So this is what it is like to be a part of something

         I never trusted fraternities for the same reason W.C. Fields didn’t go for clubs…any organization that would have me as a member is not anything I would care to get involved with.

         The idea of a “we” is okay…for the Army or a football team. But it’s a little greasy to fully embrace when it comes to life in general. I went to a party at Sigma something or other back in the day and it did seem to have benefits, but it also seemed to be a vessel with more barnacles than sailors, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, you probably were one of those Sigma something or others.

          Anyhow, their big selling point was contacts and networking throughout life. That is essentially what we know as “the good old boy network” except with latte and alligator shoes. It appeared to me then, as it appears to me now, pretty much nonsense.

          I don’t think I would want to work for an organization that hired or promoted people based on which house they used to get drunk in 20 years ago. It might happen. It might even explain governments and Enron, but I want no part of it.

          So, why did I join this current network?

          I am now a member of something because Ed bullied me into it. We were sitting in my rented condo during a cocktail party at the Ritz-Carlton in Beaver Creek. It was the Orlando Ski Club, but I wouldn’t call it organized enough to be an organization.

           Herb, for instance, was talking about how much money he was making and discussing the cost of the tires on his Porsche. (That could have been a fast-forward scene from the Sigma so and so house, by the way.) To escape this, I had maneuvered Ed between us to deflect conversation and he starts carrying on about why I never accept his invitations to join this network thing.

            Short version is that I logged on to a computer and accepted it. I am now “IN.”

            Trouble is that I am not at all sure what it is I am into or what its purpose is supposed to be. If it has changed my life in any noticeable way, I haven’t noticed it. All it seems to do is garner more invitations to join the networks of other people.

            So, I have to wonder if I am doing my part.

            To that regard, here is an open letter to all the people with whom I network.

            Dear Symbiotic Connections:

                          How am I doing?

                          Has your life, fortune, sacred honor or esteem in the community been in any way altered by my presence in your network? Has it advanced you? Impeded you? Have I somehow thrown myself over the barbed wire of the business world so you can charge ahead?

                          If so, you are welcome.

                          Have I, on the other hand, somehow failed you all in some manner in which I am not aware, not actually being aware of what it is that I ought to be doing? Am I as useless to you as that previous sentence is to communication in general?

                         Is my network ashamed of me? Am I letting down the side? Am I sort of like the doofis with a Bluetooththing in the ear — the guy you wish hadn’t showed up for lunch?

                        If so, I apologize.

                        I just want every one of you to know that I have your back and will do whatever is necessary to ensure that you get whatever it was you expected to get out of me … as long as it doesn’t actually ever entail me doing anything  or participating in anything or exerting the least effort on your part.

                        It is an easy promise to keep because I know you would do it for me.

I’m irritated…the paper must be back

        We came very near to breaking two lifetime habits and saving me a lot of work…but the Olympics messed us up.

         Somehow our newspaper subscription managed to lapse without any fanfare, something I find amazing. We must have gotten a dozen advertisements per week asking us to subscribe when we already had a subscription, but nothing happened here. It is like they are all trying to pull people aboard but when one starts to slide back into the water, nobody reaches out to grab them.

          Oh well. Neither my wife nor I cared that much except we wanted to keep up with the Olympics. Feel free to laugh. A Florida paper is NOT what I would call “astute” coverage and I should have known better. Back when the Winter Olympics were in Lillehammer, the sports department sent a guy from Cuba, not that there is anything particularly wrong with that — if baseball or boxing or Jai-alai were medal sports. This gomer came to see me the day before he left and wanted me to “tell him about skiing” so he would have some expertise.

             I about swallowed my candy. He had never been on skis.

             Then again, that gives him about as much to go on as the average sportswriter has with football.

             So I told him all I know about winter sports: You ride up, you slide down and then you drink.

             Still, we wanted the paper so we resubscribed and I will once again be hauling most of it out to recycle on Sunday night, still unrolled and unread. But not before at least one thing irritates me out of each issue.

             This morning was the headline “Blood Bank Chief’s Pay Increased Right Before Layoffs.” A woman who runs a “non-profit” organization was increased to $605,000 per year right before she axed 42 people. At that salary, it is no wonder that her organization doesn’t make a profit.

