that I did not want to leave that job, but I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor, and my health let me down. They may also know that I was the victim of a sexual predator when I was a child and recovery has taken a lifetime… in fact, it is still going on. They may know that my family life has become difficult because health issues affect an entire family, especially when the costs of care are turned into gigantic scary monsters by an increasingly greedy and corrupt health-care industry (not doctors and nurses. mind you, but the higher-ups who really make all the money off drugs, tech, and insurance.) There are no longer skeletons in my closet. All my darkest secrets become fuel for writing and bubble out of my cauldron, transforming into butterflies, who may have started as worms, but have worked themselves into filigreed winged creatures that flit about in the sunlight. I turned one of my most horrible experiences into a post for https://www.facebook.com/groups/1000Speak/. It was the story of Ruben Vela, and it was about my inability to prevent a tragedy. Here is the link; When Compassion Fails. Gobs of sobs from readers in the comment section. I usually try to make them laugh… but crying is a part of the reading game too.

And where are the Trolls? I see them on the internet everywhere. I know other bloggers who have cut off comments because of Trolls. They don’t seem to come around me with their leg-breaking, gut-busting insults and four-letter-wordy mayhem. Do I not deserve that as much as anybody else? But I know better than to actually wish for what I don’t really want. It is okay, Trolls, if you decide you’d rather apply the soul-crushing efforts elsewhere.

The point is, while I have always wanted to be a writer and have some experience with naturists and nudists, I have never before now had to come to terms with dancing naked in the sunlight in front of God and everybody… but continuing to write means dealing with it now.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, writing

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, goofiness, humor, paffooney, secrets, self portrait, wisdom, writing

May 13, 2015 · 11:57 am

Animal Town and Clowns

There is a place in the cartoon part of my brain where the dream-stories of Fantastica take place. I am trying to get my goofiness all lined up to produce a more finished cartoon saga using all the goof-gas and whooey that I have stored up in that squirrel-den I call my mind. I prepared a setting already… a single set that already showed you what Animal Town looks like, where all the people are anthropomorphized animals. Here it is again to refresh your memory.

Animal Town is just one place in the larger Toon World of my silly imaginings. There are many more. I intend to draw these toons in what I call “Clown Noir”… that is, the drawings will be in pen and ink, filmed in black and white and red… especially red for noses. Got the idea? I hope I haven’t spoiled the joke already. Spoiled jokes are kinda like spoiled milk; they make you want to put a clothespin on your nose (and that kinda hurts, so it becomes harder to laugh.)

I also wanted to introduce a few of the denizens of Fantastica. (That’s denizens, not Dennis’ sons, because I used to think all the people that lived in one place somehow became the children of Dennis, but then Dennis told me that just ain’t so!)

Rugs Rabbity is a class of cartoon character I like to call a hero. I know what it looks like. I probably did steal the character from Warner Brothers, but filtered through my dreams Rugs becomes something else other than pure Bugs. He is, after all, a parody of a parody, and when that turns all parrot-y then we are looking at un-punny puns. Makes you want to put another clothespin on your nose, doesn’t it?”

And here are two more parrots that I hope you will recognize and copyright lawyers will not. They are much more insane and destructive than their counterparts from Mr. Prizney.

But cartoon dreams are not all animalized, and not all borrowed from elsewhere. I am capable of making up my own characters too that don’t satirize and plagiarize and turn me into a toon-thief. If you visit Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, there are one-of-a-kind characters that you might meet there too.

Flash Crumpwell is a hero character also. But unlike Rugs, he is a little dim in the light-bulb-lighting department.

Handsome Harry has always got his face covered somehow, because, after all, if you are so good-looking that women always faint at your feet and men always shoot you on sight, life can become a little too interesting. All in all, as a villain, he would rather just blow stuff up!

Princess Doe-Eyes is the real ruler of the Bignose Tribe, because, after all, she has a tiny nose, and her father is chief because his nose is the biggest in the tribe, but he can’t really see over it or around it… and when you’re in charge, that can kinda get in the way. Davy Crickett is an Indian fighter from the old days, but he cannot bring himself to fight with the Princess or her Bignose Tribe. He much prefers to play with her.

And we must certainly not forget the clowns. Here are a couple of Clown villains (as if we need more reasons to be afraid of clowns!)

The Messmaster is a Clown who loves a good pie fight. He will whirl and hurl and get you in the face with a strawberry or blueberry or Ray Bradbury pie (those Sci-Fi pies can get particularly messy and smelly… Clothespin number three… and it is getting hard to breathe.)

Badnose is an even more evil Clown bad-guy. I can’t begin to explain why his nose is so bad.

Lastly, let me share a scene with you from the rough draft of The Clown Town Caper, a detective story starring Detective Squiggy and Little Mickey (my dream-self).

