Maroon9

After the last dance. Starting over. Year 9. Maroon.

Time Egg

Highlights, Maroon9

If you’ve spent any meaningful amount of time on a treadmill, hopefully you’ll get the following:

stress vs 4th quarter

(For the record, I would never actually kick an actual kitten…)

One year ago this past Monday was the first day back from the Easter holiday, which I was able to spend with my sister and family up in Dallas. I got into my car after my last class of that fateful Monday and made the drive over to a strange, new place to discuss the possibility1 of starting over for the coming Fall. That was the day I paid my first visit to Round Rock High School.

It would be the first of a number of inflection points over the next three weeks of my journey. My visit would last for a couple of hours, and as I was getting the grand tour around the way, I remember how — with everything that led up to that moment and with everything that my mind would juggle in the weeks to come — that afternoon felt like a frozen moment in the stream of time.2

At that moment, the building that I now call “home” was little more than steel rods and concrete flats, and at that moment, changing allegiance to the Dragons would have meant no longer teaching AP Statistics.3 However, the thought of a much-needed reboot had me intrigued. Highly. intrigued.

I don’t remember much about the next couple of weeks,4 but this little, I know:

My mind see-sawed quite a bit. 5 And I didn’t get much sleep. Oh, and I was also in full-blown “pregnant-with-exam” mode.

I won’t lie: I may have had a moment or two where I’ve allowed my mind to take a glimpse at my life on the other side of those proverbial sliding doors. But in spite of the uphill climb that it has at times been, with two weeks-and-change6 to go until the big day,7 I know that I have been incredibly blessed8 with the way things have turned out.

Speaking of “pregnant-with-exam” mode, that is about where I am now. But with this being number five for me, it feels closer to “I’ve got this” and a lot less of “please put this zombie bovine out of its misery”. And that’s a good thing.

Multnomah Falls, just around the corner.

  1. emphasis on the word “possibility“… nothing would be decided for another few weeks. [↩]
  2. Hence the title of this post, for the very few of you gamers who will get the reference. [↩]
  3. At that moment, the discussion was not for me to teach AP Stat, but for Algebra II or possibly Precal instead… maybe. While this may be a surprise to some, by that moment in the campaign in mid-April, I had already come to grips with the possibility that I was teaching AP Stat for the last time. Ever. That was actually something I had resigned myself to before the opening day of Season 7, which made me cherish every day of the journey a little more so than normal. [↩]
  4. and there are also a lot of details that I am skipping for now… [↩]
  5. Think: mind jumping back-and-forth between potential alternate realities, a la Chrono Cross. I really didn’t know if I wanted to say goodbye to AP Stat — which, again, at the time was not on the table for me in Dragon nation. [↩]
  6. It occurred to me as I was typing that, that pretty soon, once we stop using physical currency, the phrase “-and-change” won’t make sense to kids anymore. #sadness #oldness [↩]
  7. game day #5 [↩]
  8. and quite fortunate [↩]
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Furious Seven

Maroon9

I saw “Furious 7”1 this past weekend,2 and while I don’t care to go much in detail about plot/spoilers, I did want to get a couple of miscellaneous thoughts down.

[Warning: very *mild* spoilers ahead… don’t worry, nothing major.]

  • They could’ve titled it “Furious Avengers:3 Ghost Protocol”.4 Seriously, it fits.
  • There’s a subplot in that Mia is with 2nd child… I’m willing to bet that this plot line was only written in after Paul Walker’s unfortunate passing.5
  • I’m also willing to bet that the very last scene with the Rock and Jason Statham was originally meant to be an after-credits scene. 6
  • James Wan is on record as saying he doesn’t wish to discuss which scenes involved the use of body doubles and CG for Paul Walker, but a couple were obvious.7 However there were a couple of scenes that I suspect involved CG for his face — but could not tell8 — and if so, I am astounded at how well the visual effects folks did. Which leads me to believe that Weta — Peter Jackson’s CG house — only did some of the Paul Walker scenes. (?)
  • The movie was ridiculous. Completely mindless. And I liked it.

And I know this will never happen — given the ridiculous pile of cash it made this past weekend — but: I hope they end the series with this one. Because if you’ve been following my blog, you know:

I’m all about the sunsets.

