What are we doing? I thought to myself. Falling asleep in front of the TV like usual, I thought. Game 3 of the ALCS hadn't even begun and already I was anticipating Morpheus's embrace.
The only reason I was even still partially conscious was because Middle Son was texting me and Long Suffering Spouse pictures of his newly painted den---he and Margaret put in new windows and a wood floor, too---and he was asking our opinions about the way the paint job turned out.
Yes, it was green. Kind of a civil service green---the kind of bilious shade you'd see long ago in certain public buildings---but all things old become new again. Not my cup of tea, because I remember the prior usage, but this color is apparently in again among Millennials. Long Suffering Spouse and I had just debated whether the green in Middle Son's den was the same shade as the green in Older Daughter's Indianapolis dining room. I said it was; my wife said I was wrong.
Even in my semi-somnambulant state, I could see that this seemingly harmless inquiry about my opinion concerning the paint job could put me in the middle of a debate between Middle Son and his spouse or Middle Son and his contractor. I was therefore trying to clear the cobwebs, at least for the moment, and ask careful, clarifying questions before venturing any opinion whatsoever.
Olaf's call interrupted this. He sounded bright and chipper, like this was Sunday morning and he was inquiring if we were free for brunch. "Um," I said, "we're not doing anything special. What's up?"
"Oh, nothing," said Olaf, still chipper. "Your daughter tried slicing a potato with her new mandolin-slicer and sliced off a significant portion of her thumb instead. It's been bleeding non-stop for 10 minutes and we can't seem to stop it, so we're going to go to an immediate care and maybe the kids can come play with you for awhile."
Ah ha. Good for Olaf! Keep the tone light and conversational and the kids, particularly four-year old Granddaughter #1, won't pick up on how serious this is or how worried and scared Olaf was. (I don't suppose it mattered as much to six-month old Granddaughter #4, their second child -- but, then again, even small babies can pick up on tension and stress and reflect it right back.)
"Sure!" I said, "C'mon over." Olaf hung up quickly and Long Suffering Spouse and I started picking stuff up to accommodate the young people.
First, though, I had to stand up.
It had already been a long day. I had to babysit the kids in the morning while Younger Daughter had a physical therapy appointment. Then I had to go downtown for a client meeting. Then I had to get back to pick up Long Suffering Spouse. The driving alone would have been tiring. I haven't been sleeping well anyway. Getting up three and four times a night is not conducive to well-rested days. I haven't been able to breathe well in what seems like forever (when we went to Florida in March 2015 I think my sinuses were clear -- but they haven't been clear on consecutive days since).
And Long Suffering Spouse was dragging, too.
There's a reason, you know, why people have their kids at a young age: They have the energy to deal with them. I thoroughly enjoy my grandchildren... but they tire me out more quickly than I'd care to admit.
In the event, we did our grandparental duty and Granddaughter #1 had a pleasant time. Granddaughter #4 came in tired and wanted to sleep, but she wanted her bottle first, and Olaf had told my wife that she should probably stall until 9:00. Granddaughter #4 has a set of lungs on her. By 8:30 I had texted Olaf and told him we were going to try the bottle ASAP. He approved the measure. More importantly, it worked -- the child finally was asleep before the bottle was halfway gone.
I was so jealous.
I'm no less tired today; Long Suffering Spouse even slept in an extra 15 minutes this morning -- waking up in a panic when she realized she'd stayed asleep until nearly 6:00.
But there's work to be done, and I must stop stalling and do it.
And then I have to find out what this business is with the green den.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Friday, October 07, 2016
Hey, hey, holy mackerel, no doubt about it -- the Cubs are on their way
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| Photo obtained at this site. |
Older readers may hear the 1969 Cub anthem when they read the headline of this post. That was the year that I flirted, however briefly, with becoming a Cub fan. Well, my White Sox were playing on an Astroturf infield with a grass outfield and they were rumored to be heading to Milwaukee (they even played a number of games in Milwaukee that year as Bud Selig schemed to get a team to replace the Braves). Things were so bad for the Sox that they didn't even have a major radio station outlet in Chicago---my memory may be playing tricks on me; this could have been 1970---but it was around this time that the Sox games were consigned to a bunch of low-power suburban FM stations. The Chubbinis, on the other hand, were winning, destined to win, certain to win, and on 50,000-watt powerhouse WGN. My sister actually bought Hey, Hey, Holy Mackerel on a 45rpm record. I actually listened to a couple of Cub games on the radio....
