Steven Harper's Blog, page 6

Listening In

A couple days ago, Darwin and I were discussing a particular movie that came out in the 1990s. It's a movie you don't hear anything about these days and has been largely forgotten. In other words, no one talks about it anymore.Today, Darwin reported a link to the movie in his YouTube feed.We only talked about the movie. We didn't write about it on social media or discuss it over email. It was a short conversation of maybe three exchanges.
 Yes, they do listen, folks. They listen to everything all the time. 

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Ashes of Problem Students

 In my first year of teaching, I bought a ceramic jar labeled "Ashes of Problem Students," pictured below, and put it on my desk. On the very first day it was there, one of my freshmen accidentally knocked it onto the floor. It shattered. I looked at the student. He looked at me. Then I reached into my desk, took out a bottle of white glue, and wordlessly handed it to him. He gathered up the shards and spent the class period gluing them back together. When class ended, he gave the jar back to me and left. Neither of us spoke a word.The student did a startlingly meticulous repair job. You can't even see the cracks unless you look closely at the inside, also pictured below. The jar held loaner pens and pencils for thirty years. Now it's retired from school and sits on my desk at home.
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Last Day of Instruction

 Today was my last day of instruction ever. (Next week we give exams, which is assessment, not instruction.) It was weird. I've taught every lesson for the last time now. Every year, the first thing I put on the board is the daily schedule. I leave it up until the last day of instruction, which means the dry erase marker has entrenched itself and won't come off unless I use a chemical solvent designed for white boards. Today I sprayed away the daily schedule for the last time.Ever.

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The Harvey Milk

 Hegseth has ordered the navy to rename the ship HARVEY MILK. Milk was a prominent gay activist, navy veteran, and mayor of San Francisco. He was murdered in 1978.

It's navy tradition to name oiler-class ships after civil rights activists. It's also very taboo in the navy to rename a ship. Navy memos show Hegseth ordered the renaming of the HM during Pride Month on purpose.

They want us gone. They want us dead. They want us destroyed and forgotten.



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Go Ukraine!

 So two days after wiping out a huge chunk of Russia's warplane supply, Ukraine blew up a bridge the Russians were using to invade and resupply Crimea. All just a few weeks after Trump castigated Zelensky because Ukraine didn’t “have the cards."Now Russia is embattled with a war from within. Every truck is suspect and must be searched now. Transportation is at a crawl. Supply lines and shipping are disrupted. And all because of a leader who didn't "have the cards." Goodness! What would Ukraine have accomplished if Zelensky had a really good hand?The United States should have been helping Ukraine with these measures, but Trump and his cabinet are still in Putin's pocket, and they blab state secrets on unsecure social media. So the country that should have been Ukraine's most trusted ally had to be kept in the dark.Fuck Trump. Go Ukraine!

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Mission Impossible

Darwin and I saw the latest MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movie yesterday, theoretically the last one. With Tom Cruise, anyway. It was well-filmed and acted, with lots of big action scenes and stuff. But it was overlong. Several scenes went on for too many beats, and you find yourself saying, "Okay, okay, we get it. Let's move on!" The show also alternated between outrageous and, well ... impossible action, and closeups of characters talking in low, intense voices. Once I noticed the latter, I couldn't stop noticing, and I wondered why the director made that particular choice.

The MI movies have also strayed far from their original concept. MI was more about tricks and traps and heists than action. There were scenes in which a couple bad guys would enter a room to talk to another set of bad guys. They exchanged information and the first set of bad guys would leave. Then the room was suddenly revealed to be a fake set, and the other bad guys were disguised. It was a ruse to get the information! Stuff like that. There was only one such scene in this movie, and it barely qualified: Ethan tricks some bad guys with a fake tooth. The rest of it is action, action, action.

I noticed that every single bit of the action scenes follows a pattern. 1) Ethan has to do something (open a door, flip a switch, eat his breakfast). 2)  Some obstacle presents itself and prevents him (the door is stuck, the switch doesn't work, the toaster is shorted out). 3) Ethan tries to force the original plan to work (yank on the door, hit the power switch, shove the bread down again). 4) This doesn't work. 5) Ethan devises a workaround (taking the door off its hinges, pulling the switch apart and repairing it, buying a new toaster). 6) This solution works, but it sends us back to 1), where Ethan is trying to do something. Repeat until the audience is ready to throttle the director in frustration.

