DaveTown

For a couple years now, this particular version of my blog has been lost in cyberspace, only to reappear in the last week or so. I moved the whole operation over to Tumblr. You can see it Here.

Here  is some of the stuff I’ve enjoyed while looking around Tumblr.

1. You have to like kids. This is the sine qua non of teaching. If you don’t genuinely like kids, go be a Mall Cop, where this would be an advantage.
2. You really have to have a keen sense of humor that can transcend barriers of age, gender, and ethnicity. Mostly, you have to be able to laugh at yourself.
3. Don’t “mind” very much stuff. The more you don’t mind, the more you can put up with. Save “minding” for the important issues, like knife fights and fire drills.
4. Pick your battles. This applies to your bosses as well as your charges.
5. Do not succumb to the “quantity over quality” hysteria that has overtaken public education (in other words, don’t sweat the standardized tests).
6. Remember it is impossible to impose intrinsic motivation upon another human being, and that extrinsic motivation isn’t really the friend of quality education.

This time on the economy, from Lew Rockwell at the Mises Institute.

Money quote:

Sometimes the bad news is the good news. So it is with the report
that retail sales are down by 0.1 percent in July, the sharpest drop in
many months.

Why good news? It means that consumers are starting to cut back.
They could be going into less debt. They might be saving more. They are
being more careful about long-term plans pending short-term trends.

These are all preconditions for recovery. It’s only bad news if one
adopts the crude theory that economies are sustained by consumer
spending.

TOP FIVE MOVIE LINES:(Not of ‘all times’ or anything like that, but rather in my own particular and admittedly odd view of great 20th Century cee-nee-ma)

• “You keep using that word . . . I do not think it means what you think it means.”

(Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride)

• “You know, black and white would capture the moment so nicely”

(John Cusack in Sixteen Candles)

• “John Dillinger was killed behind that theater in a hail of FBI gunfire. You know who tipped them off? His F*****g girlfriend . . . all he wanted to do was go to the movies.

(John Cusack in High Fidelity)

• “He said to me: When you die, on your deathbed, you will receive . . . Total Consciousness. So I got that goin’ for me . . . which is nice.”

(Bill Murray in Caddy Shack)

• Rooster Cogburn: “I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker’s convenience . . . which’ll it be? Ned Pepper: “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man” Rooster Cogburn: “Fill your hands you sonofabitch!”

(John Wayne and Robert Duvall in “True Grit”)

And probably the correct one.

This is without a doubt the best thing I’ve ever read on the subject of anger. It’s really no surprise it comes from the pen of Mark Shea

For righteous anger is not sin if we use it as God intended: as fuel for the engine of moral action. Anger only becomes a sin when we do not put it in the gas tank of action, but instead pour it on ourselves and others and set it on fire. Then it consumes us. The use of anger, like the use of gasoline, is not to bathe in it and drink it, but to turn it toward pursuing the redemptive, active love of God.

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