Presidential Campaign Thoughts

This Presidential election cycle has been one of distaste for me so far. Neither major candidate and I see eye-to-eye on most of the issues. Obama's politics are so different from mine and his inexperience so great that I do not feel comfortable supporting him. McCain's age, on the other hand, is a factor that makes me hesitate to support someone that I'm not sure could survive 4 years in office. Which is what makes McCain's choice for a running mate intriguing to me. By choosing a young, conservative governor, he has created a ticket that I could support far more comfortably than I could if it were McCain-Romney or McCain-Lieberman. I still am not completely convinced that I will vote for McCain-Palin; I still would like to do a little more research. Still, McCain's choice of Palin has made the idea of voting for McCain a little more palatable for me to consider. There's a long way to November, still, and I could still decide that I would rather vote for 3rd party candidate than McCain. We'll have to see.

Case in Point: Why I No Longer Watch Evening News

I rarely watch evening news anymore on television because of how insipid and irrelevant I find much of the coverage. It seems that the mainstream media is simply out of touch with what is going on. My case in point tonight comes from what is perhaps one of the most absurd statements I have heard a newsman utter in quite some time.
He said, "There are no headlines [to start the newscast tonight] because there is only 1 headline: a major party is about to nominate an African American for the first time in history." Now, while I can see why the media would consider this an historic event, I cannot believe the amount of hubris and ignorance that the statement expresses. The only headline is the nomination of Barack Obama? Not even close. What about Russia's continued conflict with the republic of Georgia? What about Tropical Storm Gustav, which is eventually expected to become a strong hurricane and threaten the Gulf Coast? What about John McCain's campaign? What about Pakistan's upcoming presidential election? What about...well, you get the idea. To be so narrowly focused as to see the (already assured) nomination of one man, regardless of his race, as the only important item of the day is poor reporting. I'm disappointed.

It All Starts Tomorrow...

The day that I've been expecting for 3 months is finally almost here: the first day of school for this school year. As a result, I'm going to break my "rule" about not writing about school and take a few minutes to ponder the coming start of classes. Even though I've gone through 6 other starts to school years, I still feel like I felt when I faced my first start to my first year: very excited and also a little fearful.
I'm excited because I see the potential that this year has to be an excellent year. I'm excited to teach a smaller Calculus class, and I'm looking forward to see the leadership that this senior class will take. Second semester, I get to teach a Meteorology elective, and that has the potential to be a great experience.
I'm also fearful, though. Some of my fears deal with the differences that every year brings: new students (freshmen), a new senior class, changes to the school calendar and administrative structure. So much about this year is different that I have no way to know what to expect. There's always a bit of fear that we have to fight when facing the unknown. The other component of my (mild) fears deal with my own awareness of my own inadequacy. I know that without God's grace working in me, I am worthless as a teacher. At best, I will last about 3 days on my own strength; after that, I'll be worn out. I need to rely on His grace if I have any hope of having the energy to think clearly and teach my students well.
Whenever you read this, please pray for me and for all of us teachers. We always will need God's grace in order to do our job well. Thank you in advance.
Now, it's time for me to relax a little more before the marathon-sprint known as the school year begins. As always, it could be a late night because without fail I have trouble falling asleep before the first day of school.

Maybe I'm Getting Too Old for This

A new soccer season has started, and with it come the challenge of 7 am practices. I say "challenge" because I am not a morning person. This week, though, has been difficult so far. I can't remember being this tired after three days of practice. I feel like I've been sleep walking all week. I certainly hope and pray that I don't feel this way next, or else the first two days of class are going to be very interesting...

And So It Begins (Again)

My students don't show up for another week, but tomorrow for me is the first day of the school year. Soccer practice starts bright and early at 7 am, and then it's off to school to work in my room and talk with anyone who happens to drop by during enrollment. I expect to be at school 4 out of the 5 weekdays this week. Hopefully, I'll be able to get enough done these first two days to have one more "project day" around my house to take care of all the little items I was too lazy to take on during the summer. Regardless, I'm looking forward to the school year starting and seeing what sort of twists and turns it will bring.

