I now only have four days left in my teaching career. I am swiftly reaching the end. I need to savor just a little bit. I will soon be retired and a classroom will never be the place where I do my best work again. I can reach and teach still, but my health holds me back. I can barely present for ten minutes any more. I end up gasping for breath and needing to sit. I have never been a teacher who sits behind the desk. I am always stalking the entire classroom and working over the shoulder of the kid with the question. Okay, I can’t do the work any more… so it is the right thing to retire and let others in better shape take over. I’m dreading the end, but soon I will have to embrace it whole.
Tag Archives: drawing
Being A Teacher
June 3, 2014 · 12:54 am
Yes, I Throw a Moose or Two
I thought that this silly poem needed to be re-posted because school is ending. The need for silliness is absolutely imperative. I also need to throw a few mooses… er… moosei… er… meese? How do you pluralize the word moose?
Life is as Hard as Bowling with a Moose (A Poem)
Life is like Moose Bowling,
Because…
In order to knock over all the pins,
And win…
You have to learn HOW TO THROW A MOOSE!
As the days count down, I have had to exercise my moose-throwing muscles more and more. Today I have five days left in my teaching career. So many precious kids I have to give up and never see again… So many teachers will tell you that every year the kids are getting worse and worse, and their attitudes are turning more sour, disrespectful, and violent. But those teachers don’t know the secret. You have to throw a moose or two at the problem. Real discipline is hard work. Harder than demanding that kids sit in rows and be silent… heads down and pens scratching away. You have to actually talk to kids and learn who they are… what they feel is important… what their problems are, and what they want you to do about them. You have to be honest, give them a hook or two to draw them into the whole learning thing. You have to actually care.
So, I do. I care. And I let them talk. It’s a moose that has to be tossed.
The comment was made this morning that you have to keep them working right up until the end of the year. Doing no formal lessons in class is actually a lot harder and more risky than continuing to plod through the textbook. But in five more days there are no more classes, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks… school’s out forever. I haven’t done any lessons since two weeks ago. Grades are in the gradebook. I have been showing kids my favorite movies. Especially movies from the eighties. (Truthfully, I have not been well enough to actually teach. My body aches and I can’t breathe very well) I have been talking to kids about those movies… what they think about them, and what they think about life in general. Kids are telling me they are worried about my poor health. They say they are interested in my books and my writing, even though they don’t actually read just for pleasure and will never buy what I write… or even look at this blog. They tell me about their troubles, their hopes and dreams, their most significant relationships, and they tell me that they will miss me next year. Five days… will I make it through without breaking into tears? No, I won’t. I may not even try. That’s one moose too heavy to throw.
But I have no regrets. I have touched more than two thousand five hundred lives (a pretty close estimate… I don’t have a good enough memory to actually count.) They have touched my life in return. No other thing I could have done with my life would ever mean as much. Doctors save lives, but teachers shape real people. So what does it all mean? I mean, really? It means I have thrown a lot of mooses… er… moosei… er… well, you know what I mean. And if my arms are growing weary, then it is for a very good reason.
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Snow Babies Explained
I hope to soon be able to publish my newest novel, Snow Babies, with PDMI Publishing,
In that book, I tell the story of a blizzard descending on a small town with the intent to kill. Within the storm are a group of snow spirits who come to collect the frozen dead. They take the form of naked children, completely white. They collect the souls of people who die in the blizzard, and those frozen casualties become snow babies themselves. They operate somewhat like banshees in that, when someone sees one, it means that someone is going to die, or at least have a near-death experience. Snow Babies are not malevolent… not evil… but they don’t spare the good either. So the key question in the story… Who will die? And more importantly… who will live?
May 30, 2014 · 1:42 am
The Red Haired Girl Says Goodbye
Katherine was in my Reading Class for two of the last three years. She was never a hard worker, but always really well behaved and generally a joy to be around. Today, she saw me in the hallway, doing my before-class get-to-class-and-hurry-up duties.
“I heard you are not going to teach any more after this year,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “After thirty years, I have had all the teaching I need.”
Her brown eyes grew big and sad like a puppy’s. “We’re gonna miss you.”
“We really are,” said Barbra, one of her two friends.
“I need to give you a hug,” she said.