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Filed under action figures, cartoons, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink

Tagged as cartoon characters, cartoon-making, cartoons, goofiness, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink, plagiarism, rough drafts, Sci-Fi pie, Unforgivable acts of humor

May 12, 2015 · 12:21 pm

Garrison Keillor

Sometimes it is good to acknowledge your influences and the people whose work has changed your life into what it now appears to be. Such a person, a profound influence on my story-telling habits, is Garrison Keillor.

“GKpress” by Prairie Home Productions. Licensed under Attribution via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GKpress.jpg#/media/File:GKpress.jpg

This man in the picture who looks like one of my relatives, is the story-teller, writer, and radio personality Garrison Keillor.

The only way to accurately explain this whole honorarium-business is to tell you a story… You see, Great Grandma Hinckley, when she was reaching the tarnished end of her golden years, the latter part of her 90’s, the nearly-a-century mark, always called me “Donny”. Apparently “Michael” was too hard a name to actually remember. To be fair, though, it was my Uncle’s name, and I did look in the 1970’s very much like Uncle Don when he was a youth in the 1950’s. And though Great Grandma had more great grandchildren to keep track of than “Carter had little liver pills,” she always knew that I was one of the smart ones. When I graduated from high school I earned a full four-year scholarship from my dad’s company due to my high grades and test scores. She was very proud of that fact. She told all of her friends at the nursing home that of all of the awards presented at the senior awards assembly, I had won most of them. This was not even remotely true, except when viewed through the smoky, rose-colored lens of great grandmother-hood, but it led to all the people at the home saying things like, “You must be Donny! Congratulations on your great big brain!” Some of them even knew already that my name was Michael. Only now that I am getting old do I begin to understand old-people humor a bit better.

So, Great Grandma wanted to give me a really good graduation present. She gave most of her obligatory grandkid presents as hand-crocheted Afghans in bright neon colors that were wildly mismatched because she was color blind. But me, she gave me her radio. Yes, a portable radio roughly the size of a large school lunchbox. It was an RCA… that’s a brand of radio for you young whippersnappers who don’t know anything about what was irreplacebly good in the mid-20th Century. It was one of the most valuable things she still owned, and the TV set was too big to take to college (thank goodness). So I took that ultra-valuable old radio along to college to listen to music while I studied. Dad had hooked me on classical music, so I listened to the Public Broadcasting channel KLYF in Des Moines.

That is how I came to be a fan of Garrison Keillor. Every Saturday night, along about 7 p.m., KLYF broadcast another episode of A Prairie Home Companion. I would listen to the gospel music and ads for Powdermilk Biscuits and gossip from the Chatterbox Cafe in Lake Wobegone, Minnesota. And Garrison Keillor, old G.K., would tell stories about the doings in Lake Wobegone, his old (fictional) home town “Where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average.” It was there that I learned that every good story may ramble on a bit and have a long pause or two, or twenty, but always came to the point in the end. I learned that from Garrison Keillor. But I may owe a bit of that to Great Grandma Hinckley too.

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Filed under autobiography, Garrison Keillor, humor

Tagged as autobiography, Garrison Keillor, Great Grandma, humor, writing

May 11, 2015 · 2:46 pm

Monday With The Daughter

Mondays are usually blue and difficult days. It is hard to get out of bed. And if they are hard for me, a retired old graybeard with few responsibilities beyond getting the kids out of bed and cooking breakfast and walking the dog and waking the kids up again and keeping the dog from eating the breakfast on the table and waking the kids up again and getting them out of bed for real and … well, they must be harder for kids, right?

So, I had the dog walked and breakfast served and the table cleared and we were getting ready to go to school and drop off beloved daughter at her middle school.

“I had a bad dream last night,” said the Princess. “A zombie was chasing me in a Minecraft landscape.”

“Ooh, sounds terrible. Were you by any chance playing computer games way too late last night? Maybe Minecraft?”

“Dad! It was a terrible nightmare. It made me lose sleep!”

“Did I ever tell you about my duck dream?”

“Aw, Dad! This was a scary dream, not funny.”

“Well, you know, sometimes you can have a dream and take control of it. It is called a lucid dream. If you just realize that you are dreaming, you can direct what happens. You can make a sword appear in your hand and cut the zombies’ heads off.”

“What happens when that doesn’t stop the zombie’s body from chasing you?”

“Well… look at the time. We are going to be late for school.”

“Oh, uh… I don’t have any money left in my lunch account at school.”

“You couldn’t have told me this Friday after school? I don’t have any money on me. We need to hurry and stop by the ATM at the bank on the way to school.”

So, we hurried to the bank. I handed her the twenty dollar bill.

