on being a teacher

After four and a half weeks of teaching talented and gifted middle and high school students, I can say that I enjoy being a mentor and I am happy to be looked up to. But there is a second almost more exhausting side to being a teacher though: adult drama.

I wasn't actually aware of all the gossip and bickering and situational weirdness that goes on in the adult world. It's really not too different from undergraduate age drama, with the exception that consequences are greater. I've witnessed everything from drinking incidents, to E.R. visits (unrelated to drinking), to ambiguous romantic relationships, to hostile work environments, etc. My experience here has become something I will definitely remember and learn from for a long time to come.

As a side note, while I enjoyed The Dark Knight, I wouldn't recommend the new X-Files movie.

REMINDER: Read "The Watchmen" (Graphic Novel).

don't speak

I forgot how frustrating it is to lose your voice. It's also kind of funny and amusing, and apparently cute, but mostly it's irritating. You become a kind of spectacle. You can't speak, so instead of listening to what you say, people watch you. Everyone around you is talking and laughing, but you cannot join in the conversation. Spoken language is one of our main means of getting others to do what we want. Without our speech we lose a certain amount of control.

First day of session 2 tomorrow.

student arrival day

It's student arrival day.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Two books I would love to read:

1
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies and Nations (2004)
by James Surowiecki

"..[A book] about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton 's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts)." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds]

2
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
by Charles Mackay

hotel california

Lafayette's PARDEE HALL is exactly what I envision when I hear HOTEL CALIFORNIA. Go figure.

Mirrors on the ceiling,

The pink champagne on ice
And she said ’we are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast

summer music and answers

I haven't felt like listening to the decemberists for about a year and a half now. Listening to the song Crane Wife, I am suddenly reflective and sentimental. Reminder: Learn how to play John Lennon's Imagine on the keyboard. Also, I really ought to book tickets for a concert this fall. Let's see... nine inch nails anyone?

So what do you say to someone who feels a gaping whole in their heart and soul? To someone who cannot be reconciled with her own mortality? To someone whose body is ailing and in near perpetual pain? To someone very smart who cannot make up her mind? To someone whose world is so considerably shrunken that her sphere of interest barely extends past the person she's talking to? I find that my advice for her is useless. She seems to latch onto people who pay lots of attention to her, but conversation with her is often one-sided. She expects answers not discussion. When it comes to this I ought to be forward with her; I do not have the answers she's looking for.

name for my future daughter

Chloe?