Shreds of Truth

He was a sharecropper, or so I’ve been told.  He lived in a large, beautiful house with a large, beautiful family.  My mother, when she speaks of it, usually breaks off in mid-thought and looks at me.  “Do you remember that house?  You were so young when they lost it…”  The question is always the same, and so is the answer:  no.  I don’t remember anything about that house; I was too young when they moved.

I don’t remember anything about him, my grandfather, either.  I have only the words of my parents, and since mom rarely talks about her father, my only real knowledge comes from a story my father tells.

“He loved that house.  It was on the corner of a big farm, and the owner had worked out an arrangement with your Grandpaw where he could live in the house and help farm the land.”  I nod.  I understand sharecropping, half a step from slavery but an honest way for a man to earn a meager living in hard times.  The Depression made callused hands a badge of honor, feed-sack clothes a sign that you were living better than you might.

“Eventually, of course, he got too old and sick to work.”  My father pauses, remembering.  “He was afraid that he would have to move his family, and he didn’t have any place to go.  He went to the landowner and asked him about it.  He was a good man, though, and he told your Grandpaw that after so many years of hard work, he had nothing to worry about.  ‘Y’all can stay in that house as long as I live,’ he said.

“It was sometime after you were born,” looking at me, “you must have been about three or four — the owner died.  His son inherited the property, and he had big plans for it.  Pretty soon your Grandpaw found out he couldn’t live there any more.

“We had the old van by then, so we drove up there to help them move.  The whole time we were there, hauling furniture out the door and driving it to the new place, your Grandpaw just sat in his chair and rocked.  He never lifted a finger to help us, never said a word, just rocked.  When nothing was left but his chair, he stood up, walked out to the van, and buckled up.

“At the new place we unloaded his chair first.  He found a place for it in the living room, and he sat down and started rocking.  We unloaded everything in the van without a word or a bit of help from him.

“He never did recover from losing the old house.  It was just a few months later that he died, and he spent most of it rocking in his chair.”  Mom has been silent this whole time, thinking about a man I know I met, a man who must have held me in his arms, but whom I cannot remember.  I know the house they moved to.  It was a run-down turn-of-the-century house purchased by my cousin, and I remember looking up into an elderly male face against a backdrop of tattered ceiling.  I do not know if that was my grandfather; it may have been.

The only clear memory I have regarding my grandfather takes place after his death — how long after, I can’t say.  I was sitting on the back porch steps, crying, because my young mind (how young?  4?  6?) had realized my few memories of my grandfather would be lost to me by adulthood.  I buried my head in my arms, sobbing. 

I was right:  the memory of that realization is burned into my mind, but the memory of my mother’s father is only a shadow… perhaps less.That must have been my first glimmer of understanding about death.  All of my grandparents are gone, now, and I don’t fully understand it yet.

* For those interested in the Depression, you’ll be doing yourselves a favor to stop by exit78.com and look at Mike Goad’s “Eyes of the Great Depression” series.  My favorite is #004.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language. — Henry David Thoreau

Taking a page from both Deep Friar and the WILF challenge, I decided to share some of the facts about life which one may gain from playing video games.