It's a beautiful day for a ballgame
For a ballgame today
The fans are out to get a ticket or two
From Walla Walla, Washington to Kalamazoo
It's a beautiful day for a home run
But even a triple's OK
We're going to cheer -- and boo --
And raise a hullabaloo
At the ballgame today....
For a ballgame today
The fans are out to get a ticket or two
From Walla Walla, Washington to Kalamazoo
It's a beautiful day for a home run
But even a triple's OK
We're going to cheer -- and boo --
And raise a hullabaloo
At the ballgame today....
I felt dirty and ashamed and I never did it again.
And, of course, the Cubs choked anyway.
Cub fans and Sox fans coexist in Chicago, often uneasily, sometimes under the same roof. And some Sox fans hate the Cubs and some Cubs fans hate the Sox.
But a lot of Sox fans, and I count myself among these, don't hate the Cubs; we are largely indifferent to them. We would rather they moved to Omaha or someplace (the Ricketts family hails from Omaha), but we save our hatred for the New York Yankees. And that's a frustrating, unrequited hatred indeed... because the only Sox the Yankees and their fans worry about are Red Sox.
Cub fans are obnoxious. There are some who follow the game, of course; there are real baseball fans among them, people who can keep score, people who can recite the Infield Fly Rule, people who have even played the game above the sandlot level. And some are just playfully obnoxious -- like my wife's doctor in late September 1989, as he was delivering Younger Daughter, who made a big show of demanding more Pitocin to speed my wife's labor along because he wanted (he said) to get downtown for the Cubs pep rally. But the knowledgeable Cub fan, or even the merely good-natured and playful ones, are often hard to find among the young, intoxicated, ignorant horde that hangs around Wrigleyville on game days.
These Cub fans can't believe we won't join them in going gaga over their team. And so many of them won't shut up. Ever.
Long Suffering Spouse really has it hard this year: Junior high kids are obnoxious to begin with. Add normal 13- and 14-year old obnoxiousness to general Cub fan obnoxiousness -- well, she's showed admirable restraint so far. After only five minutes or so, I would probably clobber one or more of them and wind up in jail.
And the Cubs really are the favorites this year to win it all (for the first time since 1908, as you may have heard). They have the best record in baseball this year. They're pretty healthy coming in. Their starting pitching matches with anyone's and their bullpen is strong. They have one of the best managers around; I like Joe Maddon (my wife does not, but she can't quite explain why).
But... the team with the best record doesn't always win in the Wild Card era. The Wild Card winners, in fact, seem to have a bit of an advantage -- as the 10-1 shellacking Wild Card Winner Toronto gave Texas yesterday in the ALDS opener illustrates.
The Cubs open their series tonight against Johnny Cueto and the San Francisco Giants. Cueto's been pretty darn good in the playoffs. And because the divisional round is only a five game series---and because Madison Baumgarner awaits the Chubbinis in Game 3---the Kismet arrow points to the Giants unless the Chubbinis win both their games tonight and tomorrow. The Giants had a terrible second half... barely squeaking in at the end... but they squeaked in because they caught fire in the last week of the season. And Connor Gillaspie -- former White Sox third baseman Connor Gillaspie -- light-hitting, inconsistent Connor Gillaspie, of all people, hit the three run homer to put the Mets away in the Wild Card game.
And I mentioned 1989 -- that year the Giants beat the Cubs in the NLCS (there was no NLDS then).
But I wish the Cubs no ill. Not even from the safety of an anonymous blog. I won't be rooting for them if they make it to the World Series---sorry, I'm an American League guy and I root for the American League team in the World Series unless it's Yankees---but I do not root for the Cubs to fail... maybe I root for the ground to open up under some of their fans and swallow them whole... but I've nothing against the kids actually playing the games. If they lose, therefore, it's not my fault!
But a word of advice: Don't bet anything too extravagant on the Cubs winning it all.
