Every once in a while, I feel the need to post something thought provoking, even perhaps a bit deep. Not because I think that my opinion is so very important, nor because I feel the need to be smart and philosophical. In fact, I'd much rather write something that was witty and full of humor than something that drones on and on about my own forays into the world of classical thought.
But alas, I'm afraid I have been thinking.
Thinking about how despite our 'American Dream' work ethic, and our continuing slide toward workaholism, our country seems to be in a bit of a pickle.
Even though our corporate motto is harder, better, stronger, faster, more, we are really none of these things. We aren't better for it, are we? Our continual chasing after whatever it is we're chasing didn't solve our problems. It might have even created some of them.
Today, a day being called Black Monday by some because of the more than 70,000 jobs announced to be cut in our country alone, the stock market falling and falling, and people losing their homes, I can't help but think that perhaps we're doing something wrong.
Of course, this is all my opinion, but what if today instead of pushing ourselves to the limits, stressing ourselves out, and going above and beyond perhaps what our mind can handle, what if we decided to take care of ourselves? To take a break and not feel guilty? To take our full hour of lunch, and leave by five, no matter what we've got in our inbox.
How about we examine what we're doing in our lives, and decide if that's really an truly what we want to do? What if we thought about what made us fulfilled and happy instead of what somebody else is telling us should make us fulfilled and happy?
I'm not talking about a nation full of slackers. I'm talking about people really knowing how to balance things. People who find who they are not in their job, but in their joy. People who decided they want to live life to the full, and pursuing what that really means. People not afraid to take a few days, months, years, decades, to figure out what they want to do.
I understand that this is not just something I've thought up. It's not even revolutionary, because there are people who live by this. And they seem, well, joyful. The thing is, I don't work with a lot of them.
Having entered a truly money-based business is corporate America a month ago, I have to say that I am saddened by the way my colleagues and I live our our days. Never ending projects, reports, staying late, stressing out, feeling jaded. It's not some phenomenon, it's some sort of misguided work ethic, turned into a monster that promises MORE! MORE money! MORE status! MORE awards! MORE power!
So I am saying 'no' right now. I know it may seem young, and idealistic, and some people will continue to say that it's foolish to live any other way, but I just can't. For the sake of me, my health, my family, my faith, everything, I just can't do this much longer than I absolutely have to.
And I think it would benefit us all if we would just slow down, and truly look at what this crazy pace has gotten us. Nothing real great, I don't think. So I encourage you to think about what made you happy when you were a kid, and try to get back to that place every once in a while. Think about what hobbies you used to really enjoy that maybe you've stopped, and how to start them again. Do something truly ridiculous everyday, take a nap, take a whole day off and don't feel guilty. Instead of looking for how to cram more things into less time, enjoy spreading your day out. Instead of doing four things really awfully, do one thing with great care and with great quality.
But most of all, what I encourage you to do is to spend time with the wonderful and amazing God that created you. Because I think He might have some pretty good ideas at what he created you for, and who you truly are, with no lies, no walls, no facades to get in the way. And if you need a place to start, just remember that no matter what, you are a child of God. And go from there.
Because maybe, just maybe that's the right way to do things.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Movie Montages
Many members of my family have been trying to think of all the movies that certain scenes in which someone runs into a glass door. It would be a dang good movie montage to put all of these clips together.
The only thing is we know that we've seen it in tons of movies, but when trying to list them, we can only think of a few.
So my challenge to you: Help us think of more! Leave a comment to remind us of a great face-into-glass moment from a movie.
The only thing is we know that we've seen it in tons of movies, but when trying to list them, we can only think of a few.
So my challenge to you: Help us think of more! Leave a comment to remind us of a great face-into-glass moment from a movie.
Friday, January 9, 2009
A must-read for all of us who love teachers
What's Wrong With Teachers?
By Tamim Ansary
The Chinese philosopher Confucius was known by many titles but his proudest honorific was "great teacher." In fact, over the centuries, teachers have been revered figures in many cultures and countries.
I thought about this the other day when I ran across an online rant about teachers seeking more money in some school district somewhere. "FACT," this ranter wrote. "LAZY TEACHERS JUST WANT A THREE DAY WEEKEND! Just say NO to them, they are already OVERPAID and UNDERWORKED, and the public needs to remind them who they work for ..."
Unfortunately, this fellow is not alone. A few years ago, when I wrote a column suggesting that teachers were underpaid, I got a flood of responses from readers. Some agreed with me, but they were mostly teachers. Others -- perhaps half -- not only disagreed but expressed quite a surprising hostility toward teachers. In essence, they said teachers had some nerve expecting to be paid like engineers when their work was more like filing and babysitting.