I hugged her gingerly, always conscious of the dangers of touching a student. But there was no hint of the inappropriate kind of love. Only a student saying goodbye to a teacher who meant a little bit more to her than other teachers. And it touched my heart. I figure I have touched the lives of more than two thousand five hundred. That’s two thousand five hundred at least that have taken a little bit of my life and touched me. And this one said, “I’ll come to your classroom and visit you before the year is over.” I’m going to miss her. I’m going to miss her times 2,500.
May 28, 2014 · 1:08 am
Dungeons and Dragons (Revisited)
Since I have been writing a lot about old D & D lately, I decided to repost this essay about playing Dungeons and Dragons. It is reworked slightly to help mesh with recent posts. Of course the names of students have been changed to protect the innocent. I don’t expose real people in my blogging. I tend to fictionalize everything. After all, no one should have to suffer the damage to their reputations that Mickian goofishness can cause.
Back in 1982 I first started dungeon mastering for my younger brother and two sisters. We bought a family set with both the red book and blue book. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of storytelling games. You can’t give fanboy dynamite to an Ubernerd and not expect some kind of big old explosion.
The thing that caught me so completely was the way that you could share the development of the characters and story, everybody at the table adding their two cents until you had a whole lot more than six cents… More like priceless. And you never knew for sure how it would turn out, no matter how much you planned the plot and plotted the plan. Events could turn out entirely opposite to what they should have, and inspiration on the spot could alter the essential course of a campaign.
In the beginning it was all about wizards. The original game featured power that left wizards weak and vulnerable in the beginner levels, but fearsome with fire-balling ferocity after only a few levels of experience. My brother’s wizard, LeRoy became powerful enough to make himself the king of all of Balindale and the Southern Kingdom . When the dungeon master raised up armies of undead and ogres and undead ogres to bedevil old LeRoy, the bearded Lord of Balindale could simply summon meteors from the sky and burn them to the ground. If I presented him with rival wizards who had armies and kingdoms of their own, he pulled a fast one and used his diplomatic dipsy-doo to make them into allies… even the evil ones. He convinced them to sign treaties with him and eventually to accept him as their sovereign lord. Thus the Wizard Ganser from mighty Gansdorf was tamed and turned. When the evil Black Wizard refused to cooperate, Ganser and his army helped to invade and destroy the stronghold of Fort Doom.
So stories came to be dominated by wizards and wizard personalities. And then I began recruiting former students to play the game. The personalities changed. Goofy Gomez chose to be the wizard, the typical classroom clown who could never do anything straight. Fernie the Flunkie, a particularly destructive personality, also took up the way of magic with Asduel the Sorcerer. So in some games, Asdok the Bumbling made jokes and got his fellow adventurers into situations where only the last minute appearance of a kindly, all-powerful Titan could keep them from being roasted in a pot with carrots and potatoes. In other games, Asduel the Merciless burned cities and castles, made orphans into servants and slaves, and generally frowned quite a lot when the dungeon master suggested that some Non-player characters needed to be spared or the over-all adventure would be lost for all players.
So, because of the power of wizards, we all learned that stories could be easily unbalanced and abused by the personalities in them. We learned how important it was to learn to work together. When Sir Hogan, the Knight of Tol Arriseah, and Sin Gard, the fighter of the many magic swords got sick of old Asduel, they let the bullywugs and locathah of Eary Marsh first take him prisoner, and then roast and eat him with carrots and potatoes. And when Asdok the Bumbling set fire to the base of the tower in which he was trying to wring the treasure from the top, trapping his little thief friend, Artran the Halfling up there with him in the body of the ugly girl he had turned him into with a polymorph spell, they allowed him to take a ride in the tower-turned-skyrocket into another dimension entirely.
Dungeons and Dragons taught us that the difference between good and evil can be learned. We learned that hitting your problems with a sword or dropping a fireball on top of them did not always solve them. We learned to negotiate, to feel what others feel, and how to become a different person than the one you are. I truly believe that the most important lessons you can learn about life can be learned playing D&D. Morality, camaraderie, and cooperation are not really taught in school, but they can be taught in D&D.
And now I play Dungeons and Dragons with my own children. How better to get to know them and mold their characters? How else can you let them learn why you shouldn’t blow up your neighbors or slay your uncle with an axe except in an imaginary world where the ultimate oops can be fixed with a lawful-good cleric who knows a convenient raise the dead or resurrection spell?
