Teacher Gifts and Usury

Jacob’s now finishing up 1st grade. He’s got four teachers who primarily instruct him, and since Laureen’s been on the receiving end of teacher gifts that are sometimes useless (“A Starbucks card! Enough for two Trientas! But I don’t drink coffee! Thank You!”), we resorted to the generic “put $20 on a Visa gift card” approach, thinking that’d be unrestrictive enough to make the teachers happy. Sure, it doesn’t say “individuality” like a Dick’s Sporting Goods card would, but THEY’D USE IT, DANGIT.

Visa’s got this end of the game rigged. For their cards that don’t “expire”, they charge a flat $5.95 fee to activate the card. Now, if you’re putting $500 on there, that’s under 2 percent. But when it’s only $20? The cost is still $5.95.

30 percent fees, baby.

Next year? Dead presidential portraits lovingly printed on a cotton/paper blend.

The End of The World

I’m not entirely sure why there’s been so much angst going on about the supposed end of the world predicted by some literalist somewhere. We’ve had groups of people believe many times over believe such things, and one of two things has happened:
1. They are embarrassed.
2. They kill themselves.

My viewpoint on this is more “why worry about it?” than most people, simply because I look at it this way:

(a) if you believe the world will end Saturday, then you believe that you will be among those saved, so, thelogically, having this life end won’t matter.
(b) if you don’t believe that the Rapture’s coming two days from now, then, even if you’re religious, there’s no need to worry. If you’re Christian, you probably believe you’ll be restored whenever the Rapture happens, even though we’re not supposed to know the day or hour. If you’re not Christian, the issue’s moot.

Honestly, for every time I see “Post Rapture Looting” as an event I should join on Facebook, I cringe just as much as I do when presented with literal interpretations of the Bible. It takes so much effort to be an apologist for anything; I’d much rather we spent our time on–oh, I don’t know– making the world a better place regardless of what you believe or think. Is that so hard to do?

Our Alma Mater, We Will Cheer

This one’s primarily for my high school acquaintances/friends/”I recognize your name”s.
Backstory: My mom teaches in EMS ISD. She’s been there 25 years. This year, she’s retiring. So is Mr. Shipp. Every year, they have an awards ceremony to honor the teachers in various ways: teacher of the year, five years of service, etc.

I came to the retiree page, and this disturbed me so much I had to post about it.

If you are seeing this, please visit http://www.alearningexperience.com
EM-S ISD retiree page

Please note: I’ve already talked to the person responsible for it, and they’ve taken the heat for it, but it saddens me that this was presented to a gathering of EDUCATORS. HOLY FREAKING PROOFBALLS this is atrocious.

Okay, that’s out of my system.

Jacob the Enforcer

Last night, Jacob asked me if he could go get some tape and scissors. I said, “OK”, because every father wants their kid to do something constructive with their lives. (Bad joke, yes.)

Jacob then hung a sign on his door: “please don’t come in here”.

After a while, he asked me how to spell quiet. I told him, and he went back into his room.

Later, he reappears and thanks me for my help with his bus project. “Bus project?” I ask.
“If we don’t give Mr. Donovan (the bus driver) at least one day of quiet, he’s going to talk to all of our parents.”
“So what are you doing about it?”

Quoth the prophet: “This sign will be very helpful, and I am making several more.”

The Soul of a Balloon

Today, I was at Little Gym, being the parent-on-duty for Jessie and her dance class. The lobby had a few parents and younger siblings, and one of them had a blue balloon, filled with helium, on a thin ribbon. The configuration of the room combined with the length of the ribbon made it just ever so slightly impossible for the child’s mother to be able to reach up and retrieve it after her child inevitably would send it skyward. After assisting with the first retrieval, I realized that this was a power struggle in the making and decided that I have plenty of parenting choices to make for my own kids, and taking on other peoples’ would be at best a path toward insanity. So, I ignored that particular balloon, but it got me thinking.

What is it about balloons that makes them so attractive to kids? Especially the helium-filled, egg-shaped kind? There’s nothing inherently “fun” about something that always rises up on you. You can try to keep it down, but if you sit on it or something POP.

There’s an immediate sense of heartbreak when you hear that noise. It may startle you, it may make you brace for the crying that is to come, or it just may make you wonder about why someone paid good money for the helium and flimsy piece of latex.

The other issue with balloons occurs when you’re outside and it gets away from you. When a child loses a balloon like this, tears will follow. It’s that feeling of “I had it under my control, and now everything is RUINED.”

It seems like that balloon is an apt enough metaphor for our soul and spirit, or at least whatever breath or gas that’s inside it is. Our bodies are the balloon, and eventually, we’ll expire, whether it be with a BANG or a slow leak. (Let’s put aside the entire “inhale the balloon and talk funny” bit. With this line of thought, we veer into Harry Potter Tormentors, and…. yeah.)

I want to take this in a spiritual direction if only because I’m a spiritual person. When we, like that child, try to hold on to that balloon and exert our control over it, isn’t that simply us trying to ignore God’s plan for us and do things our own way? We can tie a string so it doesn’t get away. We can stay indoors and let it hit the ceiling. We can do everything humanly possible to preserve that helium inside the balloon, and yet it will escape. It’s as if God’s plan for us, which we believe to be known by Him and not necessarily always revealed to us, is for us to let go of that balloon and trust that the wind will take it where it needs to go.

