Born Yesterday

Last night, I took the family to see a show at the Walnut Street Theater, a grand old place now celebrating its 200th birthday! This is the oldest running theater in the USA, even older than Ford's Theater in which Lincoln was shot.

The show Born Yesterday was first performed about sixty years ago, and it features an extraordinarily greedy, philistine of a man who comes to stay in Washington D.C. for few months on business, and he brings his girlfriend, the quintessential blond bimbo type with a squeaky little voice. Harry Brock made untold millions growing his scrap metal empire during the war, and now that WWII is over, he wants to go international, and needs the help of a senator to do it. His girlfriend Billie is used as a front for him to evade taxes, and as the play progresses, he and the audience learn that she is not so dumb.

I was afraid that my kids would get bored. Among the audience of several hundred, they were the ONLY children. I explained the show went along and it was cool. I told them to imagine they were watching a show on Turner Classic Movies.

Born Yesterday relates so well to today's times. Insanely greedy people like Harry Brock will manipulate anything and anyone to make more money. This is the stuff that caused the market to rapidly melt down.

If I were a rich man, I'd go to three shows per week!

A Stressed Daughter

I hear my daughter roaring downstairs that her math homework is too hard. I hear her cursing her teacher, claiming that the woman didn't teach her how to do the advanced math assignment. I know that she'll simmer down soon, dig in, and get it done. My wife, the math whiz in the family, will probably give her a hand along the way, and help her crack the code of calculating sales tax.

Do we teachers really torture students with assignments like modern day, academic Torquemadas (he's the guy who spearheaded the Spanish Inquisition)? Some students feel the heat, get stressed, do the work - sometimes hating it all the while - and turn in the final product. Other students blow it off and flounder through their high school years. Tragically, some drop out.

What if my daughter didn't have parents who conditioned her to make the academics happen and earn those grades? What if she were conditioned to shut down whenever adversity or tough challenges cross her path. I feel for the kids who don't have a parent or guardian seriously setting the expectations for success. It can't be easy if you're doing it all on your own.

Does playing a instrument imbue a person with life skills?

Last night I attended my son's concert. Robert, who is in the fourth grade, has really shown an aptitude for playing musical instruments, the piano and the clarinet in particular. For the last two years, we have been shuttling him to the east side of Cherry Hill where he takes lessons from an elderly woman who immigrated from Argentina back in the 60's. She learned from European masters who fled Europe when the Nazis took over. The school district has nurtured his ability with the clarinet.

I never learned how to read music, and playing an instrument with any kind of skill has always confounded me. I guess he gets it from my wife's side.

What a pleasure to see my boy, one of the few fourth graders, performing in a band of what had to be well over a hundred kids cherry picked from schools throughout the Cherry Hill district.

The band director, at one point, addressed the audience crammed with parents, grandparents, and friends of the children. He said that being part of this band will help set the students up for success in life, and I'm sure he's right. These children understand the importance of teamwork, persistence, and hard work. It warmed my heart to see my son as part of such a talented group of kids.

Maturity and High School Students

As I guide my sophomores through the picaresque Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I have decided to focus on how Huck comes of age, and puts away childish things especially after he insults his friend Jim's intelligence with a puerile prank during the fog/trash separartion time. Huck knows that he has really annoyed Jim, and the little voice inside his head tells him to apologize, an action almost unthinkable back then because most whites would never condescend to say sorry to a black man, and a slave no less.
The students are to write an essay in which they define maturity and immaturity, giving specific examples that illustrate each. They then need to explain how they classify themselves on the maturity scale. Do adults, teachers, and other students deem them to be more mature or immature, and vice-versa.

Here is some of my brainstorming:

Signs of immaturity are as follows and most of them resemble behaviors of toddlers:

• Exhibiting very little sense of responsibility.


• Failure to empathize with others.


• Playing and goofing around when it's completely inappropriate.


• Losing one's temper over stupid stuff.

Improvisation and Teaching

OK. I'll let it out. I've been a Sunday School teacher for 5th graders for the last five years. It is an amazing job that happens from 9AM to Noon, and I get to teach bible and ethics to the young 'uns.

