Making a Difference

Last Friday was possibly the hardest day of work I have ever had in my professional life. Yes I have had physically hard days, but Friday was just an emotional rollercoaster that was filled with mostly downs. I cannot go into what or why, due to my position, so you all will just have to trust me.

I had a very hard time dealing with some of the information that was presented to me that day, and was an emotional wreck by the time my day finally ended at 10:30 pm. When you find out a child has been hurt and that another child is being "primed" by an adult it just gets to you especially when you feel powerless to help at all.

That all changed today.  All my hard work paid off and I made a difference. I mean I have made a difference in the past but today a huge difference was made. I was able to accomplish something other people have been trying to do for years.

I am making sure that the children and families I help get a chance at a better life. It took a lot of hard work and a lot of convincing but something is finally going to happen.

Current Events

So we have a new President. I am not going to rail against him, but what I am going to do is try and figure something out. I am an educator, and I have a coworker who is a huge Trumper. She is going up and down the halls praising Jesus that we get to keep our guns and calling Obama a Muslim.

Here is my quandary. How is it that someone becomes a teacher and doesn't understand how our government works. If Clinton had won, she would not have been able to take a way our guns. There is a huge process to this, and my coworker doesn't seem to get this. Also the Muslim thing. Trump himself has backed off of this. How is this woman so stupid? That is my question. She is shaping the minds of our youth but she is an unadulterated idiot.

She yelled at me this morning when I said we would have been able to keep our guns anyway (BTW I am a gun guy. I love hunting and all that stuff). She yelled that Obama could still come for them. I had to walk away because she was acting like a typical Trumper at a rally.  I could have yelled louder, trust me I can, but what would that accomplish? Nothing.

So there you have it folks. Sit back and watch what happens. Obama and Clinton have both told us to respect the results and I will.  I don't have to like them but I will let the man lead, and see where this country goes.  Am I hopeful? Not really. Am I curious? A little. Am I scared? Yeah, a lot. There are more like this idiot out there who don't understand how our system works, and they are teaching our youths.

Raising money is hard

I am the wrestling coach for a small school and we don't have a lot of money. The money we did have for the program was wasted by an idiot before I got to the school. I mean come on man why did you buy 5 pairs of 2XL pants when we have 0 kids over 150 pounds. Also why did you buy pants in the colors of a rival school? Why not our colors? Seriously the guy was an idiot. He bought all our supplies from the most expensive place and didn't get other essentials. So here I am going crazy trying to raise money. I did online stuff and got enough for new hoodies which is sweet, but I can't always be begging my friends for cash. So I came up with 2 ideas. One is to sell all the extra pants I have for cheap, just to get rid of them. They are nice pants, super comfortable, but the wrong color. The second is a 50/50 raffle.  I am hoping to raise about $500 eventually just to get some essentials without having to share the money with other groups in our school. If I sell or raffle using the school store I get 1/3 of the money, so I am going around the store, with admin permission of course.

Dang raising money is hard, I wish the guy before me had not been so stupid

Problems today

I feel like I might sound like an old fuddy duddy today. Am I becoming that guy who gets pissed when kids walk on my lawn? Should I start each story with "Back in my day"? I don't know.  What I do know is that this country and the world in general has a huge problem.  The gist of that problem is parenting.

What happened to the day when a kid attacked a teacher and the parent looked at the kid and knew the kid did wrong. No today a kid attacks a teacher and all of a sudden the teacher gets asked "What did you do to provoke him/her?" This in my mind is a huge pile of horse hockey (see I am getting old).  No parents and students are responsible for the problems today.  I am a parent and I refuse to be part of the problem.  I will not look at the teacher and ask "Why did you give my kid a D?"  I will look at my kid and ask, "What could you have done differently?"

Your kid throws his/her desk to the ground, and the kid expects someone else to pick it up.  NO! The kid picks it up and is held accountable for their actions.  A kid is being taken home from school because "you are not nice". I don't get paid to be their bestie, I get paid to help them navigate life.  Blame me for your lack of parenting skills? I don't think so.