  1. I’m a big fan of the series. But now I truly believe that the “Fast and Furious” movies are like Microsoft Windows: Only the odd-numbered ones are good. Yes, I enjoyed Tokyo Drift, and despised 2. [↩]
  2. a couple of times, to be honest — part of a much needed break from the stretch run of the season. [↩]
  3. Think: Superheroes. With cars. [↩]
  4. Think: Tom Cruise jumping buildings in Dubai. With cars. [↩]
  5. None of the scenes where she mentions this features a real-life Paul Walker. And with the spirit of the re-written ending, makes sense. [↩]
  6. I’m glad it wasn’t. If you don’t remember it, it was forgettable. [↩]
  7. The scene with him putting his kid in the minivan in front of the house, before it explodes, and much of Abu Dhabi… though I wonder about the scene where they first stumble upon the Lykan… [↩]
  8. in particular, the first garage scene in DR [↩]
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World Four One

Maroon9

lakitu-8-bit
Eleven years ago today, Google introduced the world to Gmail, with an unbelievable 1GB of free storage.1 Like everyone else in 2004, I thought it had to be an April Fool’s joke. 2

Say what you will about Google as a company3 — they have had some GREAT April Fool’s jokes4 — their Animal Translator will always be one of my all-time faves. 5

I’ve always wanted to incorporate a crazy April Fool’s joke in my class, but I could never get around to planning anything that was worthy. In fact, the only prank I’ve ever really planned that might have been a decent one, I didn’t actually have the nerve to pull off:

It involved teaching the first day of class of the year with a really bad asian accent6 for the entire class period. 7 The rub would be that I would only do that for ONE class period, and not the other two8 so that when those kids would talk to people in my other classes, their friends would be like, “What the heck are you talking about? I understood him just fine!” Ahhh… if only I’d had the nerve.9 10

Asian Accent

Incidentally, tomorrow is April 1st, and we are STAAR testing tomorrow…

  1. Hotmail was the king of the hill for webmail in the day, and they offered a measly 2 megabytes. If you’re tech-illit, 1GB is a thousand megabytes. [↩]
  2. Ah… 2004. That’s the year the Lakers had Karl Malone and Gary Payton. Along with Shaq, and rape-trial Kobe. A couple of months after Google introduced Gmail, while I was overseas, the Lakers traded Shaq. I wished that was an April Fool’s joke… [↩]
  3. hint: I don’t trust them. [↩]
  4. One of these years on April 1st, Google will announce that they’re changing their name to “Skynet”… only it won’t be a joke. [↩]
  5. Perhaps my favorite April Fool’s joke ever, however, was the EGM Street Fighter II “Sheng Long” dig. You’d have to be my particular generation of vino to appreciate that one… [↩]
  6. you know, the kind that you get with those college TA’s that makes you fear for the future of your academic well being… [↩]
  7. Intended effect: Kids would walk out of class saying things like “oh $#!& I gotta drop this class, I can’t understand a think he’s saying [↩]
  8. since we teach on a block schedule, we teach 3 classes a day with one planning period [↩]
  9. Or the ability to actually fake a really bad asian accent. That’s actually really difficult to do for 90 minutes… [↩]
  10. As it is, this was a prank I could never pull off back at McNeil since everyone knew who I was already — and similarly I won’t be able to do it next year at Round Rock — so the boat has sailed on this one. [↩]
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So Fast, So Furious

Maroon9

Last class block, my A-day students took a Harry Potter Sorting Hat House Quiz as part of our lesson over Chi-squared tests of independence.

One thing I learned during this lesson from my students: Apparently "Hufflepuff is for losers"...
One thing I learned during this lesson from my students: Apparently “Hufflepuff is for losers”…

Today, they took an actual quiz1 over chi-squared tests.

Still trying to figure out which one they put more effort into…

Tomorrow we teach the final lesson of the school year2 over inference with regression slope — which at this point, will just feel like another chip off of the old block.3

image

I spent a few minutes this afternoon reviewing the script and slides for tomorrow. Like I do every year at this point in the campaign, I stopped for a moment and focused a bit on those words,4 and I thought back to last year at this time, when I knew5 that it really would be.6

Later in the evening I spent some time watching the last two “Fast and Furious” movies7 with the director’s commentary. I lovelovelove! hearing the director’s8 take on all of the behind-the-scenes details about how everything is intricately pieced together to make the magic happen on the screen. And, man I dig that stuff because, like it probably is with being a coach in sports, or being an actor in theatre, behind-the-scenes is where all of the work takes place. Once you step out on stage, or on the court, or even in the classroom when the students start walking in, the work has really already been done — the actual classes — or “performances” — are usually the easy part.

