Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 663

Conform me sometimes.

I resist conformity on a daily basis and have been doing so since I was very young. In almost all cases, I believe that my resistance is justified.

There are instances, however, when I question this propensity.

When I was in high school, the anti-hazing laws which now fill the books had yet to be enacted, and as a result, the relationship between freshmen and seniors at my school was contentious at best. Being a member of our marching band starting in 7th grade (our school was a junior/senior high school) didn't help. Unlike many of my classmates, I became a known entity to the seniors well before my freshman year.

For reasons that I don't fully understand, I also chose to make the hazing rituals, many of which were quite benign, my cause celeb. Rather than suffering for a couple weeks prior to the freshman/senior dance, I decided to take a stand and fight.

In retrospect, it was a stupid decision.

In addition to compelling freshman to clear the seniors' trays at lunch time (which I refused), certain freshman were forced to wear signs around their necks throughout the day reading things like:

This freshman sucks.

Seniors rule.

Freshmen are wimps.

Having gained a certain antagonistic reputation during my two years in the marching band's drum corps, the seniors were ready for me when I entered my freshmen year, armed with a multitude of signs that I would tear up and throw away at my first opportunity. One day they stuck a box on me, with cut outs for my head and arms, covering my shoulders to my knees with anti-freshmen graffiti.

I fought it tooth and nail.

Band camp, a week spent during the summer at a local college campus or military base, was always an interesting time for me during my first three years in the band. In addition to the annual shaving cream fight, seniors routinely "doughboy'd" freshmen and junior high band members, sticking them in a shower, turning the water on, and pouring a doughy batter over them that would stick to your hair like honey. They also removed the fire extinguishers from the dorms and would turn the hallway to the underclassmen's' rooms into a gauntlet. Freshmen would run for their lives down the hall while seniors blasted them with frozen carbon dioxide.

If a freshman went along with the hazing, the torment would end in 2-4 weeks and life would eventually return to normal. For someone as stupid as me, who chose to defy the seniors' wishes, the hazing persisted throughout the year, often leading to violence. My scalp was split open more than once by a senior who had turned his class ring around and struck me on the top of the head with it. I went home donning black eyes on at least two occasions, and once, following a track and field practice, I was removed from the school in an ambulance after a senior had broken two of my ribs and I was unable to catch my breath.

The rib breaking incident occurred after battling against a senior to avoid being "bowled," a process by which a freshman's head was placed in a urinal or toilet and then flushed.

I believe that the kids refer to this process as a swirly today.

I'm proud to report that despite the suffering that I endured, I was never bowled.

My battles with the seniors eventually centered upon a guy named Dan, who had treated me especially harshly during band camp. In an effort to strike back, I had flyers prepared that I passed out at the front of the school one morning that read:

Dan's a wimp.

I also had a buttons made that read Seniors are wimps.

This did not go over well. I suffered many a beating throughout my freshman year and was denied entry to the freshman/senior Get Acquainted Dance.  My mother was called into school a day before the dance and informed that I was being suspended for "inciting riot upon myself." Despite my suspension, I still attempted to gain entry to the dance, only to be stopped at the door. The seniors had a number of things planned for me, including placing me in a trashcan and declaring me King of the Can.

My friend, Peter, was placed in the can instead.

Again, these decisions may seem amusing now, but they were stupid at the time.

Resisting conformity is almost always the right thing to do in a world that lacks logic and reason and seems bent on imposing tradition at every turn.

But when the odds are stacked heavily against you, the period of required conformity will be relatively brief, and you prefer to leave school on your own two feet rather than in the back of an ambulance, conformity ain't so bad.

A more innocent time

When I was little, I used to play in my grandfather's back fields. Living next door to us, my grandfather owned dozens of acres of field, garden, orchard, and forest behind his home, a veritable adventureland for little kids. We would climb the pine trees that my great grandmother planted thirty years before and climb down into the foundations of burnt out homes from the 19th century. There were paths to explore, ponds to cross, and apple tress for whenever our hunger got the best of us.

Strangest of all, the back fields were littered with the parts from ancient automobiles. Fenders, hoods, wheels, and all sorts of twisted metal could be found on the edge of the forests, and for years, I never understood how they got there.