Growing disrespect
I was aware, of course, that teachers have long been under attack. In 1979, Pink Floyd recorded an immensely popular song that featured a boot-stomping chorus of children chanting, "We don't need no education! We don't need no thought control!" interrupted by the singer shouting, "Teacher! Leave them kids alone!"
When I first heard this song, my mother was an elementary school teacher in the last years of her career, and I was acutely aware of how she struggled every day to stay upright under the blows and buffeting she received from tyrannical bureaucrats, clamorous parents and unruly children. What made her struggle all the more grinding was the growing disrespect she could sense for her profession in the society at large.
Never Stop Learning
• Considering grad school?
• Find a tutor for your child
• Offer: Train for a new career
One such current took a seminal turn in 1978, when California passed a ballot measure known as Proposition 13. With that initiative, the state slashed its property taxes by one-third. Within five years, 37 other states had enacted similar legislation, and within a decade the prairie fire of tax revolt had spread to every corner of the nation.
But property taxes had been the primary source of school funding; that has been an American tradition. When those revenues shrank, something had to give. No one wanted to cut necessary programs, so budget slashers looked for unnecessary ones. The pressure they were working under, however, predisposed them to see more and more programs as unnecessary, as "frills." They had to. Summer school classes vanished, arts programs dropped away, school libraries were closed and many extracurricular activities, such as music clubs and even sports, which had once softened the core programs of basic skills training, were eliminated.
This sparser education gave students less to look forward to at school and less fodder, therefore, for fond memories later. When they became adults, these students were apt to remember school as bitter medicine: Good for you at best, but nothing to look back on with nostalgia, any more than one looks back nostalgically to root canal work, though one might appreciate still having teeth. This feeling surely infects, at least subliminally, public sentiment toward teachers.
The tax revolt, however, was just one current. Coincidentally, in the years leading up to Proposition 13, school reformers were developing a set of ideas that ended up fitting in neatly with the coming funding crisis. They proposed to improve schools with measures that not only would cost no money but actually depended on spending less. In brief, they proposed to replace funding-driven solutions with punishment-based ones. The old view, in place since the 1930s, had held that the key to good education at the K-12 level was to research how kids learn and then fund activities that promoted learning, no matter what the cost. The new reformers by contrast recommended that we as a society decide what kids should learn and then punish those who failed to learn it, ultimately by withholding funds from schools and teachers.
College Resources
• 2009 college rankings
• Kick off your college search here!
• Parent resources
Someone to blame
The new approach failed to deliver the desired results, and this has had consequences. It's true that today some observers see progress, but others see none. Both opinions probably reflect political agendas, and neither rests on indisputable evidence, which leaves the public free to believe, as it does believe, that America's educational system is in crisis. And if there is a crisis, someone must be to blame.
But who is to blame? Potential targets abound, of course: bureaucrats, educrats, the left, the right, the spineless middle, "kids today," funding cuts, throwing-money-at-the-problem, society at large -- each of these is someone's favorite scapegoat. Teachers, however, hold pride of place as potential blamees: They're the hardest targets to miss.
Public school teachers are all the more vulnerable to blame because of another current in that perfect storm of social forces I mentioned above. Throughout the 19th century, when few people went to school beyond eighth grade, teachers were almost universally women; society regarded them as hobbyists working for "pin money" to supplement their husband's incomes, or they were marking time while waiting to get married. Since they supposedly weren't supporting families or even themselves, they didn't have to earn much and they weren't paid much. Things changed, deepened and diversified in the 20th century, but it wasn't until the late 1960s that the teaching profession became unionized. After that, teachers' salaries and benefits improved at a pace exceeding the national average for a period. Teachers never reached parity with high-end professions such as medicine and law; even so, by the 1980s, compared to most workers, they enjoyed enviable benefits including job security, health plans, pensions and summer vacations.
The trouble was, they were flowing against the tide. Teachers were developing dynamic, politically influential unions just as union strength in general was fading: The bulk of the old industrial unions lost ground as manufacturing moved overseas. Many workers, unionized or not, were losing benefits just when teachers were gaining theirs. In the 1980s, private companies began scaling back health plans. Employers cut down on pension contributions. Economic changes eroded job security. Technological changes forced many workers to contemplate not just changing jobs but careers. These trends, which continue to this day, cannot help but feed resentment toward teachers. (It's those summer vacations people seem to find most galling.)