So now I can officially post my Paffooney where Samosett the girl archer and little Prince Robin have murdered Unkel the Magical Ogre to get his chest full of treasure. Oh, I shouldn’t forget Boffin and Bimbur the dwarves. They are the ones that brought the group through the Wilderness of Zekk to find Old Unkel’s tower.
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The Black Wizard
Admit it, you’ve been expecting a post about the Black Wizard. Haven’t you? Or is it just crazy old Mickey thinking he represents the other shoe that needs to drop? Well, I do get kinda goofy talking about Dungeons and Dragons, don’t I?
The Black Wizard had a name that the player characters eventually learned… but I have stupidly forgotten what it was. So, I merely refer to him by the name they knew him by for most of the game. He was a personal nemesis to two of the player character wizards. He is shown here kidnapping Balin, the young son of the wizard LeRoy, my brother’s fifteenth level wizard. He also faced off against Asduel, the Sorcerer played by young Fernie the flunkie who was in my eighth grade English class for two consecutive years. Neither one could defeat him by themselves, and they never played in the same game at the same time.
The Black Wizard lived in Fort Doom, a haunted military base from the frontier of Ancient Starnor. He had designs on the Castle Kingdoms of the north like Tol Arriseah, Gansdorf, and Selonica. It was thought that he was the evil twin of the powerful wizard Merlini, but was so twisted by black magic that even Merlini no longer recognized him for certain. He teamed up with the Red Dragon R’Drak to lay seige to Gansdorf and Selonica. But the armies led by Sir Hogan and Asduel drove them out of the city of Selonica, and R’Drak himself was slain in the Battle of Gansdorf. He fled to the Southern Kingdom that LeRoy the Great Wise Wizard had built around the city of Balindale. His haunted fortress at Fort Doom was near Balindale. The Black Wizard conspired with the vampire Count Marilinev to turn all of the Southern Kingdom’s people into vampire thralls, but he finally met his match when LeRoy recruited the Raven Wizard Shaumar to best him in magical combat two against one. He fell from the sky that day in a roaring red fireball and exploded against the mountainside. Asduel would later capture and imprison his right-hand witch, and LeRoy took over Fort Doom, converting it into a castle for good. The evil wizard’s young son Kath would be raised by LeRoy as a brother to Balin, and later was converted into a player character, adventuring for the causes of goodness and light. Kath’s batwing cloak was the only thing he inherited from his evil father.
So if you have become totally fed up with my Dungeons and Dragons memories, find some relief, please, in the fact that there is very little more to tell. Even goofy old Mickey can’t say too much more. We played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons in the early eighties, but it was doomed to ultimate limits by Baptists who thought the game was a tool of the devil for corrupting young minds. Who knows?Maybe they were correct. I did, however, always manage to have the good guys win in the end and evil be defeated. It takes a pretty crafty old Satan to turn that into corruption.
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The Ancient Lost Kingdom
In our original Dungeons and Dragons campaign back in the 1980’s, the player characters followed a series of clues until they discovered the land was once civilized under the rule of Castle Starnor, and Arthur, the White Stag King. The wizard Merlini revealed to the heroes that the Raggedy Prince whose army of monsters they defeated was actually descended from the White Stag King, which was strange because people believed the myth that Arthur had actually been a spirit stag, a ghost deer with arcane powers. The prince was cast into the dungeon in the city of Balindale, the city they had liberated from his monstrous army. The wizard Merlini was able to study the prince up close and learn more.
During the Black Wizard Crisis, the heroes captured the Black Wizard’s right-hand witch and cast her into the same dungeon where the Raggedy Prince dwelt. The two villains fell in love. Their child, young Sarris, was determined by Merlini to be the rightful heir of Starnor. He possessed magic from the time of Arthur which turned him into a werebear, suggesting that there was truth to the tale of Arthur’s ability to transform into a stag. Merlini removed the baby from the dungeon and raised him personally, aided by his young apprentice Pip. For years they groomed the boy to rule as the heroes searched for the ruins of mighty Starnor.