            This salary is, of course, absurd. It is a regular candy-gram sent to a person of privilege by other people of privilege who serve on a board and vote themselves too much money. We might as well be in England supporting official inbred royal fops as to have this, but there it is.

             There is absolutely nothing that a person can do for $605,000 that could not be done for the previous $588,000. It is free money. And she earns it by canning people who might actually be doing something, and as a result of her highly paid efforts services will probably suffer and if you happen to need blood in Orange County you won’t get it unless you know somebody.

            I had the same problem when the mayor down there hired an arts guru for a ridiculous salary or when a consultant who happens to be a friend of a crony gets a big check around here. Lake County is as silly and insulting to taxpayers as any other place where money can be given for “services” that might not be exactly called “earned.” There’s not a city in the United States that is getting $30,000 a year worth of city manager “service” but those gomers routinely pull down athlete money. And what about that lineup of welfare suits knocking down blood center executive salaries for standing on the sidelines at Magic games…soon to be in an arena paid for by people who don’t know people. 

              While we are at it, how about a non-skier getting sent to the Olympics because he is chummy with the brass? Is there anybody at your place making too much for too little? It happens everywhere, so I shouldn’t be THAT irritated by this…except for one thing.

             The layoffs in a time of crisis. The attitude is “I got mine and I’m keeping it and I don’t care if the ship goes down.” It is shameful.

              My fourth-graders know better than that. They may not be able to do fractions with numbers, but if we have 16 Oreos and 21 mouths, they will figure out a way for everybody to get a bite. I wish we had people like that running things.

              The only decent way to do it would be to figure out how much money you have, figure out how many people are on your team, and then slice up the cookies. What is happening at the blood bank down in Orlando is an instance of the teacher taking 9 servings, splitting the rest among teacher’s pets and sending the kids who don’t get any to study hall.

              Are those people who were laid off necessary? If so, figure out a way to keep them. If not, having them on board in the first place was a misuse of funds and they should have been let go back when there were jobs to find.

               Possibly I would not be so offended except for one of the girls in my class yesterday. She had some kind of strange skirt on over blue jeans, which is sort of a thing they do at 10. I said it was pretty. She beamed and said it was her sister’s and is too big but she wears it sometimes.

                Then she added this: “When Momma gets her first paycheck from her job, she’s going to take me to the mall and I can pick out any clothes I want.”

                 She knows this won’t happen. It is just something you tell kids when you don’t have a job and kids pretend to believe it and bring it up to let you know they will be dressing better soon.  We all know that the money will go for electric bills, food, medicine, gasoline and rent. It’ll take a lot of catching up after being laid off for so long.

                 The little girl did mention that when she goes shopping she will get something for her sister, too, because she loans her things. She might have to do without, but that’s okay. It would only be right to share.

                 That’s character. It’s a shame we can’t elect 10-year-olds.

A Red-Letter Day in the Classroom

       First off, let me remind you that there is no such thing as a secret among 10-year-olds. When they are trying to pull something, it is written all over them.

        I knew something was up when, casually, during math practice, one little girl asked “by the way, speaking of perimeter and area, what is your shirt size?” Another brought up the same subject during social studies….the textile industry, I believe.

        During reading, we were looking at an illustration. “That’s a nice shirt that woman is wearing,” one student said. “If you were going to get a shirt like that, what size would you get?”

         Of course there were other oh-so subtle hints. Like when the three students came up to the door where I was standing and said “don’t ask us what is going to happen on Friday because we can’t tell you…IT’S A SECRET!” And then ran giggling off.

        Girls began to ask permission to “go visit a teacher” or “go to the nurse” and also began to go to the restroom in groups of four. Then the boys began to go in groups.

         When the boys start doing that together, SOMETHING is up.

          Still, with all that warning, what happened on Wednesday still caught me a little bit by surprise. When the ringleaders came charging out of the restroom yelling “SURPRISE!” my first words were “you’ve all been saying the surprise was Friday!”

           “Yeah, but we couldn’t wait.”

            It was a Minneola Mustang T-Shirt that had been signed by all the kids in class. They were giving it to me as a Valentine’s Day gift and had declared Tuesday to be “Mr. Vest Day.” The shirt was purchased with “good behavior” tickets, a currency the kids can use to purchase toys and gifts for themselves as part of a Positive Behavior System. They had taken up a collection of their tickets and passed up their trinkets to get this shirt.

