Memorizing My Lines

More than a few years ago, a former student returned to school to participate in a special program. Afterward, I gave him a tour of the new sections of the building that were constructed since he graduated, more than fifteen years prior. As we walked around, he quoted the little things I say in class. I was amazed at his memory. I was shocked that many of them I still say and that many of them I had forgotten, even though they came right back when he said them. Most of all, I was surprised at how these little lines stayed with him. More than a decade and a half after class had ended, he remembered my jokes, puns, plays on words, and silly sayings.

This past year, one student had to endure me three times a day. We had Freshman English, Theatre Advisory, and Homeroom together! It wasn’t long until this student began to do impressions of me. In fact, this student began to use my lines at the same time I would start to say them! The poor child got a triple dose of these “Hirschisms,” and shockingly, they stuck!

I suppose we all do this. We have our regular routines: the things we like to say in certain situations. With classroom teachers, however, it is a more complex. I get a fresh set of vict- students every year. Your family will roll their eyes when you use the same line constantly. My students do the same thing, but then new ones come along and I get to start all over! You can’t do that with your family or co-workers!

My lines are not static. Granted, there are a few (or more than a few) that are older than the students in my room, but some fade out and others rotate in. Some are very much connected to specific circumstances: a particular room, course, book, unit, or group of students. Others are timeless and multi-purpose!

For a little while, I have been harvesting my lines, and I made a list of them. I want to explore what they are saying about teaching, learning, my students, and me. They capture an interesting aspect of the experience I share with students. As the new school year begins, I want to think about how these silly sayings shape our experience together.

So, former students out there, what do you remember? What has stuck with you? I have my list but I will give extra credit bonus points if you send me a line that is not on my list. Email me, please!

No, I am not going to write about all of them. That would take far too much time. Some of them look different now than they did then; others are not for publication. Some require too much context and explaining to make sense. There are even a few that baffle me!

Right now, my list has around eighty sayings. That feels both like a lot and like very few. What do you remember? Let me know!  

Waiting for the Van to Go

With the impending arrival of our second child, my wife and I decided that we needed a larger vehicle. We needed to be able to schlep kids, grandparents, strollers,  and lots of other stuff. So we became yet another suburban minivan family.

Long before a minivan was in our future, my wife had agreed that, should we ever get one, I could decorate it as a Star Trek style shuttlecraft. We did and, when they got older, my kids called it the nerdmobile. I loved my unique vehicle and the adventures we had in it!  

Our first van lasted about seven years. The second one is in its fourteenth year.  I drove car pools, took kids to and from overnight camp, went on road trips, and moved furniture, bikes, and everything in-between.

When I turned fifty, I bought myself a car and the van lost its place in the garage. It sits on the driveway. By that point, our younger child was driving, so it was convenient to have a third car. He could not get away with poor driving because everyone in our community recognized our special van!

Today, the van is parked in the driveway and is rarely driven. It got a few weeks of use when that younger child came home. We used it to take him to college. My wife used it when she took a few of her friends to Wisconsin. But most of the time, it sits there, waiting.

It waits for an occasion. It waits to be full of loud laughter again.  It waits for another carpool or baseball game. It waits for the kids to come home. Me, too.

And that may be why I am so reluctant to let it go. Selling the van means facing the fact that those days are over.  Of course, I have had to pay a lot of money to fix it when things go wrong. Older cars are much like older people; they need repairs regularly.

Yet, that isn’t the key issue. Although I would love to say I am hanging on to it because it is a special decorated Star Trek car, that isn’t the truth either. Selling the van is the end of an era. It says that the nest is empty. It says that the kids really live elsewhere. It says that our family’s childhood is over and it is time to move on.

It is, and I have such mixed feelings about that.  

I rationalize the issue: even though we don’t drive the van much, it is nice to have a third vehicle when the kids are here. When one of the cars is in the shop, it is great to have a spare. Several friends have needed it. I use the van to take my Sunday school kids on field trips a few times a year. See, I need a van! I really do!

This summer, both kids came in for a visit. My folks joined us and we took the whole troupe downtown for a play and dinner. Once again, we rode together in the van. It was our family room on wheels again, possibly for the last time.

That is the truth the van’s presence in the driveway obscures. There are fewer and fewer times that the entire clan is together. There are no more car pools or school dances. No teams or casts or friend groups need a ride to the party. I haven’t been a minivan dad for a long time.

I enjoy driving my car. It has some fancy features that were not available when I bought the van. My son prefers driving the “new” car to the van. It has a great sound system, he says.

