Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Email... I hate email...

Okay. I get it. Email is really fast and it makes the world go round.

BUT I HATE CHECKING IT! Moreover, I hate how many emails people send. Mrs. Willie D knows this better than anyone, as I gave her my password junior year so she could check my email for me. I'm sure some of you techie people just died a little inside, but it needed to be done. The Track team at Hillsdale... and when I say team, I mean Coach L., sent more emails than you could possibly imagine. In retaliation, because it seemed the mature thing to do, I started sending copious amounts of "inspirational" emails around conference time so people would actually find something they wanted to read or links they would want to follow on YouTube instead of being consistently disappointed by repetitious emails about our hotel information which we didn't need since for the most part we just rode the bus and got off when they told us to.

It's not that I think the information in emails is useless. Don't get me wrong. I would have been late to every track meet, forgotten every practice time, failed half my classes, and I certainly would have been fired from this job a long time ago without email. What I am saying is that I love pencil and paper. It makes me unconditionally happy. A real live planner with a non-mechanical pencil working together to solve all of my organizational problems! Or a pencil and paper solving math problems... Wow. I cannot stand electronic organizers. They don't mean anything to me. What with the binary code and the shiny screen it lacks the satisfaction of taking your brand spanking new No. 2 and crossing the shit out of some horrible task you had been assigned in the last PD meeting. Pencil on computer screen equals damage from which said computer will never recover.

It makes me really sad to think that people are taking such a giant leaps away from mole skin organizers and printed text. I personally cannot imagine my childhood without lugging around all of the progressively larger Harry Potter books. Summer = HUMONGEROUS HP books by the Leut's pool. Imagine a pool full of kids trying to swim while reading HP at the ledge with a Kindle. We all would have been electrocuted and died unspeakable deaths. It's science. Am I saying email would have been responsible for our deaths? Yes. Yes I am. Does this make me a crazy person? It's hard to say...

Saturday, May 12, 2012

My dedication to blogging equates to that of an 8th grade boy to math class...

     The thing that troubles me when I sit down to blog is that I constantly think to myself, "Oh. I could blog about that!" while miles away from a computer on which to blog (as I would never admit to blogging at work). Of course at that exact moment the thought then leaves my brain. Someday I will buy those Google glasses and my blog can suck the thought straight out my eyeball and put it on the Internet... Actually that thought kind of makes me want to throw up.

     Technology has its creepy side. Google glasses reside on that side. You are simply begging for brain cancer, worse eye sight, the end to virtually all of your relationships with actual human beings, and to die in a car accident. At least in the moment you can Google, "The odds of dying in a car accident while rounding a curve at 55 mph." ... which, as you can ask Chelsea is not too oddly specific to Google. It will find sites to which it can direct you.You can "Ugoogle" anything! It's half the reason I'm able to teach science. How the students haven't managed to notice that I go to my computer every class period for 5 minutes it's hard to say...

     That practice is actually better than when I go into default, "No worries. I know everything" mode and pass of my educated guesses as clear, irrefutable scientific fact.

     Today I am sending out a general complaint into the world as to inform those of you who have reproduced that I am sick and tired of parenting your children. Within the first 4 minutes of being at our league track meet last night I had to perform the following interventions:

1) Explain to a 7th grade girl why it's not very classy to flip your best friend off in a public bathroom with a coach and other athletes in your presence. No big deal Mom and Dad. I know she probably learned it at home, but I've got your back.

2) Cluster a group of 7th grade boys and inform them that poking each other in the face and screaming "penis juice" at the top of their lungs is not appropriate in front of a group of mothers and fathers. Dear little boys, may your "penis juice" never lead to a whole other group of little monsters like yourselves. PLEASE PEOPLE stop spreading your "stupid" seed out into the world!

The more I do this job the more terrifying the thought of raising a human being becomes. I'm smart but, I can admit that there are certain things my brain and Google will be ill equipped to rescue me from. Perhaps parents would do well to invest in a computer, read more books, put down the crack pipe, and crack open a Bible.