            It is too late for me to get Rookie Teacher of the Year. There is about as much chance of me ever being Teacher of the Year as there is of me becoming Secretary of Agriculture. I won’t be around this profession long enough to ever be a principal or vice-principal and I may not be around this world long enough to see what is to become of the kids I try to teach.

            I may not be going anywhere…but on Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2010, I arrived.

            By the way, the shirt didn’t fit.

            But that doesn’t matter. This one won’t be worn for yard work or running…it’s going to be hanging on the wall.

The sorcerer’s apprentice

            When I was showing the Lake Magazine site to some friends of mine in Colorado, someone pointed out that I appeared to be dressed as Mark Twain and wanted an explanation.

              And all of a sudden, it hit me. I haven’t sent a new picture in since Halloween! Yikes. When was the last time I blogged? Uhhh…Halloween?

              I can’t justify this….I mean, if you say you are going to do something, you ought to do it and be done with it. Or quit doing it and be done with it. Those are the only two honorable options. Anything else is moral cowardice, laziness, sloth, immaturity, dishonesty, lack of self respect and, just possibly, Senatorial.

               But while I can’t justify the lapse, I can explain it. In fact, I have 20 explanations, starting with R.B. and going through to B.T. That would be my fourth-graders and all the fourth grade things they do, which is to say all the children things, which is to further say, all the work they create for adults just by sharing our air.

               I love every minute of it, but when you get right down to it, it pretty much adds up to every minute of my day that is not spent sleeping, eating or filling out forms related to education. I’ll give you just one example…this weekend.

                I could title this “My So-Called Time Off.” I was supposed to play golf, I had been invited to go to the races, my yard desperately needs work and there are a number of Super Bowl parties tonight. It could have been a full weekend without adding anything.

               Instead, yesterday morning I arose at 6, read, graded and made comments on 67 essays…some but by no means all of which included punctuation, capital letters, paragraph indentations and things that are recognizable as words.

                I am supposed to be teaching metaphors, similes, anecdotal support and robust vocabulary to people who write the following:

                paint art and color is my favotire thing. paint get messy I like to paint picures on flat I injoy finter paint with a brush to draw pupys. I hope to be a fmous drawling when i grow up.

                Sift through a pile of that before breakfast some Saturday. Then move on to grade 20 science tests. You find out that a star is made up of galaxies and asteroids, the third planet from the sun is a neutron and a form of energy that can travel through space is a centimeter. If you wrap a coil of wire around a nail and attach the ends of the wire to the positive and negative poles of a battery, you will create an abolitionist.

               That last one might be true.

               That was another hour or so. Then I graded the Theme Three Test, again a batch of 20, 25 pages each, including yet another essay and extended response written questions. You can actually have a teaching assistant go through and grade a lot of this stuff, but then what have you learned about what the kids have learned…or haven’t learned? You need to see who is missing what and go back and try to bandage the scrapes and prop up the loose boards.

                 I could continue with the weekly test, the quiz on area and perimeter, the vocabulary sentences (8 per day, times 20), the FCAT worksheets, the solar system projects and reports on favorite planets, the letters to the pen pal in England, the five letters home I am writing this afternoon dealing with personal issues. The 57 letters I have to answer from the kids in class….my mistake there…I established a post office and declared that all mail would be answered.

                   The one on top of the pile says “Dere Mr. Vest: How am I doing? Do you like my picher? Will you draw me one? Why don’t I ever get to be line leader?’

                   Times 57. This is a slow week. Sometimes it is 20 a day.

                  What it reminds me of is the scene in Fantasia when Mickey Mouse is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the buckets of water keep coming and keep coming.

                   The fact that what I now do is more fun than I have ever had in my life and is the most fulfilling part of it doesn’t change the fact that if you don’t keep up you will drown in the paper.

                  That is my explanation for the lack of blogging.

                  But let’s grade this on a curve….the old school way of accommodating student needs. If we create a formula that figures the amount of time spent blogging relative to the amount of spare time available, my percentage has to be way up there.

                  I’ll try to do better.

How Mr. Grinch threw away Christmas…sort of

        Friday was very nearly a perfect day at school, so it is only appropriate that it end so very nearly disastrously.