Deep sea stuff, especially deep sea stuff involving large objects like submarines, shipwrecks, and whales, freaks me badly, so a good quarter of the movie had me filtering the movie through my fingers. Darwin is severely acrophobic, so another quarter of the movie had =him= filtering the movie through his fingers. 

Since this was a Part II, the screenwriters cleverly fill in backstory from Part I, but don't stop there. Endless references to the previous movies sneak in, including a minor character from the very first movie who plays a major role in this one. I imagine he was startled to get a phone call from a casting director who said, "Remember that role you played 30 years ago? Great! Are you free?"

The movie is worth seeing if you want to empty your mind for a while and follow the story of someone who's having a way worse day than you are. It's not worth seeing twice, though.




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Oh, Disney

This came up on a friend's thread and I thought I'd mention it here.

Disney shares your data with EVERYBODY. Their privacy policy doesn't really do anything to protect your privacy. It's more of an invasion of privacy policy. I looked it up just now and found this nugget:

"We, certain service providers operating on our behalf, and third parties may collect information about your activity, or activity on devices associated with you, on our sites and applications and third-party sites and applications using tracking technologies such as cookies, pixels, tags, software development kits, application program interfaces, and Web beacons. We may collect information whether or not you are logged in or registered, and may associate this tracking data with your registration account (if you have one)."

In other words, the moment you visit a Disney-operated anything, they sell all your usage data with your name attached to it to anyone with a debit card.

You =can= opt out, but you have to opt out of each web site, account, or service individually. So you have to fill out a separate opt-out request for Disney+, Hulu, your amusement park account, the Disney park app, and so on. If you have a Disney app on your phone, it tracks everything you do all the time, even if you're not logged in.

They're very upfront about it, as long as you go look: https://privacy.thewaltdisneycompany.com/en/privacy-controls/online-tracking-and-advertising/

Disney is as bad as Meta and Google. 

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My Retirement

 I'm retiring from teaching high school in June. During the pandemic, when teachers went from heroes to villains within a few months, I decided that the moment I hit 30 years, I would bow out. And so I am. I've done the math and figured that I've taught approximately 6,720 teenagers. Every year, I give my students approximately 75 assessments (including homework, essays, tests, projects, and more), meaning I've graded about 497,300 assignments. Every year on average, two or three of my students fail, so my failure rate is about 0.0004%. Wow. In my career, I piloted the co-teaching system, in which a special education teacher teams with a subject teacher in a class loaded with special education students. The system is now universal. I created the media literacy class out of thin air and for a while, it was one of the most popular courses in the district. When I started teaching, using colored chalk was considered edgy. Now every classroom has a SMART board. I have four certifications (German, English, health, and speech/theater), and I've taught all four of areas. I've never taught Honors English or Advanced Placement. Students who struggle with school need good teachers, too, and it turned out I have a knack for reaching them, so that's the population I stayed with. I'm proud of keeping a low failure rate while not dumbing down the curriculum. I've had epic battles with administration over a number of issues. What books the students should be "allowed" to read. Library censorship. The language I used on my blog. The gay characters in my novels. Teaching about condoms in health class. Running mass shooter drills. Wearing a religious symbol in the classroom. Right-wing parents and administrators who wanted me fired. And twice, death threats. Sometimes I won, sometimes I didn't. Some days the tension was so high that I threw up in the bathroom. Then I rinsed out my mouth, returned to class, and taught as if nothing had happened. When people ask me why I persisted in a difficult, thankless job, I tell this true story: One day, a student told me I'd had her uncle for sophomore English eight years ago. His name was DJ, and I remembered him. The student said DJ was serving overseas in the Marines, and she mentioned to DJ on the phone that she had my class. He got excited and said, "You tell Mr. Piziks that he's the reason I'm here!" I asked what DJ meant by that. It turns out that DJ was planning to drop out of school in tenth grade because it was too much of a struggle and not worth the effort anymore. We were reading THE CRUCIBLE at the time, and I asked the class a tough question about the play. I called on DJ, who gave a prompt answer. "That's right!" I said, and went on with class as usual. But for DJ, the moment was entirely different. "In that moment," he said, "I realized that I WASN'T STUPID. I stayed in school and graduated and enlisted in the Marines and right now I'm doing what I love and it's because of Mr. Piziks. You tell him that." And she did. Another true story: I was at a school function one evening when a parent came up to me. "You're Mr. Piziks, right?" she said. "You had my son Noah last year." I remembered Noah, and told her so. She said, "When he started middle school, our family went through a really bad time, and Noah became withdrawn. He didn't speak much. He never laughed or smiled. We tried everything—therapy, medication. Nothing helped, and we were so worried. Then he started high school and had you for English. After a few weeks, he started to change. He smiled for the first time in years, and he talked about you and what he did in class. He was actually excited about going to school. Your warmth and humor brought him out of his shell, and I'm so grateful. I wanted to thank you." She hugged me, and I was tearing up. But now it's time for someone else to take up the reins. Will I miss it?  Probably now and then. For now, I'm ready to rest. 