Environmental Friendliness

I thought with all the talk of reducing one's carbon footprint, I would do the same.
Here goes:



I'm not quite sure how this is going to help the environment, but hey, since it doesn't cost me anything, I'm all for it.

How I Feel Today After a Long Road Trip This Weekend

Gdalks fglkjade dfjlkteai, bsadkfjoirt afiogjhkjja dglkajio. Tyuhbcajkljeafbk bakljoir joiaji alk knaol adadadadada!

Primary Election Results

The results from the primary election have rolled in, and they are hardly surprising. The closest race was between Republicans Jim Ryun and Lynn Jenkins. Jenkins won by a couple percentage points and now will face incumbent Nancy Boyda in November. Jenkins winning the primary presents a Boyda with a difficult task ahead of her. She won largely because of a backlash against Republicans, especially by moderate voters. Jenkins, however, should be attractive to many moderate voters. Definitely, she will be more attractive than Ryun would have been. Jenkins' ability to attract more of the moderate vote should give her a decent shot of winning, if she manages her campaign correctly. A good place to start would be the low approval rating of Congress. I've seen it listed as low as 9%, lower than President Bush's.
The other results were as I expected, most notably Rucker beat out Hecht for the Republican nod for District Attorney. Hopefully, all of the politics come to an end for a month or two before it picks back up in October. (Wishful thinking, I know....)

More Mud Than a Pig Sty

It's August, and the general election is still about four months away. Already, however, the mud slinging between candidates has begun. Locally, former representative Jim Slattery, a Democrat, is trying to beat out Pat Roberts, a Republican, for the Senate seat. And Slattery has already started in on a ton of negative attack ads against Senator Roberts. And, as with most attack ads, most of the information contained in them is mostly incorrect, at best. It's not the only ugly campaign going on. Lynn Jenkins and Jim Ryun are both vying for the Republican position on the ballot against incumbent Democrat Nancy Boyda. The Jenkins/Ryun ads are ugly enough. Once the primary election is over and Boyda and the Republican nominee start going after each other it's going to get really ugly, really quickly, especially if Ryun is her opponent. If I remember correctly, those two constantly attacked each other for months, often using subtle (yet powerful) means to avoid looking negative. Ugh. Such ugly political attacks are why I never want to run for office. I'm already sick of such horrible behavior, and it's only going to get worse once the primaries are over. I may be making much use of the mute button in the next few months, assuming I even dare watch TV at all.
Interestingly, the national election is getting ugly, too, although since Kansas is not a critical state, we're not having to put up with the Presidential mudslinging. Still, the news is constantly replete with mud-slinging, and, even more amusingly, accused mudslinging. Presumptive Democrat nominee Barack Obama constantly has accused his opponent's (presumptive Republican nominee John McCain's) campaign of playing the "race card." The odd part about that accusation: it's completely baseless. McCain has, however, run some attack ads against Obama that say he is arrogant and not ready to lead.
So, that's the current situation. Where do I stand on all of these candidates? Well, I'm not going to say definitely. In some ways, I'm not thrilled with most of the candidates, but I'm especially not excited about the two options for President. Obama and I disagree on just about every major political issue, and I think that the McCain ad about him being arrogant and not ready to lead is right on target. That doesn't mean that I'm all for McCain, however. I don't agree with half of his political positions, and I am not convinced that he'll survive four years of the stress of being the President. That will make McCain's choice of a running mate critical for my decision. (It doesn't matter if Obama picked Sam Brownback for his running mate. Obama already has lost my vote.) If McCain chooses someone who is a younger conservative who could legitimately run the country if McCain were to die, I think that I might vote for him. If he picks another moderate like himself, well, I'm not sure what I'll do. But I'll wait to see on that.
For now, I'll be sure to take a shower after watching any amount of TV to get off all of the mud that's being slung.