       The day started, oddly enough, almost a month ago — just after Thanksgiving. That’s when I started dressing up the room. Among the decorations were a few of those ridiculous, boorish, low-IQ, childish talking and singing things….

          A few, in this case, includes a moose that rocks in a chair while singing “Grandma got run over by a reindeer” and another big moose that dances to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and a Jack in the Box, a Muppett, a donkey, two different dogs, an Aztec sun, a hopping chicken, a Garfield, a hopping penguin, a chihuahua doing “Feliz Navidad” a mouse that has to be hot-wired (science lesson) to do “We Wish You a Merry Christmas, three different sets of singing, swaying and dancing snowpeople, a thing on a sled that apparently sings carols while having a grand mal seizure and, of course, the dancing Santa Claus.

                There must be others….

               Oh yeah, the jack-in-the-box that sings “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” and the dog on a leash that used to yip Jingle Bells, but now hiccups in a rhythmless smoker’s hack, and the plush toy dog given to me last year by a student…it sings “I’m a Love Machine.” And the purring cat. And poor Jake the Jackalope, who has passed on this year, the victim of being placed foolishly within the reach of fourth-graders standing on chairs to see if his antlers were real and if it would be possible to pull his flesh off. They weren’t, it was, he’s gone.

              Anyhow, that was about a fifth of the decor when we started off the day on Friday. We had a sing-along to Bingle Jells, a classroom original, to the tune of Jingle Bells. “Snashing gloo the mow, in a corncob full of clay….” etc. We had a spelling bee Cage Match followed by Multiplication Smackdown and a talent show. The kids were allowed to order what they wanted from Chick Fil A, McDonald’s and Burger King and parents fetched food and served as waiters. We lined the desks up like banquet tables and covered them with tablecloths and played Christmas music during the meal.

              The dessert table was piled so high that even the kids were turning down cookies late in the day. It was excess at its most marvelous stage and it all culminated in the gift exchange. We drew names and kids could take an unknown, wrapped present, or could “steal” a previously unwrapped present from another child, who then got to choose again. It was mayhem.

              Then I got to open my loot, with kids explaining the meaning behind each gift. Against all odds in a room full of 10-year-olds, it went perfectly. Not a single complaint on my part. Parents were great, kids were fabulous, administration just said “please don’t do any damage and don’t let them miss their buses.”

               I was in a dreamy state at 2:30. I was in a dumpster, literally, at 3:45.

               We have other kids coming to our house and I needed to get as much of the Christmas stuff as possible packed up to transport home. Try to picture this. Twenty sugared-up kids with brand new toys, footballs flying through the air, a keyboard playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, a train chugging around piles of wrapping paper, “New Orleans Jazz Christmas” tunes blaring, parents fluttering about trying to help, me trying to find boxes and bags for transporting stuff, announcements resounding from the intercom, children of all shapes and sizes showing up at the door to offer cookies, candies and homemade cards, 30 various animals and noisemakers making noise, nine students arrive from the class of another teacher who had to leave early to catch a plane….

               And then it was more or less over. Most of the kids were gone, the buses were pulling out, it was quieting down and I started thinking about loading the car. Job One…determine which of the half dozen black trash bags contained the priceless collection of talking and jumping and singing toys…but wait….there are only four bags left and they all have trash in them…I can see Chick-Fil-A bags, paper towels and toy containers in the tops of all of them.

               At that point, one of the remaining kids began to drag one of the remaining bags to the hall. They had been HELPING. I would rather have a regiment of Al Queda against me than half a dozen kids helping…it would be much less trouble.

                I rushed out to find the janitor to determine what had happened to the bag. The principal saw me, paged the janitor who brought another janitor and we determined that all the bags on that floor had been put in the dumpster.

                It had to be near the top, I thought. How hard could this be.

                Let me tell you something about black trash bags on the last day of school before Christmas. They pile up in substantial numbers and once they are put in the dumpster, they tend to mingle. There is no top, recent layer, clearly defined. It is all Mount Hefty, a volcanic, writing mix of innocent tissue and volatile lunchroom milk and mashed potatoes.

                 Into this mess I climbed, at first hopefully telling myself that one on the top rear looked like it might be a bag of electronic toys. And there another fact of the plastic bag matter made itself apparent….nothing looks any more or any less like anything else once it has been bagged and piled.