It was discovered that the southern section of the kingdom of Starnor was still ruled by the Lich King Frakkus, known widely as Nightmare. Frakkus had been the Necromantic adviser to Arthur and may have had a hand in Arthur’s ultimate demise. From Frakkus the heroes learned that Starnor could be magically revived by defeating the demon who had carried it off to another dimension. They also learned that the only way to succeed was to make an alliance with Frakkus. The Lich King would remain in control of the South and the fortress of Rau’s Bones. So, instead of slaying the evil necromancer, the heroes helped him defeat and imprison the demon. Starnor was revived. Sarris was placed on the throne and was given the most trustworthy of advisers, including the Grizzled Wizard Gristhane. Sarris, in the form of a bear, would rule Castle Starnor benevolently, potentially forever.
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The Grizzled Wizard
One of the secrets of the successful dungeon master in Dungeons and Dragons is the ability to provide the right amount of help with impossible quests so that the players can succeed, arrive at the story’s goal and feel like they accomplished the miracle themselves. One of the ways I did this was by using a powerful wizard as a patron. Gristhane the Grizzled Wizard, also known as the Green Wizard of Gorthanc Grotto, was the character I used to do this.
This powerful, mysterious, and possibly evil wizard set the adventurers on quests that led them to the orc-besieged city of Gansdorf to help the human wizard Ganser, the wizard Merlini, and the elves of the Northeastern Forest defend the city. He also set them the task of finding the lost prince of Starnor. Once they found him, they were given the task of locating Ancient Starnor and magically rebuilding the kingdom. They also were charged with defeating the Black Wizard, a task that led them to the Black Wizard’s master, Lord Frakkus, the Lich King known as Nightmare.We had epic battles. Of the four adventurers pictured here, only Sir Hogan and Asduel survived the fighting.
Always the Grizzled Wizard provided the critical clue or the appropriate magic to win the day and achieve the quest. Sir Hogan asked him to bring the thief Clarissa back from the dead. This he did, and the noble knight married her, making her the Lady of Castle Tol Arriseah. He was an essential part of many adventures, and though he never had the starring role in the story, he was always a crucial part of it.
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The Enchanted Barbarian
This Paffooney is more Dungeons and Dragons nonsense. Back in the early eighties, when elves swarmed over the free lands of Castle Gansdorf, one of the most intriguing adventurers there was the barbarian warrior with no name. He never spoke. He was apparently mute, but that was never proven. He bailed the adventurers out of trouble after trouble, helping to defeat the Black Wizard… Assisting Sir Hogan the noble knight in the conquest and settlement of Castle Tol Arriseah… Locating the hidden ruins of Starnor and revealing the werebear prince who was destined to rule there when the ancient kingdom was reborn… As it turned out, he was not even human. He was an enchanted great sword named “Ral K’uth Fey” and given man-like form by the grizzled wizard Gristhane. Oh, I could spin a yarn back then. We slaughtered armies, conquered castles, and built kingdoms all on the living room floor. I have to admit, though, I sometimes had to cheat on the dice rolls in favor of the story turning out right.
May 22, 2014 · 11:28 pm
Who Fans
Back in about 1979 I discovered Dr. Who from the BBC on PBS. It soon became my all-time favorite Sci-Fi series, ahead of Battlestar Galactica, the Twilight Zone, Land of the Giants, Lost in Space, and Land of the Lost. I started watching with Jon Pertwee, the Third Doctor. I didn’t even realize that doctors came before, or that regeneration was even possible. I watched the good Doctor, aided by U.N.I.T. battle Cybermen, Silurians, Daleks, Sontarans, and Ice Warriors from Mars. I saw London attacked by Daleks. I saw the Doctor driving about saving the world in his goofy yellow car. I loved it with all my heart.
Naturally I chose to Paffooney the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton. Makes a lot of sense, huh? I watched all the episodes I could manage with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Doctors before I even knew about the First and Second. Then I got a chance to see the very first episode with William Hartnell as the Doctor. I was thoroughly enchanted. I’m not like today’s kids who can’t be bothered to watch anything in Black and White. I watched every episode PBS could air. At that time many of the first episodes were lost or seriously misplaced. But I grew a special fondness for Doctor number Two because that character is so much like me; bubbling over with useless facts, bumbling good intentions, and thinking by playing his recorder (though my thought-instrument is actually a harmonica).
I still crave more Doctor Who adventures. I loved Doctor Seven, Sylvester McCoy, too. Even more because he’s also now a part of The Hobbit movies. And I really appreciate the new Doctors, especially David Tennant. Doctor Who lives again! And maybe we will even learn his actual name! He’s Doctor Who?
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Catch a Falling Star 