“Um, Dad… I forgot my school I.D. at home.”

“Ah, yes… Monday.”

She made it to school at least five minutes before the late bell with money for lunch and her I.D. on so that she wouldn’t forget during the day who she actually was… well, if she did, she could at least remind herself with the I.D . Whether the zombie apocalypse happens and her dream comes true and my advice about nightmares actually saves her… I have my doubts. But with daughters, there is always hope. You hope that if you continue to feed them and get them to school on time, and talk about their fears, and address their numerous shortcomings with humor and understanding, they will turn out all right. And maybe, just maybe, they will pick a reasonably good nursing home to stick you in when you get so old and forgetful that you are too goofy to wear pants in public.

Cloudscapes

Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!” This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution. (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)

Look at a couple of my cloudscapes. Do you see angels?

Cloudscapes (a poem)

Blue and white and filled with light…

The cloudscape burns with angels…

And wholly bought with grace unsought…

I long to fly with angels…

Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?

I see them there, they’re angels!

So, there you have it. I’m a loon. I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin. But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences. Creativity has its price. And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul. If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.

The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek ἄγγελος ángelos, The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature. (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)

I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits. I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God. So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me. I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on. Here is the pencil sketch;

This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke. In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself. But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle. She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle. I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, poem

Tagged as angels, creativity, goofiness, humor, metaphor, novel writing, paffooney, pencil sketch, philosophy, photo Paffooney, poem, poetry, religion, William Blake

May 9, 2015 · 4:05 pm

It’s a Nerd Thing

Last night my family and I finally got to see the new Avengers movie. For me, it was a religious experience… even my wife, who never discusses my comic-book obsessions without raising at least one eyebrow, likes the Avengers movies… so I was able to share this sacred ritual with the whole family (minus the son in the Marine Corps who has already seen it.) The new wave of Marvel movies is a godsend. They are something that feeds my story-addicted tapeworm in ways that movies never have before. It meshes with my need to read comic books

If you hadn’t figured out the nerd facts by now, I am a comic book collector. I used to subscribe to Avengers, two Spiderman books, Iron Man, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, the X-men, Daredevil, and Howard the Duck. Shamefully that is not a complete list.

A key to my love of the new Marvel movies is that the films actually consider the old comic-book story-lines while at the same time being willing to take the risk of changing the relationships between characters, inventing new characters, re-imagining old characters, and even (shudder) killing off characters. (Of course you realize, in comic books, all heroes eventually die, but none of them stay dead… through the miracle of comic book story-telling… Selah!)

Okay, now here’s what we comic-book nerds call a spoiler alert. This movie we saw last night provided changes to the Marvel universe that positively thrilled and enchanted me. Hawkeye, the bowman with entirely self-taught swashbuckler skills and no super-powers was revealed to have a wife and kids. His lady-Avenger friend Natasha, the Black Widow, has apparently known about the family all along and is even friends with his kids. Where once we presumed a romance between the two, we now find a redefinition of the relationship that changes everything. It even allows the story to set up a tragic romance between Natasha and Bruce Banner where she utters the classic line, “We are really both monsters,” in a very tender and heart-wrenching moment. The line is later repeated by Tony Stark to the Hulk, creating a beautifully done theme of the duality between hero and monster, hero and villain.

Two new Avengers are introduced and their tragic back-story is added to the hero vs. villain, hero vs. monster thematic mix. When I first started reading Avengers comics in the barber shop in my home town back in the 60’s Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, were already a fixed part of the Avengers, but their complex and convoluted back story as mutant children of Magneto raised by Gypsies had not yet been developed.

These beloved characters have always had a sinister side. You never knew for sure if you could trust them or count on them. They were children of Magneto and had been a part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Wanda’s powers were dark, unpredictable, and potentially world-consuming. In this movie they are given a different back story, attached first to the Hydra villain Baron Strucker, and then to the ultimate villain of the piece, Ultron himself, the indestructible and omnipresent metal man.

The final piece of the delicious Avengers 2 pie is Ultron himself. Much like Thanos in the first movie, Ultron causes nerd-spasms in the love organs of comic-book nuts like me. Especially when such love and care was taken to get the story right. In the comics he was created by Hank Pym, also known as Ant-Man, and the movie changes his creator into Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. But the essential angst of the character, a Frankenstein’s monster sort of story, is still there. He both loves and hates his creator. There is an extended metaphor in Ultron’s eventual creation of the more human-like android Vision. Ultron keeps alluding to Pinocchio by repeating the phrase, “There are no strings on me,” and the Vision is portrayed as his attempt become a “real boy”. Yet, it is still a Frankenstein story. Just as Stark is afraid of his creation and fears his own destruction at Ultron’s hands, Ultron is most afraid of Vision, and the final piece of the Ultron personality is regretfully extinguished by Vision.