So I am researching selling the van. It will seek new worlds, and so will we. All of us will boldly go where we have not gone before: the next stage of development for our little family.

Scram Scam: Some Guidelines to Prevent Scammers From Tricking You!

As we prepare to return to school, we must remember not to let down our guard and be duped by unscrupulous cons. There are too many people trying to take advantage of our trust and goodwill. Here are a few guidelines to help you from becoming another victim:

Email:

This article on Apple World Today cites Verizon research stating that 30% of emails designed to trick you (called phish emails) are opened! The article goes on to make several good suggestions about spotting a phish email. Here are a few suggestions to avoid email scams:

Don’t click on links in emails: This is how scammers trick you. The typical phish email appears to come from your bank and says that your account is frozen (or some other terrible thing) and you need to re-enter your password. The email looks like it comes from your bank and, when you click the link, the website looks like your bank’s website. But it is not! When you enter your information, it gives you an error message because, of course, it is not the real website. You have just given the bad folks your bank user name and password. Recently, scammers have used compromised email addresses to send phish emails. So it may be that the email appears to come from someone you know! No matter who sent the email, don’t click on the links – period!

Contact the sender – not through the email: If the email appears to be from your bank, don’t click on it, call your bank using the number on your debit or credit card or on your statements. If the email says there is a problem with your Apple ID, go to Apple.com on your own and log in or call Apple on the phone. This rule will also apply to phone scammers (which we will discuss shortly). If the sender of the email is a friend, call them. Replying to a scam email from a friend will only tell the scammer that you read the email. If you have a second email for your friend, try it or contact them through social media. If my email was hacked, I would like to know about it. 

Look at the sender’s email address closely: As the article linked above states, often phish emails look like they come from sources you trust. Your email has a name associated with it. If I send you an email, you won’t see the actual address, you will see my name. If you click on or hover over my name, you will see the actual address from which I sent the email. If I receive an email from American Express, I would expect that the sender has an American Express email. The label may say American Express, but if I go to the “sent from” line and look at the email, and it says something else, it is probably a phish.

Web:

Scammers can get you through more than email. This BottomLine article talks about how the scammers might trick us by creating websites that are one letter away from the sites we are trying to reach. The example in the article is that you type Netflix.co and forget to add the last letter. This reaches a website that looks like Netflix, but is, in fact, a way to harvest your Netflix password!

Examine the URL: Just as you examine the email address, look at the web address (called a URL = Universal Resource Locator) and make sure that it matches the site you are trying to use. If I am trying to look at my Bank of American account, the website must be bankofamerica.com. Please note that the address has the “of” in it. I discovered that bankamerica.com is not a functioning web address – yet.

Make sure the site uses https: In front of the web address are the letters http, which stand for hypertext transfer protocol. That means you are looking at a regular website. However, a site that adds an S means that it is secure! Here is an article from Computerworld explaining why it is so important to make sure that any site on which you enter personal information has that S and is secure.

Don’t enter any personal information on any website if you are on a public network: If you are in a hotel or at a coffee shop or in a library, you are on public wifi. The network that you are using is not unlike the old party lines where everyone could hear everyone else talking. With the right technology, a person can see the activity on a public website. Don’t enter passwords, credit card numbers, or any personal information unless you are on a secure and private network either at your home or work place. This is also why some people are using encrypted virtual private networks to protect their information. Click here to read an article on VPNs.

Use resources like Web of Trust: There are browser extensions (apps that run in Chrome, Safari, Firefox or other browsers  - you aren’t still using Explorer, are you?) and give the browser additional functions. I like Web of Trust because it presents me with a green, yellow, or red circle indicating the safety of the website I am using. It will present me with an alert I have gone to a problematic or scammer website. Norton also lists ten signs that a shopping site is secure which could be applied to any commercial website.  

Phone:

Don’t answer phone calls from numbers you don’t recognize: If the call is from a legitimate source, they will most likely leave you a voice message or contact you another way. If you are concerned you have missed an important call, call the number you have rather than the number that called you. Recently, scammers have made their number look like your number, so it appears to be coming from a local source. Don’t be tricked: an unknown number is unknown even if it has the same exchange or appears to come from your town.

Don’t talk to strangers on the phone: One scam worked this way: when a person picked up the scam call, the scammer would immediately ask, “Can you hear me?” When the person answered, “Yes,” their response was recorded and could be used elsewhere! If you pick up the phone, perhaps thinking it is from a legitimate caller, and discover it is from an unsolicited source – hang up! If the source says they are the IRS or your bank, hang up and call that source using a number you have used in the past successfully.