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
Reciprocity? Can you get an ointment for that? (More adventures of Youngest Son in the ignorant world of education)
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post suggesting that the best way to improve education in this country would be to tear down all schools of education. My rant was prompted on that occasion by my son's being refused the opportunity to student teach during his 7th college semester. After he had received fairly mediocre grades in his freshman year education courses---still adequate, mind you, according to the standards then in force---the Education Department at Youngest Son's thrice-cursed South Janesville College decided to raise the standards for student teaching.
Yes, I know. Ordinarily, I'd be the first to say "hooray" for raised standards. But the school retroactively imposed these standards---held them against---Youngest Son; they did not 'grandfather' him into the program. He wound up having to 'return' for a ninth semester---which was the Education Department's goal all along, to keep pumping kids for tuition for the longest time possible---and, even then, he had to battle because the grades he received freshman year, which would not have been perfectly acceptable for eventual student teaching according to the standards in place at the time Youngest Son earned those grades, were still used to threaten his prospects.
Now you may think that my beef is really with South Janesville College, that the SJC Education Department is particularly incompetent and inept---and it is---but my beef is with the entire education establishment in this country, at least insofar as I've encountered it. I said tear the system down in 2014. My attitude has only hardened: Blow up all the schools of education, I say now, burn the buildings down, raze the rubble and sow salt on the sites where the buildings once stood.
Now, not all of the dialog in the screed that follows is exact. I exaggerate for effect. But though I may exaggerate, it is only to expose to sad and sorry truth of the closed, dim, dumb, dense, peanut-sized brain of the apparently typical education bureaucrat and administrator....
Youngest Son did persevere in his quest to complete his teacher's credentials. He served his ninth semester largely at home, teaching in a near north suburban high school, under the mentorship of a friend of ours---someone we know not to have two heads, someone I would wholeheartedly exempt from my attitude toward teachers generally. Every rule has exceptions. My wife is a teacher; I surely exempt her.
And the 'supervising teacher' (I may have the idiotic nomenclature wrong, but this is the teacher who is enlisted by the college to see whether its student functions well or badly---it does not rely solely on the report of the classroom teacher to whom the student teacher is assigned) is the husband of a former colleague of my wife, a colleague that my wife and I both think very highly of. She's actually made appearances in these essays, at least a couple of times. I like her; I trust her. I don't know her husband from Adam's off ox, but I know he has a PhD in history (my son's a would-be history teacher) and a Vietnam vet (that makes a difference to me, which I will come to... eventually).
Anyway, both of these supervisors thought the world of Youngest Son. They thought he handled himself superbly in the classroom. They thought that he should be snapped up in a minute by the school district where Youngest Son was student teaching -- and there were, in fact, three history jobs coming due in the high school for the coming year.
Of course, Youngest Son completed his ninth semester around the end of 2015. Maybe his responsibilities stretched into January of 2016; I don't recall at this point and it really doesn't matter.
High schools hire for the Fall, not for January. And Youngest Son was cut loose, cast adrift, placed at liberty in January.
Sign up to be a sub, he was told. The rules with regard to subbing have long been that anyone with a college degree---even me, though I'm totally unsuited for classroom work---can be a sub. That's what we were told.
He was never called.
There was some delay in processing Youngest Son's license. In a final insult, South Janesville College couldn't quite finish its paperwork so that Youngest Son could get his Wisconsin teaching license right away. It took a couple of extra months, many phone calls and emails and even a pilgrimage to the old campus by Youngest Son to get the paperwork moving.
But eventually it moved. He had to be fingerprinted, submit to a background check, a few things like that. But the license was finally issued.
Now, Youngest Son could supply his license number when he applied for teaching jobs. And he applied to any and all teaching jobs in the Chicago area during the Winter and Spring and Summer---and the glowing recommendations he received from his student teaching supervisors notwithstanding---he got nary a sniff from anyone. Even the school where he had student taught, which had three history teaching positions to fill, did not give him an interview. That school interviewed a knuckleheaded grammar school classmate of Younger Daughter, a girl who'd stretched her undergraduate career to 11 or 12 semesters; Younger Daughter saw it on Facebook and was afraid to mention it to her brother lest his head explode.
Youngest Son became quite adept at applying. It was all computerized, he told us, and it was the delay in getting a license number that, Youngest Son later determined, created the first problem. The computer kicked out anyone without a license number: Even if the person in question had taught in the building and was vouched for by a senior teacher there, the application never made it to a set of human eyes.