                 A half hour into this, Miss Bebe (the janitor) and I had a bigger pile outside the dumper than inside and my shoes were soaked in something that makes me gag a little to even think about it at this time. She was more frantic than I was, speaking in fragments of several unfamiliar languages and imploring me to get out of the dumpster, that she would find Glenn (another janitor) and make him go in there and do that.

                Glenn was having none of it. He had, apparently been in dumpsters before. Now that I have spent some time in one, I understand his position completely. The other custodial staff members were nowhere to be seen or had, so the three of us were opening bags, retching, mumbling, beseeching, and, a little under our shallow breaths, cursing the foul luck.

                That is when Glenn, who had a better understanding of the geology of rubbish than I did, made an observation. “If you’re standing in milk, it ain’t gonna be under that. That lunchroom stuff is heavy and this stuff wouldn’t work its way below it.”

                 And then he said something that chilled my sweaty, stinking self to the bone: “Did you check all the bags in your room carefully to make sure the toys and trash didn’t get mixed?”

                 To this, I replied in a sort of whimper that echoed from the walls of the now-nearly empty dumpster….”no.”

                 Sure enough, up there in the sanitary confines of what seemed a very neat and clean classroom, over next to the white board, was a bag that seemed too fat and rounded to be wrapping paper and cookie parts. Beneath a thin layer of paper towels and a Transformers toy package, I saw the nose of a chihuahua peeking out.  I removed him and pressed the button and he began to sing “Feliz Navidad.”

                Now, here is why school is so much better than other workplaces and why Christmas is so much better than other times. I had just taken an hour of time on the busiest day for the hardest working people in the school and got them involved in the nastiest thing possible, all due to panic and stupidity and these two showed nothing but absolute relief and delight.

                I reached into the bag and pulled out a couple of more and we had a little concert. And then I reached into my wallet and pulled out a couple of bills. They both insisted that I didn’t have to do that, but they took ‘em. And they smiled even bigger and went off to reload the dumpster.

               At the end of the hall they turned and said “Merry Christmas.”

               And the best part of the best day ever was that they really meant it.

It is like a classroom blew up in my face

If you think it has been awhile since I blogged, you should see my front yard. I’m a regular computer regular next to keeping up with chores, decorating for Christmas and babysitting foliage that doesn’t belong in this climate.

I’ve been too busy to even write and say how busy I am. Read Full Entry

The NEW cure for educational woes

        Just saw an item in the paper about “Virtual Education” and it pushed my button enough to make me take time I don’t have to push these keyboard buttons.

        Children now have an educational resource that they can easily access to learn all the stuff that is being taught in school. The computer has come to the rescue with all sorts of programs that the little ones can click on and have a world of information there for the picking. That seems to tickle a lot of fancies but I don’t exactly see it as the most hopeful sign.

         Children have ALWAYS had an educational resource that would allow them to learn the stuff that they would be taught in school. Books.

         Instead of going to the public library, they watched cartoons. Before there were cartoons they sat under trees and stared at clouds or wandered around cow pastures or went fishing. Knowing there were 10,000 trillion useful words in a library did not get them educated.

          Knowing that there are useful programs on computers won’t do it either.

          That might be comparing oranges to Apple computers, so let’s try to close the similarity gap a little. Remember when they used to drag you to the library or the Bookmobile would come around and somebody forced you to go be amid learning? Did you check out a book on how to do multiplication or did you get a picture book? Were you spending your evenings with Jane Austen and geography, or did you diddle about looking at photos of rocket ships and planets, never bothering to read the captions?

           Well, whatever kids did in the library, they’ll do on a computer. There must be a thousand programs out there that teach counting with a monkey carrying coconuts from one tree to another. If that monkey is entertaining enough, the kids will watch him….but usually only if they already know how to do the thing the monkey is doing.

            So far, nobody has created a monkey interesting enough to sell clauses and parts of speech to children who weren’t in the market for them.

             You turn a kid loose on a computer and that kid will find something more entertaining that what he was supposed to be doing…just like in a library. Those computer programs can be quite useful if you sit there with the student, direct them through the exercise, do most of the actual work and allow the child to enjoy the monkey and the coconuts, and the child will probably pick up some new things.