Don’t give personal information over the phone: Don’t provide your credit card, social security number, or other personal information over the phone unless you have made the call yourself and are 110% sure you are really talking to Ticketmaster, your bank, or your grandchild. If someone claiming to be from your electric company calls and says they need your bank account number, tell them you will call them back – and then use the number on your bill! 

Other Thoughts:

If you have any doubt at all, assume it is a scam: While I’d like to think the best about people, scammers are very good at tricking us. The latest scam sent an email that included a link that, when clicked, opened a Google drive window and asked the victim to sign in to allow an app access to their account. It not only looked real, it was the real Google sign in. The trick was that the scammer’s link (thus the “don’t click on links” rule) connected the victim to the scammer’s app! It tricked professionals! However, a little more care and the simple rule of don’t click on links in email could have saved them! Trust your gut reaction and err on the side of caution.

Go slowly and double or triple check: If your grandchild, niece, or neighbor calls and says that they are stuck in a foreign country without money, check with other people (like their families) before giving the caller your information. Scammers make things seem like an emergency and that, if you don’t act immediately, horrible things will happen. Horrible things will happen if you rush and act too quickly.

Travel Scams: Here is a fantastic infographic listing forty travel scams and the countries in which they have been reported. It is worth a look before you go on a trip.

Use strong passwords and two part authentication: I have written about ways to prevent your accounts from being hacked using better passwords, password vaults, and making your logins to important accounts harder to hack.

If you believe you have fallen for a scam and given away your information, you need to notify the appropriate authorities as soon as you can. Lifewire has a good article telling you some first steps to take if you have fallen for a scam. Your local police department is where you would report any sort of crime. Here is a link to the FTC’s scam alert page. It is a good place to look if you are wondering, “might this be a scam?” With a little knowledge, hopefully, we can stop the scammers from succeeding!

What is Patriotism?

The word patriotic is being swung around like an ax. What does it mean to be patriotic? What are the characteristics? According to Merriam-Webster, patriotism is  “love or devotion to one’s country. ” Dictionary.com goes further and says that a patriotic person is who shows “devoted love, support, and defense of one’s country; national loyalty.” Just to make sure we fully understand, Dictionary.com defines loyalty as “faithfulness to commitments or obligations” or “faithful adherence to a sovereign, government, leader, cause, etc.”

George Orwell, the author of 1984, made a distinction between patriotism and nationalism: “Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ’patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

Patriotism can have both a positive and a negative connotation. It is far more than hollow flag -waving, blind nationalistic bigotry, exclusion, or war mongering. Samuel Johnson is sometimes credited with the statement, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

The magazine, The Nation, asked readers to define patriotism. One of them wrote, “ we should have respect for others and their ideas, and a mutual wish to work out our differences. By nurturing a cohesive nation whose citizens share a genuine sense of commonality, we develop the country to adapt to modern times and the new needs that come with it.”

Wikihow has a “how to be patriotic” infographic. It emphasized action rather than attitude. It uses verbs such as learn, look, and participate. It suggests that patriotism is more than a feeling or a thought, but an activity.

The Daughters of the American Revolution define patriotism this way, “For 125 years, the Daughters of the American Revolution has carried the torch of patriotism.  Love of country was the purpose; ancestors who fought for freedom was the bond that connected women to unite to form an organization that honored heritage and worked to ensure a bright future for our children. “ Again, the verbs are active: love, fought, form, and work. The focus here is on a “bright future for our children.”

Putting these pieces together, we can see patriotism might go far beyond mere love of country but suggests an active engagement by living up to its principles. Patriotism is a promise to fulfill our obligations to each other and the union that connects us, a faithfulness to the ideals that are the foundation of our country, and a commitment to the democratic processes that foster fair, open, and civil discussion and dissent.

Adlai Stevenson is famously quoted saying,  “I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power—to walk with it in serenity and wisdom, with self-respect and the respect of all mankind; a patriotism that puts country ahead of self; a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. These are words that are easy to utter, but this is a mighty assignment. For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.”

On this Fourth of July, let us rededicate our patriotism and live up to those principles.

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Twenty First Century Fathering

As we approach Father’s Day, I think about how fathering has changed since I became a parent. I look at my friends who have children under the age of fifteen and see many following a different path than their parents. I see true parental partnering. I see dads staying at home and parents sharing the child-rearing opportunities. There is a different model of fathering for the twenty-first century.