A wrench was thrown into the gears of my lesson plan today, and I had to think fast. Every Sunday, I show a custom made PowerPoint to help illustrate the story line and main ideas in various bible stories. Increasingly, I augment what I do with cool stuff and video streaming that I pull from the Internet. Guess what happened!

The school director had to commandeer the projector for a guest speaker and she hadn't told me. Down the drain went my carefully constructed lesson! Instead of gnashing my teeth or shutting down, I used this as an opportunity. Instead of relying of visual stuff, I decided to go the audio way. Since it's a Jewish school and Hebrew instruction is vital, I went to Youtube and streamed Hebrew versions of songs from The Lion King, Alladin, and the Little Mermaid. Since the kids new the English versions so well, they were able to zone in on familiar Hebrew words and translate them. IT WAS A BLAST!!!! REAL and ENTHUSIASTIC LEARNING WENT ON.

Time to Breathe Again

We'll the play is over, and after the props are put in storage and the set gets broken down, it will be a memory. About one hundred and fifty of us worked so hard to give this fascinating play life. I am so, so, so very proud of our students who performed. Getting on stage takes guts, a little insanity, and buckets of dedication.

Working with Ms. Triplo is extraordinary and I am in awe of the woman's ability to connect with students, organize the show, and inspire. I admire most her ability to keep it positive, along with her compassion and caring.

Now that the curtain has closed for the final time on what people are saying was the BEST show to grace the stage of LHS, I can finally breathe and decompress (and plan for the next show!) What am I going to do with all the extra time?

Becoming My Own Best Teacher

The best kind of learning happens when a person becomes his or her own best teacher. Since yesterday, I've been teaching myself how to use Microsoft Publisher and I'm having a blast with it. Yes, I am doing it for a reason. Ms. Triplo asked if I could design the playbill for the upcoming show, My Fair Lady.

Certainly, I could take a Publisher class sponsored by Camden County College and spend hundreds of dollars. Likewise, I could sit around and wait for someone to tutor me, but that's not the way to go. Teaching myself is so much more fun. Last night, I dug into the program and started really moving with the playbill. When I looked up, two hours had passed - just like a time machine!

I'm not going into this blind. I've commandeered a playbill that I grabbed from Cherry Hill West's production of Bye Bye Birdie. I'll look at the layout and ask myself, "How did they do that?" Through trial and error, I'll get it.

Sexting

As teachers, we have to deal with lots of stuff that hinders student learning. I got into this profession knowing that classrooms were awash with raging hormones, reluctant readers, ADD, ADHD, rampant immaturity, depression, distractions galore - you name it. Today in the Courier, I learned about a new and insidious force that can derail students' learning and cause terrible harm - "sexting." I'm certainly aware of cyberbullying, through texting, but I had no idea that kids frequently send explicit pictures of each other, not realizing that this is a serious and punishable offense. It's so sad, and the process starts with kids not thinking.

I have all the more reason to confiscate cell phones.

http://southjersey.momslikeme.com/members/JournalActions.aspx?g=437469&m=4080991

Electricity Keeps Us Alive! -

We're lucky to have a dad who's a cardiologist in my sons cub scout den. During today's field trip, Dr Drachman taught the boys, the other dads, and me a thing or two about the human heart. He showed us his Echo Cardio Machine, which is really something like an ultrasound for the heart. He wired one dad up and we saw his four chambered heart, a foggy, ghostly looking thing on the screen, pumping away, the valves flapping with the regularity of a clock.

I had a couple of epiphanies. For one, it hit me how much human beings and refrigerators have in common. Electricity powers both our hearts and refrigerator motors. Take away the electric current and what happens? We die and the food rots. Most miraculous is how our bodies generate their own electrical currents. Artificial hearts are powered by a battery that has much in common with the one that powers a car!

I thought of the movie Frankenstein and how the doctor shrieked, "It's alive! It's alive!" as a corpse began to breath and move after being jolted by harnessed lightning.

I thought about the theory that life started on Earth billions of years ago after lightning licked an inorganic, primordial cesspool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H3dFh6GA-A