Now that my book report on this movie experience is drawing to a close, it is safe to conclude that the reason I loved it so much, besides the fact that I could share comic-book lore with my non-comic-book-reading family, is the depth of ideas in this movie, and the chance it gave me to reconnect with old stories, re-percolate them, and brew something entirely new.

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Filed under Avengers, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as Avengers, book report movie review, comic book, family movies, humor, nerd stuff, paffooney, Ultron

May 8, 2015 · 12:10 pm

Sailing Through a Sea of Ideas

I have been steadily chipping away at my science fiction novel about planet-saving in a world crashing with biological and political disaster. It is a comedy about the end of the world… though it is set on a distant planet that is not our world. It is not the Earth. It is the fictionalized world of David Icke’s reptilian aliens (for those of you crazy enough to follow loony-tunes tinfoil hat conspiracies with the same ironic gusto that I do). I call this novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. The world of the novel is accidentally being invaded by the Telleron aliens who starred in my novel Catch a Falling Star. They find there a world that is undergoing massive biological crises caused by war using weapons of mass destruction and injudicious exploitation of the environment for the enrichment of the elite. I know that sounds totally like Earth at present, but that is the purpose of a cautionary tale. This is the planet of the lizard people, Galtorr Prime.

But by now you are aware of the fact that I am a tremendously un-focused divergent thinker, and I already have more stories in the works. I fully intend to follow up this science fiction YA with a fantasy YA about the Norwall Pirates and South Seas Juju following an old sea captain born in Iowa all the way home from the mysterious island where he earned the curse of invisibility. It will be called The Captain Came Home or other such nonsense similar to that.

The novel about the Captain who is invisible has as its main character Valerie Clarke, who was also a main character in the novel Snow Babies. This novel is, however, set at a moment of time before the events of Snow Babies occur.

Never one to be satisfied with working on two novels at once, I have started a third. I finally came up with a name for this story that has been in my head since the 1970’s when I first learned about autism and mental disorders that affect communication. I am calling this one, for now, Fools and Their Toys.

This story is about Murray Dawes, a young man who can’t communicate with others due to autism that finally blossoms when a boy genius builds him a ventriloquist’s puppet in the form of a zebra’s head. Through the puppet the young man finds he has an awful lot to say, and he begins to bring the world around to realizations of some pretty awful things.

To prove that I have been doing at least my 500 words a day, here is the lead that I created today for this third active writing project that I’ve added to the juggling session of three novels at once.

Fools and Their Toys

I know you will probably say this is totally unbelievable, that an inanimate object… or, rather, a puppet who is animated by others, cannot be the narrator of a story. You are right, of course. I can’t possibly be the author of this tale. I am a modified sock puppet of a zebra with mechanically blinking eyes and mechanically enhanced mouth movements. My head is full of cotton stuffing and old newspapers. But I was cleverly put together by a genius, and given life by another.

You have to understand, the human mind is like a great complex Labyrinth where no man has ever mastered every single corridor. Sometimes the most beautifully complex minds become lost or trapped in a dead-end corridor, never to find the light outside again. But sometimes a special mind that was meant for special things is helped to find the light again… shown a trap door or a secret exit by another who has mastered at least a portion of the great, overly-complex dungeon. And sometimes it is possible to slip past the Minotaur who guards the secrets of the Labyrinth and keeps us all from unlocking the magic.

Okay, I know that is barely 200 words by itself… but I do get 500 done per day. I am writing two other books at the same time for gosh sakes!

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, autism, colored pencil, divergent thinking, humor, invisibility, juggling novels, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, story ideas

May 7, 2015 · 12:06 pm

My Classroom Gallery

Since beginning my career as a teacher in the 80’s, I have always had respect for student artwork. Often, I have had more respect than the artist did, as many of these artworks I have collected were retrieved from the trash can or the classroom floor. I collected these works of art, got students to sign them whenever it was possible, and always accepted any time the students offered to give me a doodle as a gift. I put them all in my old blue binder, itself a gift from a student, and called it my Classroom Gallery. Let me show you a few of the treasures I have hoarded over the years.

I do believe some of these artworks were intended to grease the wheels of justice and keep certain artists out of trouble… especially when they weren’t actually listening to my wonderful teaching. This example is one of many that put my name and reputation in large fancy letters made with scented markers.

Sometimes, however, I detected a more truthful take on things when I un-wadded masterpieces from the trash can. They would reveal a slightly different sentiment, though usually only a temporary one.

I also found a lot of masterpieces that were imitations of other things in their lives, things that meant more to them than English lessons, at least for that moment.