For more than fifteen years, I called myself a full-time father and a part-time teacher. I was not going to be a “babysitter.” I was not going to be the father who left the primary parenting to his wife. I did not want my children, when difficult issues came up, to say, “I need to talk to mom.”

There are issues that mom handles better than dad. There are times when the kids know which parent is the go-to person. That is also part of the balance. I want my children to have role positive models of both fathering and mothering. My parents did a great job in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I remember being the only one of my friends whose mother did not stay at home. I remember when that changed. As my wife and I approached parenting, we consciously decided to move further down that line. We shared taking time off of work for parental leave. We alternated who stayed home with sick children. We both got up in the middle of the night. The only tasks that were assigned by were breastfeeding!

Every year, I give a presentation for the parents of freshman students at my school. The meeting is at 9:30 am, which works well if you are a stay-at-home parent. However, many parents arrive wearing the same kind of name badge ID that I wear. They left work to attend the meeting. We usually get between twenty and forty parents. Well, it is almost always twenty to forty moms. However, in the past few years, more men have been attending as well. The percentages are not high enough that I want to note them here, but the trend is moving in a good direction. Maybe someday soon, there will be as many dads as moms at the school meetings.

I am optimistic that things are changing –and changing is the key word here. I vividly recall taking my daughter to the shopping mall when she was about one year old. When it came time to change her diaper, I went into the bathroom, but there was no changing station. I went to the information desk and asked where I could find a changing station? I was told that only the women’s restrooms were so equipped. So I changed my daughter’s diaper on the counter at the information desk.

Today, there are changing stations in many men’s public bathroom. Not only would there be no changing station in my bathroom, when I was with my daughter, I could not go to the bathroom at all! I was delighted to see a baby holding device on the back of a stall door in one bathroom as well!

So out there, somewhere, younger dads are moving parenting into the future. Businesses did not see the need for changing tables when my children were young, but now they do. I hope this works both ways: parents have asked for this, and dads now access them. 

Happy Father’s Day, dads! Happy going to the meetings, changing the diapers, and being an active, intentional, and critical partner in the parenting of your children. Happy twenty-first century parenting!

Productive Work Avoidance

I should be grading. I have a set of papers that should be completed before I work on final exam portfolios. There are quarter grades, exam grades, semester grades, parent phone calls, not to mention the cleaning of classrooms, offices, and bulletin boards. There is schoolwork to be done!

I am not doing it. It looms over me, but I have much more pressing things to do. I have organized the photos that I want to add to my wall in the living room. I have researched point and shoot cameras that all seem far too expensive for my needs. I have triple checked the hotel and flights for a vacation that is still several months away. The exercise room sound system has been checked and needs some new parts that I should research.

I’m not neglecting schoolwork. I did a review of my Freshman English lesson structure and created a model that I can use in the future, even though I am not teaching Freshman English next year. I have put all the school dates on my personal calendar. I have added my son’s college dates to the calendar and identified possible days to visit him. Soon, I’ll coordinate these with my school calendar. See how efficient I am!

During finals, responding to student work is both easier and more difficult than the rest of the year. It is easier because I know that these assignments will not be revised. Many students will not even review them, although they will be available online. Thus, I write fewer comments and do more “scoring” and less “grading.” However, these papers are not only measuring the students’ skills, they are also an indicator of the success of their teacher! As I read their work, I judge myself. Their final exams are a clear measure of how far we have traveled together – and I was the driver!

Grading final exam portfolios is slow. I anguish over each student! I am cheering for them and I am crestfallen when I see issues that we have not been able to adequately address. I am comforted knowing that our outstanding sophomore teachers will be able to pick up where I left off and fill in the gaps. Yet, I think about what those sophomore teachers will say when they encounter these deficits, “Who did you have for Freshman English?” Gulp!

So I reorganized the silverware drawer in the kitchen. I wrote thank you notes. I backed up the computer. I created a Google document for Friday night service announcements! I got my Father’s Day cards and made a visit to the local art fair.

Procrastination is putting off work that needs to be done. I freely admit that I am doing that. But I am not watching television, eating candy, surfing the web, or even reading the Hugo nominees (which I really do want to do). Oh, no! My procrastination is productive. My procrastination allows me to check off many items on my to-do list!

But I know I am avoiding the larger and more difficult grading tasks.

I liked writing this blog post, but I should be grading finals!