How nuts is that?
But it gets much, much worse.
Remember how I mentioned that Youngest Son got a Wisconsin license? Thrice-cursed South Janesville College is in Wisconsin. Naturally its graduates would be licensed in Wisconsin.
Fortunately, Wisconsin and Illinois have a reciprocity agreement: An Illinois license is good in Wisconsin and a Wisconsin license is good in Illinois. Teachers are told that, if they wish to remain in Illinois, however, they should convert their Wisconsin license to an Illinois license within five years.
On this, all were agreed. South Janesville College said so. We heavily discounted anything SJC had to say, of course, but the teachers who supervised Youngest Son's student teaching efforts both concurred as well.
Finally, in August, having applied for a history position that just came open unexpectedly at a Chicago science and technology charter school, Youngest Son received an invitation to interview.
Initially, things went well. He had his Wisconsin license with him, and his glowing letters of recommendation, and the initial interviewer seemed quite taken with him. She called in someone else---an administrator, presumably---who came in and seated himself before the computer. A few keystrokes later he said, "Your name's not here." He was looking at a page on the website of the Illinois Board of Education. He read off a name. "Is this person related to you?" he asked. "My mother," said Youngest Son. "Well, she's here, but you're not," he said.
"Yes, but I have reciprocity." Youngest Son held up his Wisconsin license.
"Is that contagious? Maybe you should see a doctor."
"No," Youngest Son tried again. "My Wisconsin license is good in Illinois for five years."
"But it's not here," said the man, the apparent administrator at a science and technology charter school, gesturing at the screen.
The interview was over.
But---the statutes notwithstanding---now we knew: The Wisconsin license was bupkis. Youngest Son immediately began the process to convert his Wisconsin license to an Illinois license. More forms were required. South Janesville College was required to send records---Youngest Son's copies weren't good enough---but, wonder of wonders, on this one occasion, South Janesville College acted promptly. Still, two months later, according to the same website that charter-school jackass was looking at in August, the application is "pending." The kid can't get a job without the license---even though he has a license that is supposed to be good under the law---and he can't get the State to act on his application.
Meanwhile, we've learned that the State of Illinois does issue a substitute teaching license. It isn't required, so far as we know; it's just that no one will hire you as a substitute without one. So Youngest Son went a got a substitute teaching license -- I saw it this morning on the screen at the Illinois State Board of Education website. There were still more forms to fill out, another set of fingerprints, all for the hopes of getting $100 or so a day as a sub. A hundred dollars a day, even if you work every day, adds up... slowly... and not to very much.
Public high school teaching jobs start anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 a year---decent money---but you have to jump through an awful lot of hoops to get there.
And, of course, you have to be on the screen.
Now you may be wondering---if you have a good memory, at least---why I mentioned that it was significant, in my mind, that my son's supervising teacher was a Vietnam vet.
Well, it may not be the only reason why departments of education, education bureaucracies, and educators generally suck (that's a technical term), but I'm absolutely positive that the Vietnam War contributed.
See, back when the war was on and the draft was going, one of the best ways to get out of the draft, and thereby avoid Vietnam, was to go to college. So many of our most hawkish neocons evaded actual military service in this way. A lot of schools, including my own alma mater, had "draft counselors"---students in good academic standing who could earn their continuing deferments---who helped their duller classmates find departments and programs that would allow them to stay in school, too. I was a little young for Vietnam, but some of the ex-draft counselors were still in school or hanging around campus when I started. I got to know a few (I worked for one for many years---I didn't meet him until my last year of law school---but, once I did meet him, I found out we had several mutual acquaintances). And I know a lot of the dullards got steered into education programs. Easy, easy A's and B's---or C's, anyway, for the really dumb ones---aided and abetted by sympathetic professors who did not want to be responsible for sending anyone to the jungles of Southeast Asia.
Yesterday's draft-wary dullards are the deans of education departments today, the superintendents, the principals. Once in power, they continued to recruit and promote equally dull, untalented, unimaginative people just like themselves. And public education in this country went careening downhill. I don't know why the husband of my wife's colleague actually served, but at least he wasn't 'saved' by draft counselors, which is why I automatically exempt him from the scorn I heap upon so many of the 'professional educators' of today. You may not think that's a proper tie-up, but that's my opinion anyway.