It’s so hard to let go. I want to control everything I can, because I think I know best, or at least I think I know how to at the very least keep myself somewhere safe. But those who call ourselves Christians really aren’t meant to be safe in anything except that God loves us.

So, today, I’ll loosen the grip on the balloon a bit. I may not be able to let it go completely, but you can only take one step at a time.

If you have some time, check out Keith Stewart’s message this week at Springcreek. It’s powerful.

Random thoughts as I try to get back to sleep

It’s about 12:30 a.m. Friday morning. I’ve just given Jessie some cough and cold medicine to hopefully clear her head and relieve her cough. Jacob seems to have gotten over his, but both of the kids spent a great deal of time outside today. They’ve created a slide using the rope on the tree fort in the back yard. Carry it up the hill, then slide down on your feet while holding it. Repeat forever.

Jacob says he wants to build a catapult. This should tell you something.

We’re in Day 4 of “Mother Nature Hates Football”.

So much stuff going on: Jessie has her testing for gifted and talented on Saturday. This should be interesting, because Jessie doesn’t quite have the same gifts as Jacob. She’s a phenomenal creative talent, and she can remember almost anything you tell her or she experiences, but it’s not the same as Mr. Flinger.

If you’re an Imagination Movers fan, they’re coming to the Verizon Theatre in Grand Prairie. Buy me some tickets. 🙂

Laureen has been happier in the four days she’s been home than she has in a long while. Apparently having the chance and time to just work on things around the house is a comfort to her, and she’s made headway on The Garage Where Stuff Goes to Die, plus most of the downstairs.

I don’t know if I mentioned the yard sale she held a while back. It was kinda interesting to wake up at 9 a.m. on a Saturday, go downstairs, and see people crawling over the yard. I went outside, and a guy asked me if I had a power cord for some random VCR. There was stuff all over the place, and it took a while for my uncaffeinated head to realize that Laureen had woke up at 5 a.m. or so and decided to have a yard sale that day.

We sold the hockey gear. That was one of my last vestiges of Nortel. Won’t miss it much.

I received a new pair of rollerblades for Christmas, but the weather has made them somewhat useless. I have tried them out, but it’s so different. I’m used to hockey skates, where you have a hard shell and your ankles don’t give. These are an adventure, to say the least.

Anyway, here’s hoping for a good weekend all around.

Shooting Yourself in the Foot, Texas Style

The upcoming Texas legislative session is going to be interesting, to put it mildly. Even though our governor assured us during his campaign that Texas was in great shape and there’s lots of money coming in, it turns out that if we spent this next fiscal year at the same level we did last year, we’d be $27 BILLION short over the next two years. Texas does biennial budgets, so we have to look ahead a bit.  Here’s the proposed budget. One of the things that’s going to happen is that school districts are going to lose funding. The Dallas Independent School District is bracing for a loss that could be $250 million. Of course, having to cut school spending doesn’t seem to bother our governor that much. In a speech to  conservative business leaders in Houston sponsored by the U. S. chamber of commerce, Perry said, “Do we really need free school bus service, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian-Pacific Heritage Month, ESL, special needs and enrichment programs like music, art or math Olympiad? I think we should get back to the basics of the three Rs, reading writing and arithmetic. I mean when is the last time a 6th grade science fair project yielded a cure for a disease?”

To rub more salt into this particular wound, Perry also stated that he wanted to make private schools more affordable. Think about that for a second.

How can a governor decide we don’t need public services, but we should make private ones more available? To me, this is just another example of the state trying to transfer money to either religious organizations (Christian or other religiously-based private schools) or corporations that haven’t really shown they can do any better than a regular school can (charter schools). While I applaud the ideas of both types of schools, giving state money to support them is ludicrous. We pay for roads, hospitals, and other public works so the ENTIRE public can benefit, not just those who can afford it. I don’t mind paying more taxes when the entire system benefits, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the state legislature.

On the educational side, with all of the cuts that are coming, how are we supposed to continue the No Child Left Behind policy? A lot of the services that would be cut are special needs kids, that extra tutoring for someone who needs it, or an individual tutor to get a child up to speed. Districts that are already in trouble will fall further behind, and districts that are holding their own will be faced with difficult choices.

When people look to cut their budgets, there are a few things that are sacrosanct: you have to eat, you have to have a roof over your head, etc. It’s my belief that education in Texas should be just as sacred. If we cut those services that are helping us meet mandates, then we WILL be left behind. When you cut school funding, you deliberately hamper the future. Those students that could be productive to society and get college degrees to earn more money and afford homes to pay more taxes…won’t. They’ll be stuck in the service industries, living hand to mouth. I can’t state it passionately enough: if you live in Texas, call your legislators and demand accountability for those cuts.

Of course, there is the entire issue of those mandates and why we follow them, but that’s another story. They’re here; we can’t change them (yet), so let’s deal with this particular reality.