• The human body can be shot, hacked, burned, frozen, and otherwise mutilated, yet it will be healed completely by a good night’s sleep.
• Being seriously injured doesn’t limit your ability to run, jump, and fight, but it may cause a brief reddish haze to flash across your vision.
• Poison won’t hurt you if you don’t move until the poison wears off.
• Eating bread is better than a good night’s sleep, since it has the same effect but only takes a tenth of a second to accomplish.
• Removing internal organs from an animal you’ve killed is as simple as pulling a clean pair of socks from a drawer.
• That twelve-foot sword you just used to kill a giant rat will fit neatly in your pocket right next to your double-bladed axe, spare set of full-body plate armor, the anvil your neighbor wants you to take to his business partner, and enough gold to overflow Fort Knox.
• Fires don’t require firewood, torches rarely burn out, and no one needs to pay the electric or water bill.
• Nobody goes poo.
• Long falls only hurt you if they happen because you’re careless.  If you fall because of circumstances beyond your control, you will merely be knocked unconscious for a short period of time (during which you are likely to heal fully, as after a good night’s sleep).
• Young, fragile, naïve girls are usually able to magically summon and control beasts that would make the Devil shiver in his boots, if he wore boots.
• Extraordinarily valuable items are left in unlocked, unguarded chests scattered randomly around any villain’s hideout.
• Villains always have elaborate hideouts.
• The key to defeating any villain may be found within his hideout.
• Maps always have a blinking “you are here” dot… no matter where you are.
• Especially tense moments always trigger flashbacks of incredibly important events in your life that you’ve never remembered before.
• Dreams come true, but only if they feature a god, ghost, or demon trying to tell you something.
• Store owners are always as willing to buy your old, used junk as they are to sell you new, top-quality merchandise.
• Whenever things don’t look so good… don’t worry, the sequel’s graphics will be much improved.
• If at first you don’t succeed, check GameFaqs.
• The last of anything is the most powerful of its kind that has ever lived… but, unless it is evil, it needs your help to continue surviving.
• The “reset” button solves everything.
• If the reset button fails to solve something, that’s ok… there’s a cheat code.  You cheater.

You know, I don’t think this post has a point.  Hmm.

*reset* … *reset*reset*reset*

… (Dang!)

As a general rule, I don’t like people who think they can “get rich quick.”  They annoy me.  This includes people who claim that they’ll be millionaires before their thirtieth birthday.  They generally claim that this isn’t a get-rich-quick mindset, since 30 years of age won’t come for, like, six months or more… but they still have that… je ne sais quois… that bloody cockiness in their stride that says “who needs a career?  I have a glib tongue and a plan, baby, a plan.”

Remember that fellow from the Beetle Baily comic strips?  Cosmo was his name.  Wikipedia describes him as “Camp Swampy’s sunglass-wearing resident ‘shady entrepreneur.’”

Yeah.

So this, of course, makes me a total hypocrite when I come up with a new plan (yeah, baby, a plan) for a business venture that is 100% guaranteed to earn fat profits.

Even though I only come up with good plans.

Until I realize the fatal flaw (which usually is the fact that expenses would far outweigh any possible income from the venture).

Like a few weeks ago, I had (in a brilliant flash of insight) an idea that enabled me to stop spam from being posted to this blog.

I had been getting at least a dozen spammed comments per day (pathetically low, I guess, compared to most blogs, but enough to seriously frustrate me).

I implemented my new anti-spam idea.

In the three or four weeks since, I’ve had about three spam messages posted.

Three.  When it should have been three hundred.

I thought I’d found the perfect product… a nearly 100% effective spam blocker (I don’t mean a spam filter, like Akismet… I mean a spam blocker, where the software never even sees the spam).

I was going to make thousands.  Hundreds of thousands.  Millions.

Until I realized that a WordPress plugin for this would effectively be open source (the code would be easily viewable by anyone who wanted to install the same blocker without paying me) and I’m not sure that any value would be added by any related services I could offer.

So unless someone wants to pay me to install a few lines of code in their WordPress theme…

$5,000,000?  $50,000?  $5?  (*psst… it works on other applications too, like forums and such!*)

…I guess it’s back to finding the venture capital for that Spanish-language movie theater I want to open in a local Hispanic-immigrant neighborhood.

(I’ll be rich!)

I have this one student who is a constant thorn in my side.  Every day it’s the same story… he refuses to do work; he talks constantly, even calling out across the room to annoy his classmates; and he doesn’t seem to mind the fact that he’s failing miserably.

I try to deal with this misbehavior, of course.  I fuss at him.  I yell at him.  I threaten to send him to the principal for disrupting his classmates (which usually does stop him from calling out).  I send letters home (after trying and failing to reach his parents by phone) letting them know that he will not receive credit for my class unless he shapes up.

It doesn’t matter.  Three things are always certain:

He will not do his work.

He will continue talking.

He won’t act even slightly resentful toward me.

It bothers me.  It gnaws at me.  Most troublesome students have the decency to get irritated with me from time to time.  They usually act like I’m interfering with their lives when I fuss or yell at them.  Practically all of them at least give me the cold shoulder and a quiet sneer when I crack down on their misdeeds.