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Cooking Fails!

Man, what's wrong with me lately?

I made a cake and measured wrong when I was doubling the recipe. The cake rose in the oven and spilled over the pan, dropping a huge glop of batter on the oven floor. I was alerted when the smell of burning sugar filled the house. The cake was a loss, and the batter had welded itself to the oven. I had to run the self-cleaning program. And the recipe uses four eggs to boot! (I swear the loss should be covered under my homeowner's insurance.) Fail!

I made chocolate mousse and THREE eggs screwed me up. One of them was stuck to the bottom of the carton and self-destructed when I tried to pick it up. It got egg all over its neighbors, so I had to remove all of them, clean them, and put them into another container. The yolk on the second egg fragmented during separating and yolk contaminated the whites. It took me several minutes of fishing with a shell fragment to get it all out. The third one cracked badly when I was separating it, creating a tiny, shallow side of shell and a huge, deep side of shell. The yolk immediately plopped into the tiny side and overfilled it, threatening to contaminate the whites yet again. I grabbed at it to change to the finger-separating method but didn't quite make it. Yolk everywhere. I had to abandon the entire batch and start over. Expensive egg fail!

I made M&M cookies with my lovely new hand-held mixer. I put the cookies into the oven and set the timer--incorrectly, as it turns out. The cookies didn't burn, but they came out crunchy instead of chewy. Fail!*

I swear I must have done something to offend the kitchen fairies.


*Though it must be said that Darwin loves them crunchy, so this one's really a semi-fail.



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The Great Covid Saga, Part II

We had a week of Covid-free bliss. Also, the pain from my biopsy finally stopped, and the news came back that it didn't find any new/spreading cancer tumors. It was nice.

Then Darwin got sick again on Friday. It started with coughing and sneezing, then feeling run-down. The symptoms worsened quickly. We worried it was a cold, and I wondered if =I= would catch it, too. It takes me more than a week to get over a cold anymore, and I don't have enough sick days left at work to handle that. A thought occurred to me, though, and I asked Darwin to take a Covid test. He did.

Positive.

The hell? I did some reading and discovered I was ignorant of one facet of Covid: the rebound. Some people get over the virus, and then a few days later, they come down with it again. It used to be associated with taking Paxlovid, but that idea has been disproven. It's just Covid being a bitch. I had no symptoms myself, but took a test anyway. Negative. Okay, then. If the blogging community will allow me to be a bit self-centered on my own blog for a moment, I'll say I was very relieved. Cold or Covid--I still don't have the sick days. Anyway, I got Covid first and got over it first, so if we were both going to rebound, it seems like I would've done it first. 

Saturday morning, I took Darwin to urgent care, only to learn that they can't/won't treat rebound Covid, and you can't go on Paxlovid again so soon after coming off it. There was nothing to do.

I took Darwin back home and put him to bed. We were low on meds, so I went to the store and bought a big pile of cold and flu stuff, along with various you're-sick-you-get-treats foods. Darwin dosed himself with NyQuil and conked out on the bed for most of the day. I sat with him and wrote on my new laptop and delivered food and meds to him as necessary. By evening, he'd lost his sense of taste and smell and developed a high fever, which we dosed hard. He coughed almost continuously until I got some cough medicine into him. I was worried we might have to take him to the hospital. He took more NyQuil and we went to bed.

This morning, he's markedly improved, though still sick. Coughing and run down, mostly. Another Covid test came up positive. I took one. Still negative. 

Darwin's parked on the bed again, dozing. Hopefully this saga will end today.



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