Then one day my father explained that when he was a teenager, he and his brothers would purchase and rebuild old cars, using my grandfather's considerable garage and tools, and then conduct demolition derbies in the fields behind the house.

Fifteen year olds slamming rebuilt cars into one another across fields of grass and weeds.

A different world back then, huh?

My thought for the day

After twelve years of teaching, I have learned a great deal.  I am in the process of generating a top-10 list of the most important lessons that I have learned, though it seems to be expanding into a book.   

But here is one of those universal truths that I have recently become fixated upon that I thought I should share:

So much of what a teacher should be doing, and yet is so often underscored and forgotten completely, is motivating students to succeed.

All else should be secondary.  

If a teacher does not connect to his students, establish meaningful relationships with families and find a way to excite that student to learn and achieve, all is lost.

Teachers who have difficulty motivating students are afraid to be honest with students and their parents, ignore the important role that fun and play should have in learning and erect unnecessarily professional barriers between themselves and their students and families.

All of the success that I have experienced in my twelve years of teaching, all of those stories of remarkable student turnarounds and enormous academic gains, have had nothing to do with my skill or expertise as an educator.  It had nothing to do with books or technology or differentiated instruction.    

It has all come down to motivating my students by any and all means possible.  By clawing and scraping and cheering and badgering and pushing and pulling until a student has found the desire to succeed.

When a child wants to learn, the battle has been won.

The Internet is not always necessary

While in the vet's office, I noticed a sign that read:

For your convenience we are now online at ctvetcenter.com .

While I appreciate the effort, I'm not sure how an online presence makes a veterinarian more convenient.  Perhaps if I could schedule appointments online, that might be good, but no, this is not one of their offerings.

Sure, they list their hours of operation, but my vet is a 24-hour emergency care facility, which means that they are always open, no matter the time. I once brought my dog in at 3:00 AM.

Apparently there are employment opportunities at the location, but how many people bring their pet in for a checkup, hoping to land a job as well?

And yes, there's even a place to upload photos of my pet, but this can hardly be termed convenient.

When I can schedule an appointment online, find some ideas on how to get the cat to shut up at night, or arrange for a staff member to administer Kaleigh's eye drops each day, I'll be impressed.

Art imitates life

It seems absolutely ridiculous to cast Jennifer Aniston in the role of a woman who can't find a date.

It's Jennifer Aniston! C'mon!

Then again, it seems absolutely ridiculous that Jennifer Aniston can't find a date. 

It's Jennifer Aniston!  C'mon!

So I guess the casting might have been fine after all.

But I don't care.  You can't just cobble a bunch of flimsy stories and half-drawn characters together, frontload it with a bunch of well known actors, slap on a title like He's Just Not That Into You, and expect this movie to be a success.

It wasn't. 

An end of the world I told you so

I've been experiencing a reoccurring dream of a nuclear holocaust.

It's a pretty sucky dream.  I find myself constantly saying goodbye to my wife and daughter just before we are swept under and vaporized by the shock waves from the nearby mushroom cloud. 

I'm just mentioning it here just in case this terrible dream comes to fruition and the world ends in a fiery blast, destroying almost all of life as we know it.

I want to be able to say, "I dreamt this moment!" and be believed before I cease to exist.

Killing pigeons and swimming in sync are both dumb

With the Olympics less than a year away, I have a couple complaints that I would like the IOC to consider:

First, I do not support the inclusion of any sport that is not played in childhood. Synchronized swimming is a good example. No kid jumps into the pool, hoping to find a friend who will swim around "Just like me!" while accompanied by music.

Children who might want to do something like this invariably have no friends to swim with anyway.

Sports like synchronized swimming also require the use of judges to determine a winner, another practice that I abhor. If your sport utilizes a judge as the sole means of deciding the gold, silver and bronze medal winners, it is no longer a sport. It is a performance.

We might as well include break dancing, poetry slams, and magic shows as Olympic events if we're going to rely on judges to decide a competitors fate.

I also do not like it when Olympic sports are removed from the games. In 2012 baseball and softball are being removed from the list of events.