Uthf

I don't know what it is about today, but I'm feeling like I'm functioning at about 50% or so. It's an odd sort of cloudy day. Odd because it's late July, and normally it is clear, sunny, and insanely hot. Those conditions appear to be coming in the next few days, so I'm not disappointed in this abnormal weather. Still, I think it's having an effect on me. I can't seem to get my thoughts fully in order. Well, it looks like it's going to be one of those days when I'm going to have lean on God's grace because my own aptitude just isn't there right now.

It's So Nice to Be Home!

After three weeks of hard work, and a Saturday of refereeing soccer games, I only have one thing to say: it feels really, really good to be home. Thanks be to God for such a great place to live!

Punished for Working Efficiently

A significant part of the class that I'm taking this week requires me to design an integrated thematic unit, which is a way of structuring a unit so that it is built around a conceptual theme that the class then examines in light of different disciplines. It is the sort of thing done frequently in elementary school, but never (with good reason) done in high school. As a high school teacher, it may seem odd that I'm in the class, but because of schedule problems, this was the only option for this year.
Designing the unit hasn't been hard. I have a nice, 7-block (about 3 week) unit designed on "Reading and Responding to the Book of Creation." It's part mathematics, part history, part apologetics, and part practical theology. Incidentally, most of what I've done will never be used in my classroom because it does not match with the reality of the nature of the material I have to teach and the way that I believe it should be taught. I'm trying to be as creative and outside-the-box as possible right now so that I can maybe come up with 1-2 good ideas for my real classroom.
Since it uses quite a bit of material that I already have planned and since this topic is one that I've already done a lot of thinking and reading about, it was very easy for me to design a unit that met the professor's criteria. So easy, in fact, that I could be done in the next hour or two if I really wanted to be. I don't really have any motivation to work, however. Since I've worked so quickly, my professor has threatened me with having to start work on another thematic unit. Since I don't like the concept of integrated thematic units at the high school level a whole lot in the first place (I disagree with many of the philosophical bases that this approach is based on), the last thing I want to do is start designing another unit. I can't help the fact that I picked a good topic and that I like to work efficiently at a task, especially one that I want to get done so I can move on to other things. But to punish me for working efficiently by then demanding more work from me is ridiculous.
So, tomorrow is going to be a highly inefficient day. Two hours of work is about to become five. I dislike being off-task to such a large degree, but if it's an option between a minor waste of time (slow work) and a major waste of time (designing another unit), I'll take the minor one any day.
I'm ready to be done with classes for the summer. Why can't they end on Thursday?

One Week Left

The marathon sprint (yes, I am aware that I just wrote an oxymoron) that is summer graduate courses at Dordt College is drawing to a close. Soon, I'll be done with round 2 of my Masters-degree coursework. And you couldn't pay me enough to stay around a minute longer than I have to; I'm ready to be home.
This week promises to be a lot of work, and I'm not particularly looking forward to that. Tonight, in fact, should be my shortest night. The rest of the week is going to be loaded with inefficient group work, a redundant statement. I'm not looking forward to doing it, but I am looking forward to getting it done. I just want to be home.

Why Can't I Write?

My class this week on Integrating Students with Special Needs has been interesting, even if a lot of it does not relate to my particular situation. One aspect, though, that has been unpleasant has been the activity to write a "social story." These stories try to use really simple language to try to explain to students with disabilities the proper way to behave. Sounds simple, right? Well, it should have been, but for some reason, I couldn't write the silly thing! The restrictions were quite onerous for me. (For one thing, I couldn't use words like "onerous.") Thankfully, my professor helped me figure out how to approach it. Still, I am amazed at how much trouble I had. [Sigh]. I guess no one of us can do everything.

