When I was still alive and still teaching, maximizing and managing time was an incredibly important part of the day. You had to activate learners with an attention step, a lesson focus that grabbed them. Usually that had to follow a warm-up, something you got them to do as soon as you had smiled at them at the doorway, offered to shake their hand, and then pulled them into the classroom to do some work for you. fifteen minutes at the start of the class to rev up mental engines and get the gears turning… shake out the rust and the cobwebs that accumulate the instant the final bell rang in the previous class. I timed that part of class down to the second with my pocket watch… or phone in later years. Then, once the engines started, the focus is in place, you introduce the learning objective. Never more than ten minutes… timed to the second… you give the explanation, the road map of the day ahead, the instruction. Then for the next ten to fifteen minutes you let them discover stuff. In groups, with a partner, teacher to class, student to class, or (rarely) individually, they must apply what you pointed out and figure something out. It could be complicated, but probably it was simple. All answers are welcome and accepted… because all answers will be evaluated and you learn more from wrong answers than you do from correct guesses. Evaluation comes in the five to ten minutes at the end when you evaluate. “What have I learned today?” You try your hardest to pin something new to the mental note-board hanging on the brain walls of each and every student. Depending on how much or how few minutes you are given before the final bell kills the lesson for the day, you have to put the big pink ribbon on it. That tightly-wound lesson cycle goes on all day, repeated as many times as you have classes. In that time you have to be teacher, policeman, friend, devil’s advocate, entertainer, counselor, psychotherapist, chief explainer, and sometimes God. And you time it to the second by your pocket watch.
I miss being the rabbit holding the BIG PENCIL. Now that I am retired, I am no longer on the clock… no longer subject to careful time management. My pocket watch is broken and lying in a box somewhere in my library. I live now in non-consecutive time periods of sleep and illness and writing and playing with dolls. I have entered a second childhood now. Not really a simple one because of diabetes and arthritis and COPD and psoriasis and all the other wonderful things that old age makes possible. But a childhood free of school politics and mandates from the school board and from the State. A childhood where I can once again dream and imagine and create and play. That’s what this post is if you haven’t already figured it out. I am playing with words and ideas. They are my toys. Toys like this one;
This, of course, is Tim, the turtleboy of irony, holding his magic flatiron that he uses for ironing out irony. He is flattening it out now with a cartoony Paffooney and wickedly waggled words. Ironically, I have often taught students to write just like this, making connections between words and pictures and ideas through free association and fast-writing. Have you learned anything from today’s retired-teacher post? If you did, it is ironic, because you were never meant to from the start.
#3. To know about Filipino culture, you have to understand what Jollibee is all about. Jollibee is the Filipino MacDonald’s. Of course, it is cheaper… and better tasting. There are a few of them around the country here. California has more than Texas. They are like a giant Filipino magnet. You go there to find the Filipino community in any American city. But other people love the food too. You have to sort the Filipinos from the Hispanics and white folks that are not too proud to eat cheap and delicious.
Catch a Falling Star 
Consolation Hockey Night
Sunday was a bad, bad day for me. My football team, the Arizona Cardinals, were in the National Football Conference championship. One game away from their second trip to a Superbowl. But they not only lost, they were crushed 49 to 15. Not one morsel of goodness was left to a poor humiliated die-hard fan who has been waiting for the team to succeed his entire life. So, how do you recover from that? My wife decided to take me to a hockey game. Surely that would make me feel better. Of course, I was dying at the time of virus-related lung-mangling coughing fits and total lack of will to live. My novel that I have worked so hard on and was so proud of is in jeopardy of never being published. My sky no longer has sunshine. It is only natural that the Dallas Stars hockey team would help. Hockey is my real favorite sport, and I have loved the Stars as my second-favorite team since the 1960’s when they were the Minnesota North Stars.
It should be explained at this point that I love hockey in the same way that I love Mark Twain and the basic concepts of comedy and humor. It all stems from the same basic seed… ridiculous behavior lampooned by its own awareness of itself. Look at how it all started. The hockey gods, Dave and Rick, sat down together beside a frozen lake in Saskatchewan some time in the cold winter in the late 1800’s and decided to invent a national sport for Canada.
“Canada deserves a pretty cool national sport, eh,” said Dave.
“We gotta frozen lake right here, hoser,” answered Rick. “We can take some other sport and do it on ice, eh?”
“You got it, hoser,” said Dave. “What could be cooler than that lacrosse game the Iroquois and the Hurons play? With the whacking sticks and junk! Wouldn’t that look cool on ice, hoser?”
“They’ll never get a good hit in on anybody else’s head if they are slip sliding all around the ice… Let’s put ’em on skates. And we gotta make sure the game ball ain’t too big so they can whip it around with the sticks really, really fast.”
“Yeah, let’s increase the difficulty by taking the net-thingies off the sticks, and let’s make the ball into a little hard rubber disc. We’ll call it a puck. And people will die all the time in this high-speed multiple-projectile game with lots of whacking sticks!”
“Truly excellent idea, hoser. You are one really great hockey god!”
“You too, hoser… you too.”
So you can see by this carefully researched and verified origin story that hockey is not a sport to be taken lightly. Grown men with skates and sticks going around in circles really, really fast, trying to whip a puck past the goaltender into a net and at the same time trying to avoid all manner of collisions… though not trying very hard.
So my wife drags me to the American Airlines Center, the arena the Stars share with the NBA Dallas Mavericks. We get in easy enough, and then march all the way up to the three hundreds’ sections where all the cheap seats are. To get there, you must go up and up and up on multiple escalators, get to the arena roof, and take the stairs up higher still. This we do with Filipino friends in tow… who know absolutely nothing about this whacky sport, but they like big spectacles and the arena food. And I have the added benefit that they will believe absolutely anything I tell them about the game. Oh, it turns out it could be really fun after all! And I wouldn’t even have to lie to make their eyes pop out of their heads.
Of course, from the rafters with the bats, the game looks like a bunch of colorful ants scrabbling all over a big white postage stamp, but the new highlights screen makes it kinda like watching TV at home, except with lots of expensive snacks that you have to go mountain-climbing for and drunk guys that have had too much of the beer that vendors actually carry up into the stands. (One fight actually almost broke out in the crowd near us, three rows down, but the young guy got scared of the really loud and old fat guy who was yelling obscenities at him and scurried away faster than a drunk fat guy can follow.)
Of course, my wife never lets me bring binoculars to these things because I might lose them… and also because the Ice Girls who scrape the ice during time-outs wear skates and very little else. I have to look at the big hanging TV very closely during those times. Especially when those times occur while wifey is down the mountainside searching for affordable snacks.
And, of course, it is always a very welcome thing when the Stars win. As you have probably guessed, I don’t get to see my favorite teams win in front of me very often, and we have to savor those things when they occur.
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Tagged as consolation for losing, Dallas Stars, enjoying hockey, goofiness, hockey, hockey fights, hosers, humor