Why?

Have these sports become so unpopular that nations can no longer field teams? With the amount of baseball talent coming out of the Caribbean, South America, and Japan, I hardly think so.

So what gives?

Golf was once an Olympic sport as well, more than a hundred years ago but not since. It will reappear in 2012 but only on a trial basis.  Yet the PGA tour is full of international players, and Europe has its own version of the PGA tour across the pond, not to mention the international Ryder Cup competition each year.  So why not include a sport as popular as golf as an Olympic event?  If sports like judo and badminton remain on the schedule, why not genuinely popular sports like golf and baseball?  It would seem to me that the more events, the better. Right?

Of course, I guess removing the occasional event isn't all bad. In 1900 live pigeon shooting made its first and only appearance in the Olympic Games. The object of this event was to shoot and kill as many birds as possible. The birds were released in front of a participant and the winner was the competitor who shot down the most birds from the sky.

I know it's wrong to assume that people living a hundred years ago were stupid and barbaric, but an event like live pigeon shooting make it difficult to think otherwise.

Unacceptable, even in a restroom

This placard is posted in the men's room of AC Peterson's, a local restaurant and ice cream parlor. 

Do you see what I see?

The half-exposed drill hole on the right-hand side?

The screws placed in such a way that they cover up part of the letters?

The unleveled mounting of the placard on the wall?

I know it's just a tiny sign in the men's room of an ice cream parlor, but someone is responsible for this shoddy work, and it drives me crazy.

Do your best in whatever you do, damn it, and if you can't manage that, at least cover up the old holes in the wall.

Graduation blues

I saw one of my former students last week, and she informed me that she is attempting to finish high school a year early by squeezing in summer classes and avoiding study halls.

I couldn't help but marvel at the dichotomy of our two lives.

When I was in high school, I dreaded the end of my senior year. Despite my excellent grades and pile of extracurricular activities, I had no prospect of college. My parents never uttered the word college to me and I never met with a single guidance counselor who might have helped me find my way to higher education.

Saddled with a bleak future and parents who expected me to move out on my own after graduation, I never wanted high school to end. I remember that my classmates would post a countdown of days remaining in the school year in the corner of every chalkboard throughout the school, relishing the daily ritual of erasing and shrinking number by one.

I couldn't understand it.

Having grown up in a very small town, I was graduating from high school with the same 100 kids with whom I had attended elementary and middle school, give or take a few. These kids had known me since I was five years old and probably knew me better than my own parents. For better or worse, I thought of this group of people, forced together at an early age into kindergarten classrooms at John F. Kennedy Elementary, as a family. We had been together for thirteen years, and now it was ending.

And everyone seemed so goddamned happy.

Worse still, I loved school. Throughout my entire high school career, I avoided study halls, opting instead for classes like Peer Education in order to jam as many credits into my schedule as possible. Like my former student, I also had nearly enough credits for graduation at the end of my junior year, but the thought of taking a couple summer classes and graduating early would have been preposterous.

With about twenty-five days left in my senior year, I made an appointment with the Vice Principal to discuss returning for another year. There were many classes still left for me to take and I simply did not want to face the prospect that my educational career was coming to a close. I remember sitting across from him and asking if the law required me to graduate, or if I would be allowed to return for another year of learning.

Free college, I thought of it.

I don't think he ever took me seriously, asking at least twice if this was a joke.  Ultimately, he had to do some research in order to determine if a student could return for another year of high school, and after some digging, he found his answer.

No. 

So with great sadness, I graduated, and three weeks later was living with friends in Attleboro, Massachusetts.

I was on my own.

Things turned out fine for me, and I'm sure that they will turn out fine for my former student, but part of me wants to urge her to stay in high school for her senior year. Growing up happens so damn fast and childhood is so fleeting. No matter the allure of college, I want to tell this girl that she has her entire life to hurry up and move along. She has only one chance at a senior year of high school and she should take it.

No need to become an adult before you must.

If you have to announce it to the world

I saw a vanity plate today with the word CREATVE on it.

I ask you:

Is there anything less creative than expressing your creativity  by tagging your car wit the word creative?