Yes, I know. Ordinarily, I'd be the first to say "hooray" for raised standards. But the school retroactively imposed these standards---held them against---Youngest Son; they did not 'grandfather' him into the program. He wound up having to 'return' for a ninth semester---which was the Education Department's goal all along, to keep pumping kids for tuition for the longest time possible---and, even then, he had to battle because the grades he received freshman year, which would not have been perfectly acceptable for eventual student teaching according to the standards in place at the time Youngest Son earned those grades, were still used to threaten his prospects.
Now you may think that my beef is really with South Janesville College, that the SJC Education Department is particularly incompetent and inept---and it is---but my beef is with the entire education establishment in this country, at least insofar as I've encountered it. I said tear the system down in 2014. My attitude has only hardened: Blow up all the schools of education, I say now, burn the buildings down, raze the rubble and sow salt on the sites where the buildings once stood.
Now, not all of the dialog in the screed that follows is exact. I exaggerate for effect. But though I may exaggerate, it is only to expose to sad and sorry truth of the closed, dim, dumb, dense, peanut-sized brain of the apparently typical education bureaucrat and administrator....
Youngest Son did persevere in his quest to complete his teacher's credentials. He served his ninth semester largely at home, teaching in a near north suburban high school, under the mentorship of a friend of ours---someone we know not to have two heads, someone I would wholeheartedly exempt from my attitude toward teachers generally. Every rule has exceptions. My wife is a teacher; I surely exempt her.
And the 'supervising teacher' (I may have the idiotic nomenclature wrong, but this is the teacher who is enlisted by the college to see whether its student functions well or badly---it does not rely solely on the report of the classroom teacher to whom the student teacher is assigned) is the husband of a former colleague of my wife, a colleague that my wife and I both think very highly of. She's actually made appearances in these essays, at least a couple of times. I like her; I trust her. I don't know her husband from Adam's off ox, but I know he has a PhD in history (my son's a would-be history teacher) and a Vietnam vet (that makes a difference to me, which I will come to... eventually).
Anyway, both of these supervisors thought the world of Youngest Son. They thought he handled himself superbly in the classroom. They thought that he should be snapped up in a minute by the school district where Youngest Son was student teaching -- and there were, in fact, three history jobs coming due in the high school for the coming year.
Of course, Youngest Son completed his ninth semester around the end of 2015. Maybe his responsibilities stretched into January of 2016; I don't recall at this point and it really doesn't matter.
High schools hire for the Fall, not for January. And Youngest Son was cut loose, cast adrift, placed at liberty in January.
Sign up to be a sub, he was told. The rules with regard to subbing have long been that anyone with a college degree---even me, though I'm totally unsuited for classroom work---can be a sub. That's what we were told.
He was never called.
There was some delay in processing Youngest Son's license. In a final insult, South Janesville College couldn't quite finish its paperwork so that Youngest Son could get his Wisconsin teaching license right away. It took a couple of extra months, many phone calls and emails and even a pilgrimage to the old campus by Youngest Son to get the paperwork moving.
But eventually it moved. He had to be fingerprinted, submit to a background check, a few things like that. But the license was finally issued.
Now, Youngest Son could supply his license number when he applied for teaching jobs. And he applied to any and all teaching jobs in the Chicago area during the Winter and Spring and Summer---and the glowing recommendations he received from his student teaching supervisors notwithstanding---he got nary a sniff from anyone. Even the school where he had student taught, which had three history teaching positions to fill, did not give him an interview. That school interviewed a knuckleheaded grammar school classmate of Younger Daughter, a girl who'd stretched her undergraduate career to 11 or 12 semesters; Younger Daughter saw it on Facebook and was afraid to mention it to her brother lest his head explode.
Youngest Son became quite adept at applying. It was all computerized, he told us, and it was the delay in getting a license number that, Youngest Son later determined, created the first problem. The computer kicked out anyone without a license number: Even if the person in question had taught in the building and was vouched for by a senior teacher there, the application never made it to a set of human eyes.
How nuts is that?
But it gets much, much worse.