It is time for us to take a hard look at how we are raising our kids. We are raising kids ho have no accountability. They think everything is someone else's fault.  Our kids need to learn introspection, and we as parents need to learn to not always blame someone else. if our kid gets in trouble at school, should we listen? Yes. Should we automatically blame someone else? No. Our kids need to be held responsible for behavior good and not so good. Don't blame me, or other people, because you can't discipline your kid.

People this is what is causing so many problems in our country and with our education system. Kids are not held accountable. My most successful, and well rounded students are those who accept their faults and work towards changing those not so great habits.

Inservice

I am an educator, sort of.  I teach life lessons to our youth. I attempt to impart on them knowledge I have gained over the years.  Being that I have survived this long, I really was an idiot when I was younger, I feel it is my right and my duty to let them know what an idiot I was and how they will make their own mistakes and that it is okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are what make us better people.

Now for the meat of it. We have an inservice day today.  We are all sitting around learning yet another way to teach.  I am watching a video of a guy about 20 years younger than I am and he has great ideas.  I am learning from a person much younger than I am. Would I watch these videos if I wasn't trapped in a room with my fellow educators?  Probably not. I tend to watch videos of not work things, unless I have to for a class.  I appreciate what we are going through.

Then comes lunch.  By now I have spent 4 hours with a group of people I see everyday and many times over the weekend.  I am not going to participate in the group lunch.  Mostly because I want to listen to my thoughts for a few minutes, but also because even with the best intentions if I eat something someone else has cooked I will get sick (I have dietary restrictions being a Celiac).  Does this make me anti-social?  Absolutely.  Am I okay with this? Absolutely. Are they okay with this?  I am not sure I really care enough to ask or worry. It is times like this that I miss my wife and daughters.  It is times like this I could really just use a day to watch tv and zone out. But that is not going to happen.  I will eventually wander towards the voices coming from down the hall.  I will smile sort of and engage in conversation.  I will be trapped like a bear in a cage listening to the 1st grade teacher tell me why God has blessed me.  I know He has, but when He makes me talk with her I feel like He is laughing at me, and I am cool with that to a certain extent.

All this being said I am off to go and be social.

Teens are the same everywhere

So I was walking back home last night after being at one of our 2 local stores and I started contemplating something as a 4-wheeler roared past me with one of my high school students driving.  Teen drivers are all the same no matter where you are.  Little back information.  I am living in a rural Alaska village with no streets.  Not even dirt roads.  We live on a system of boardwalks.  It is nice here, and the kids are cool.  But teens will be teens.  And all the teens here ride like maniacs.  This is not me saying that this is isolated to here.  My last village had dirt roads and the teens there drove like maniacs too.  be fore that I was in Minnesota in the suburbs and the teens drove like maniacs as well.  Basically what I am saying is that American teens are American teens no matter where they live.  They can be a huge pain in the butt and make us anxious because of some of their behavior, but they are teens none the less and we need to remember that at one point in our lives, we were maniacs too.

Smelly Day

I work with teenagers, and teenage boys are a pretty dirty bunch.  I don't mean in their minds I mean physically they are smellier than the girls.  Part of growing up right?  So the place I am working and living had to shut off the water so they could make repairs to the water line or something and we have no water for showers, for the day at least.  And needless to say I am not really looking forward to the added funk that the adults are going to bring into work.  I have a feeling that today is going to be a day when I can see the body odor in the air.  In my mind, with an over active imagination for a 43 year old man, it is going to be a green/brown cloud that just lingers near the ceilings in the halls only to descend momentarily to catch those who have their mouth open unawares.  I can taste the foul smell now and it is gross.  So please, think of me today as you take a nice warm shower (take that how you want ), or wash your hands or do anything where you don't have to smell the overwhelming odor of unwashed teenagers and adults.