Not this one.

He just shrugs and smiles… not sarcastically or rebelliously, but as though I’ve said something mildly humorous.  He’ll quiet down or write a couple of words on his paper, but five minutes later he’s back to talking or staring off into space.

When I run into him after school, he’s completely friendly, as though I’m his favorite teacher.

What the heck is wrong with this kid?

Does he honestly enjoy being in trouble all the time?  Is he glad that I take the time to tell him to shut his mouth and do the work?

It bugs me.  He’s a disgrace to high school dropouts everywhere.

Dang.

Some of our disaffected youth really need to learn how to act like hoodlums.

Writer Dad writes that he will be focusing his thoughts on education this week.  His first post for the week got me rather fired up, even before I got a chance to see the video.

Since I haven’t had much to say here for a long time (first busy, then distracted, then exhausted), I thought I’d use one of my comments to Writer Dad as the springboard for an education-related post of my own.  I wrote (slightly edited):

Education is a system, like a computer is a system.  It is a system in the sense that it depends on multiple, interdependent, functioning components to be useful.

Parents, teachers, students, administrators, lawmakers… these form the system that is our educational process.  In my “system”:

• Parents are too focused on their jobs, divorce proceedings, and mind-altering substances to function well.
• Teachers are too demoralized, cynical, and entrenched in dogmatic curriculum to function well.
• Students are too distracted by bad homes, cell phones, and sexual escapades to function well.
• Administrators are too intimidated by parents, frustrated with teachers, and out of touch with the students to function well.
• Lawmakers are too resentful of their educational experiences, ignorant of the real process of educating young minds, and distracted with other political concerns to function well.

Take a computer system — any computer system — and smash its mouse, keyboard, monitor, CPU, and power supply with a baseball bat.  How useful is it now?

With practically every component of a system broken or damaged, the system cannot be expected to operate.  Education systems are no different… and we are all to blame.

Parents

If you are failing to encourage, discipline, and provide learning support for your student at home, you are the reason your child is failing.

If you aren’t putting even more effort into your child’s education than his teachers do, you have failed your child.

Teachers

If you have stopped caring about your students, you are the reason your students are failing.

If you aren’t trying to make your subject matter relevant to students’ lives and to the world in which they live, you have failed your students.  (I know that sometimes this is difficult, and I know that sometimes it’s practically impossible.  I hope to address these scenarios later.)

Students

If you aren’t paying attention in class and making a sincere and total effort to do what the teacher asks of you, you are the reason you are failing.

Whenever you give up or leave things unfinished, whenever you allow your friends to distract you from learning, and whenever you convince yourself that high school doesn’t matter because it isn’t “the real world,” you have failed yourself (more on that last point in a later post).

Administrators

If you aren’t protecting the teachers’ right to insist upon a strict and orderly learning environment, you are the reason your school’s students are failing.

If you are backing down in the face of an angry parent or whiny child, if you are ignoring issues which distract children from their learning, or if you are dealing with children who break the law at school by slapping them on the wrist, you have failed your school.

Lawmakers

If you aren’t personally visiting schools and interviewing teachers from your constituency before voting on each and every education-related proposal to enter your jurisdiction, you are the reason your constituents’ students are failing.

If you don’t have face-to-face conversations with teachers and administrators in a solid and sincere grass-roots effort to thoroughly understand the issues facing education, or if you choose to ignore educational issues because you think you have other priorities, you have failed education in your country.

So…

I’ll say it again:  Education is a system.  The system’s components are the reason the system fails.

Think this doesn’t apply to you, because you’re not in one of the five categories?  Think again.  If you live in a democratic society, you can take part in the lawmaking process at the very least.

Is it futile?  No, probably not.  How hard will it be to change?  Extremely difficult, since it requires major attitude adjustments for parents, teachers, students, administrators, and lawmakers.  Pointing fingers doesn’t help.

Ask any of the five components of education where the problems lie, and they will choose two or three other components to blame.  No one component is willing to admit that all five components are at fault.

We blame, we fail.  We fail, we blame.  Round and round the bottle goes…