              But that could have been done with pencil and paper.

              The fact of this matter, as I see it, is that the kids who would have gotten this information in school, or would have come to school equipped with this information after having picked it up from their parents, are the kids who will get it from computers. The ones who won’t get it one way won’t get it the other way, either.

              The answer is not brighter lights, louder sound effects or more vivid colors…it is attitude.

              Computers won’t change that.

Mark Twain II, the sequel

         I was Mark Twain for Halloween back in 1980 or so…which is almost 30 years and a lot of natural gray hair ago. It was, by most accounts, disastrous.

         A current girlfriend of a friend of an ex-roommate’s previous husband knew a hairdresser who would turn my hair an moustache white. Those were days when Halloween was celebrated at bars by people who are 30 years younger than me.

         I didn’t have contact lenses so I was stumbling around, squinting at people. Didn’t much matter….everybody looked acceptable after enough Budweiser and I went home somewhere with somebody. Possibly alone, but I doubt it. No glasses, except the 37 full of beer, driving, getting there alive…those don’t all mix exactly.

         That doesn’t matter either. What does matter is that I went to bed with the makeup on and in the way excess alcohol has, forgot that I had it on. Excess beer will also wake you up in the middle of the night for a bathroom break.

          Well, I wandered in there and flipped the light on and still without glasses, saw myself in the unexpected white hair. It is not an experience I would recommend for the faint of heart.

          Last week’s experience was scarier.

          I dressed up at school because this is the sort of thing that makes school more fun for the kids. Only about one out of ten of the teachers dressed for the occasion and mainly the rest of them sneered and made fun of the ones who did dress. In other words, they punished them for trying to make the experience fun.

           It is the same basic malformed gene that makes people who stand along the sidelines at the sock hop make fun of the people who dance.

           About half of the kids didn’t dress either…and, just like the adults, they made fun of the ones who did. It is this suppression of good times that characterizes your average adult in these below average times for creativity.

            Of course it burned me up. I was particularly upset that teachers would simply smile when some little tater in a T-shirt pointed at the Lady Bug or the Glitter Girl or Dracula or Cleopatra in the hallway and giggled and said “that is stupid…you look funny!” I usually stopped the class and addressed this kind of behavior with the line “no, they don’t look funny, they look cute…YOU look funny because you came to a costume party dressed as a kid who doesn’t have sense enough to enjoy being one!”

            The line was really meant for the teachers who were giving me the same treatment in the hallway. (I would like to mention that so far, I have not used the term “loser” or mentioned that there is nothing on this planet funnier than the sight of some of these specimens in shorts or blue jeans. Let’s keep this dignified.)

            Okay, so far, this is just aggravating. Now for the scary part.

            The sneering, insulting snort of the day was “who are you supposed to be?”

            White hair swept back, white moustache, white suit, white tie…that ought to have been hint enough in a situation in which characters are supposed to have a literary connection. But I was carrying a copy of Mark Twain’s collected short stories, headlined MARK TWAIN in letters 3 inches high.

             And these teachers had no clue.

             Now let’s draw a finer point line. These are people who easily recognized characters from Star Wars and called them by name. They even knew one of the little boys was dressed as a contestant on Dancing With the Stars. Several who dressed, were done up as Harry Potter characters in costumes FROM THE MOVIES. I asked how these characters were described in the books and got blank stares from a couple and the line “who has time to read?” from another.

              And then she turned to me and said “who are you supposed to be?”

              It would have been a really bad day except that I went to a “restaurant” with some colleagues after work and had a couple of brews. As I walked toward the booth, I noticed a couple of biker types, hair as white as mine, empty bottles strewn across the bar.

               One of them called out: “How ya doin’ Mark?” And another threw in “What’s Huck Finn been up to?”

               At least there are still SOME people out there who remember books and aren’t afraid to have a good time when one is available.

Just about kickoff…just about ticked off

          I sold, paid for or had cause to have others pay for a couple of thousand dollars worth of ducks for my school. It’s a fund-raiser for the Education Foundation…there will be a duck race and some lucky kid will get a college education and another will get a laptop and another will get theme park tickets.

          It is a dandy fund-raiser.

          I got tickets for a bunch of kis who particularly deserve a college education but aren’t likely to be traded to families who can provide them. Because of this, I visited several classrooms picking up ticket stubs.