But as I was staring at those words, it was one of those frozen moments where I halted myself in the middle of the piano piece to stop and think about the complexity of what I was actually playing, just for the sake of stopping to appreciate the beauty9 of said complexity.

I also thought about how it was simultaneously immensely challenging and also incredibly fortuitous for me personally this year, starting over in the new place, getting some of the pieces to fit in place and also having others fall perfectly into place, that just for the briefest of moments this afternoon while staring at those words, I breathed a sigh and thought to myself in that quiet moment:

“Somehow… I survived.”

I took this shot during a morning stroll at Town Lake during Spring Break. I don't usually make the turn off the trail to this spot, and I don't know why I did on this particular day, but I'm glad I did. I got there just as this bird was splashing around, bathing itself, spreading its wings. In that moment, it was... so apt.
I took this shot during a morning stroll at Town Lake during Spring Break. I don’t usually make the turn off the trail to this spot, and I don’t know why I did on this particular day, but I’m glad I did. I got there just as this bird was splashing around, bathing itself, spreading its wings. In that moment, it was… so apt.

Oh, about the title of this post… sorry, I couldn’t help it. 10 No joke, I wanted a shirt for this Thursday that reads, “I like the tuna here”11 but I couldn’t find one that I actually liked. 12

  1. you know, the kind that actually counts as a grade [↩]
  2. Well, last lesson over new material, anyway. We have plenty of review lessons ahead of us until May thirteen. [↩]
  3. Our ninth hypothesis test, and fifth type of confidence interval. [↩]
  4. This point in Season 1 of AP Stat — 2010-11 — I almost literally threw myself a party when I made it to the end of the textbook. The amount of time and work it took to make it through year 1 of AP Stat… that moment is still one of the largest celebratory moments of my teaching life, even to this day. [↩]
  5. more or less, though I won’t go into the details here. [↩]
  6. at least for my time at McNeil. A year ago at this time I didn’t yet know for sure where I would end up. [↩]
  7. “Furious 6” and “Tokyo Drift” — which were chronologically the last two in the timeline of the plot. Oh, number 7 comes out this weekend! [↩]
  8. Justin Lin! Cypress High alum! Man, I’m gonna miss him in the series. I know there were rumors about him coming back for eight and nine, but I think he might have his hands busy with Star Trek 3. Plus the dude is a Cypress High alum… [↩]
  9. and madness [↩]
  10. In other words… sorry I’m not sorry. [↩]
  11. If you get it, you get it. [↩]
  12. Originally the title of this post was “so fast, so far” — a deliberate twist on the more usual phrase “so far, so fast”, which sums up my feelings about being at this point in the campaign. [↩]
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Chop Wood

Can't make this stuff up, Maroon9

About ten seconds into today’s lesson:1

Student #1: Have you ever taught ESL?2
Me: What?? No…
Student #1: You’d be good at it.
Me: Why?!…
Student #1: You’re very patient.
Me: Oh… okay. [insert slight pensive pause] Actually… I’m really not; I just act like it in front of you guys…
Student #2:3 So when you go home do you just let it all out and “rraaAAWWwwrrr”4 and like, chop wood? 5
Me: [looking dumbfounded and possessing no idea where to go with that]… okay so, the null and alternative hypothesis for this problem… … …
(oh... chop wood... I see what you did there...)
(oh… chop wood… I see what you did there…)

I am filing this one under “Can’t make this stuff up.” 6

For the ninth time in my teaching life7 I was reminded how brutal it is the first couple of days back from Spring Break.

I mean, brutalbrutalbrutal!.8

Perhaps I found my footing sometime today9 but good night, could we please make Spring Break two weeks long?!

keep-calm-and-karate-chop-10

  1. which was the M&M’s Chi-squared goodness-of-fit lesson [↩]
  2. ESL: English as a Second Language. Not sure we really call it that anymore… [↩]
  3. This particular character is a fast-talker, for context. If you watch “Scandal”, picture highly caffeinated Quinn Perkins. [↩]
  4. yes, this kid literally roared and waved her arms around in psycho karate fashion, to boot. [↩]
  5. WHAT. [↩]
  6. Yes, I created a new category of posts just for this one. [↩]
  7. This is my ninth year of teaching… [↩]
  8. Yes – there’s a factorial at the end of that last nested exponent! [↩]
  9. about the time the above “wood-chopping” conversation occurred — which, for the record, was during my 5th attempt of teaching the same class. -_- [↩]
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