Week 2 Begins

Week one of my 3 weeks at Dordt has finished. My class this past week went pretty well; it wasn't anywhere as difficult as I thought it was going to be. It still was work, of course, but the workload wasn't overwhelming. It's good to have that class done and out of the way.
My class this week is going to be a complete unknown. I know nothing about this professor, and I can't tell from her syllabus exactly how much work she will ask of us during the on-campus phase. Since she's a new professor, there are two possibilities: too much work or too little. I wouldn't mind the latter, myself, since from what I hear, my course in week 3 is the former.
It does not matter much, of course. It's by God's grace that I get any of this work done, anyway. We'll just have to see what happens.

Why Not Hydrogen-Fueled Planes?

I was pondering this idea the other day: as we see the price of oil skyrocket and dream of a hydrogen economy, why do we hear so much about implementing hydrogen as a fuel for automobiles and not as a fuel for planes? Given the infrastructure challenges facing hydrogen-powered cars, it would seem to me to make more since to roll out hydrogen-fueled airplanes, instead. There are fewer airports than there are gas stations, the refueling of planes is accomplished by more trained workers (a concern for self-serve hydrogen fueling stations), and switching to hydrogen-powered planes would significantly reduce our demand for oil. Yet, I haven't heard of any planes that run on hydrogen. An Internet search for hydrogen-powered airplanes turned up lots of environmentalist websites, no mainstream media sites, and a couple of research articles. Boeing, according to the one article that I read, seems to doubt the ability of hydrogen fuel cells to be the primary source of power for commercial aircraft. Whether this inability truly exists, or whether it's more of a "640K out to be enough for anybody" statement, remains to be seen. I'm all for switching to hydrogen power overall. So, to all mechanical and aerospace engineers out there, no nay-saying about this idea. Let's get those fuel cells and/or hydrogen engines functioning at a high enough level that we can drop oil as our main fuel source.

Tomorrow it begins

The first of 3 graduate classes that I am taking this summer begins its on-campus phase tomorrow. From my recent perusal of the class roster, there appear to be only 6 of us in class. That is a smaller class than the 10 or so that I had in each of my classes last year. A small class should make for a more enjoyable experience, however, since we'll each have plenty of time to interact with the professor and each other. I'm looking forward to the class, but I also have to admit to feeling a bit of trepidation at the start of this next class. Parker Palmer says that a teacher's biggest fear is being expose as a fake, and I can't help but wonder if that fear is at the core of the timorousness. It definitely will be a time for leaning on God's grace, and I look forward to seeing what God does in the coming week!

July and Hard Work

Wow, it's July! It seems like a long time and yet a short time since the latest class of seniors at Cair Paravel said their final farewell to the hallowed halls. Now, I've spent over a month on "vacation." I'm not quite ready for school to start, but neither am I ready for more time off. The routine has gotten, well, just that--routine. That will all change here in a few days when I start three weeks of all-out sprint academically, taking a graduate course a week for the next three weeks. I've already spent about a month in pre-campus work, but now it's time to take the classes themselves. If they're anything like last year's classes, I'll be very busy during the week and very bored on the weekends. Such is the way this program goes. At this point, though, it will be a welcome change of pace from what has become my summer routine.

Poem: Psalm 61

I wrote this song/poem a while back. I'd forgotten about it until I was exploring a folder on my hard drive and found it. Enjoy.

Help me, Lord, I’m fading
My love for You away
Listen, Lord, and help me
Restore my joy in You

Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock

At times I feel so empty,
My soul’s brook run dry
All my hope seems futile
And I don’t even care

Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock

My thirsty heart screams
For more of You than me
So take this broken vessel
And build it up again

Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock higher than I
Lead me to the rock

A Solution to High Gas Prices?

This article discusses some interesting testimony before Congress by some energy analysts about the effect of speculators on the current price of oil. Speculators, the analysts claim, have been driving oil prices far above their appropriate values. So, the analysts say that if Congress enacts legislation to limit speculation in the oil futures market, the price of oil could return to a level that would allow $2 a gallon gasoline. (Oh, those were the days, huh? :-) ) Of course, we all know how accurate analysts are. Anyone remember that record-setting hurricane season analysts predicted for last year? :-)