           I went to one room, picked up tickets and was about to leave when the teacher screeched “what are you doing wearing THAT?” And then she made a hissing noise of disgust. I was wearing a Tennessee necktie. She was wearing orange and blue flip flops and a Gators T-shirt.

            Now let us forget for a moment that if anybody has any right to hiss in disgust at anyone, it would be at the late-career, late 50something woman who thought it was good role modeling to wear flip-flops and a T-shirt to school, no matter what the colors. But that’s another impossible battle.

             When she made the noise, she actually took her flip flop off and waved it at me like it was some kind of talisman to ward off the devilment of someone not thinking the way she does. I smiled, tried to make light of it and pointed at the shoes and said “that’s sick.”

             She responded by saying “we’re gonna stomp you tomorrow…we are going to just stomp you.”

              I thanked her for the comment and told her that I had never told anybody my team was going to stomp theirs BEFORE a game. I added, in a lecturely way, like I was teaching 9-year-olds the Just Say No to Drugs curriculum: “Consider the lesson in sportsmanship that you are teaching these children. If you have a big advantage on someone, it is okay to make them feel bad about it. Is that what you are saying?”

              I thought she would laugh. Her answer startled me. She said “it is when you’ve got a Tim Tebow and you’re a GATOR!!”

              I am sure we have people just like that up in Tennessee. It’s one of the good things about being away from where you came from…you don’t see how the people who say they are on YOUR team act.

Hope, the ultimate curse

         Apparently my Bible is missing some pages.

         There must be a part in there somewhere that says “cursed are the hopeful, for they shall not be able to walk away from an oncoming train wreck that really doesn’t affect their lives anyhow.”

          Here it is Friday morning before Tennessee’s game with what has been acclaimed to be the Greatest Football Team In the History of the Universe, featuring the Greatest Young Man Who Ever Lived, supported by 96 first-round NFL draft picks and a SuperHuman Linebacker who probably will not even be allowed to play in the NFL because he is so good.

          That would be the University of Awesomegators its ownself, headed up by the man who has never made a mistake, never done anything wrong and does not tolerate mistakeage or wrong do-age from others…with the possible exception of a few dozen off season arrests.

           Meanwhile Tennessee has a new coach who is well-hated and a quarterback who can’t seem to hit North America on a regular basis with his passes. Lee had better odds of pulling off a victory at Appomattox. Heck, the Spartans were better off at Thermopylae. This is Rome vs. Carthage.

           I got all this information from the Orlando Sentinel, whose football expertise is second only to its political insights…but never mind that, either. ESPN, the coaches polls, the other polls, the magazines, the Koran, tea leaves, Ouija Boards and financial planners ALL predict Florida will beat Tennessee by between four touchdowns and 223 points.

            So, why am I starting to think somewhere in some dark corner of what used to be a mind that “we might have a chance at this”?

             First off, the only thing that makes a football expert an expert is that the other football experts agree to it. They don’t know any more than we do. The ones at the newspapers have never played ANYTHING other than politics. These are the same people who think Obama’s Health Care program is a good idea and who predicted Al Gore would be president. I have lived among them. Their word have no thunder.

            Secondly, last I heard, both sides will be using students. Albeit possibly students who have recently worn jail coveralls and may have occasionally been coached with a Taser. They’re still kids at heart. And as the great philosopher Kent-Boy Rose once told me long ago in Strawberry Plains Tennessee: “All you gotta remember about college football is two things…they’re just kids out there and kids are liable to do anything.”

            Finally, I believe we have a chance because I am cursed with hope. That means instead of enjoying the day and maybe catching up on schoolwork, I will probably sit down and watch this mess…at least for a little while. I’ll tense up, clench my fists and stand in front of the TV and tell myself “maybe…maybe it will happen.”  And then if it doesn’t, I’ll be disappointed and feel awful for 15 minutes and bad for a couple of hours after that.

             And then it’ll be over and I’ll start hoping for something else.

             It’s what you do as a fan.

              Oops…gotta go. It’s time to paint the Yaris Orange and White and put some flags in the window adn put on my Tennessee necktie. Hey, I don’t want people to accuse me of jumping on the bandwagon after we win this thing.

               GO VOLS!