Remember how I mentioned that Youngest Son got a Wisconsin license? Thrice-cursed South Janesville College is in Wisconsin. Naturally its graduates would be licensed in Wisconsin.
Fortunately, Wisconsin and Illinois have a reciprocity agreement: An Illinois license is good in Wisconsin and a Wisconsin license is good in Illinois. Teachers are told that, if they wish to remain in Illinois, however, they should convert their Wisconsin license to an Illinois license within five years.
On this, all were agreed. South Janesville College said so. We heavily discounted anything SJC had to say, of course, but the teachers who supervised Youngest Son's student teaching efforts both concurred as well.
Finally, in August, having applied for a history position that just came open unexpectedly at a Chicago science and technology charter school, Youngest Son received an invitation to interview.
Initially, things went well. He had his Wisconsin license with him, and his glowing letters of recommendation, and the initial interviewer seemed quite taken with him. She called in someone else---an administrator, presumably---who came in and seated himself before the computer. A few keystrokes later he said, "Your name's not here." He was looking at a page on the website of the Illinois Board of Education. He read off a name. "Is this person related to you?" he asked. "My mother," said Youngest Son. "Well, she's here, but you're not," he said.
"Yes, but I have reciprocity." Youngest Son held up his Wisconsin license.
"Is that contagious? Maybe you should see a doctor."
"No," Youngest Son tried again. "My Wisconsin license is good in Illinois for five years."
"But it's not here," said the man, the apparent administrator at a science and technology charter school, gesturing at the screen.
The interview was over.
But---the statutes notwithstanding---now we knew: The Wisconsin license was bupkis. Youngest Son immediately began the process to convert his Wisconsin license to an Illinois license. More forms were required. South Janesville College was required to send records---Youngest Son's copies weren't good enough---but, wonder of wonders, on this one occasion, South Janesville College acted promptly. Still, two months later, according to the same website that charter-school jackass was looking at in August, the application is "pending." The kid can't get a job without the license---even though he has a license that is supposed to be good under the law---and he can't get the State to act on his application.
Meanwhile, we've learned that the State of Illinois does issue a substitute teaching license. It isn't required, so far as we know; it's just that no one will hire you as a substitute without one. So Youngest Son went a got a substitute teaching license -- I saw it this morning on the screen at the Illinois State Board of Education website. There were still more forms to fill out, another set of fingerprints, all for the hopes of getting $100 or so a day as a sub. A hundred dollars a day, even if you work every day, adds up... slowly... and not to very much.
Public high school teaching jobs start anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 a year---decent money---but you have to jump through an awful lot of hoops to get there.
And, of course, you have to be on the screen.
Now you may be wondering---if you have a good memory, at least---why I mentioned that it was significant, in my mind, that my son's supervising teacher was a Vietnam vet.
Well, it may not be the only reason why departments of education, education bureaucracies, and educators generally suck (that's a technical term), but I'm absolutely positive that the Vietnam War contributed.
See, back when the war was on and the draft was going, one of the best ways to get out of the draft, and thereby avoid Vietnam, was to go to college. So many of our most hawkish neocons evaded actual military service in this way. A lot of schools, including my own alma mater, had "draft counselors"---students in good academic standing who could earn their continuing deferments---who helped their duller classmates find departments and programs that would allow them to stay in school, too. I was a little young for Vietnam, but some of the ex-draft counselors were still in school or hanging around campus when I started. I got to know a few (I worked for one for many years---I didn't meet him until my last year of law school---but, once I did meet him, I found out we had several mutual acquaintances). And I know a lot of the dullards got steered into education programs. Easy, easy A's and B's---or C's, anyway, for the really dumb ones---aided and abetted by sympathetic professors who did not want to be responsible for sending anyone to the jungles of Southeast Asia.
Yesterday's draft-wary dullards are the deans of education departments today, the superintendents, the principals. Once in power, they continued to recruit and promote equally dull, untalented, unimaginative people just like themselves. And public education in this country went careening downhill. I don't know why the husband of my wife's colleague actually served, but at least he wasn't 'saved' by draft counselors, which is why I automatically exempt him from the scorn I heap upon so many of the 'professional educators' of today. You may not think that's a proper tie-up, but that's my opinion anyway.
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