But there's more
When industrial unions struggled for higher wages, they were going up against the owners of specific private businesses. People outside those companies had no stake in the struggle and no personal reason to care which side won or who got how much of the company's profits.
Teachers, by contrast, get their money from taxpayers. When they seek a raise, they seek it from "us," not "them." Teachers and parents may have a natural confluence of interests, but teachers and taxpayers have an inherently adversarial relationship. For a taxpayer, the question is never simply, "Do teachers deserve more money," but "Do teachers deserve more money from me?" Anyone who feels a reluctance to say yes is predisposed to assign a lower value to teachers' work and consider it easy. And indeed, when people reacted to my column about teachers being under- or over-paid, their opinion correlated pretty precisely with whether they saw teaching as difficult and sophisticated or as a rote, near-clerical job that anyone could do.
Want More Tamim?
Read other columns by Tamim Ansary.And now, to complete the perfect storm: School reform based on standards, testing and accountability, the movement born in the 1970s and still going strong, tends to reduce teachers' decision-making powers and their creative role in the educational process. It's the accidental but inevitable by-product of a reform project that seeks to systematize education by establishing exact, detailed curriculum objectives, mandating how these are to be taught, testing to see if they have been learned and dispensing funds according to test scores. This approach tends to reduce teachers to mere conduits between curriculum development specialists and kids, between kids and testing experts, between tests and funding agencies. Their job can be codified into a function. This prevents the worst teachers from wreaking damage but prevents the best teachers from soaring. The metamorphosis in the teacher's role helps to validate limiting their earnings but also reinforces whatever disregard the public may already feel toward teachers.
Best and brightest
Lee Iacocca once said, "In a truly rational society, the best of us would be teachers, and the rest would have to settle for something less." Although this is clearly not how it works now -- people whose grades and SAT scores give them broad options tend to favor more lucrative professions -- some extremely gifted people do still go into teaching, simply because they feel a calling. It's the same reason some people become artists. But if the concept of "Great Teacher" doesn't exist in the public imagination, what will draw the best and brightest into this career?
In a 1969 survey, 75 percent of parents said they would be proud to see their children grow up to be public school teachers. By 1982, that number had dropped to 46 percent. I haven't seen more recent surveys, but I would bet money it's dropped further still. If the best steer away from teaching, teaching will justifiably strike the public as a lower-grade profession: It's a vicious cycle built on a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Many people feel that bad teachers should suffer appropriate consequences. They're frustrated that our current system makes it hard to demote or fire a teacher. I agree. Why should teachers enjoy immunity from the consequences of doing terrible work?
By the same token, however, teachers ought to be able to look forward to reaping appropriate consequences for doing great work, and I’m not talking about money. I'm talking about respect. I'm saying, as a society, let's find our way back to making "teacher" an honorific, so that our greatest teachers will enjoy a prestige equal to that of our greatest artists, generals, orators, inventors and sports heroes. If we do that, I predict we’ll wake up one day and say, "Hey, what ever happened to that 'crisis in the schools' people used to fuss about?"
By Tamim Ansary
The Chinese philosopher Confucius was known by many titles but his proudest honorific was "great teacher." In fact, over the centuries, teachers have been revered figures in many cultures and countries.
I thought about this the other day when I ran across an online rant about teachers seeking more money in some school district somewhere. "FACT," this ranter wrote. "LAZY TEACHERS JUST WANT A THREE DAY WEEKEND! Just say NO to them, they are already OVERPAID and UNDERWORKED, and the public needs to remind them who they work for ..."
Unfortunately, this fellow is not alone. A few years ago, when I wrote a column suggesting that teachers were underpaid, I got a flood of responses from readers. Some agreed with me, but they were mostly teachers. Others -- perhaps half -- not only disagreed but expressed quite a surprising hostility toward teachers. In essence, they said teachers had some nerve expecting to be paid like engineers when their work was more like filing and babysitting.
Growing disrespect
I was aware, of course, that teachers have long been under attack. In 1979, Pink Floyd recorded an immensely popular song that featured a boot-stomping chorus of children chanting, "We don't need no education! We don't need no thought control!" interrupted by the singer shouting, "Teacher! Leave them kids alone!"
When I first heard this song, my mother was an elementary school teacher in the last years of her career, and I was acutely aware of how she struggled every day to stay upright under the blows and buffeting she received from tyrannical bureaucrats, clamorous parents and unruly children. What made her struggle all the more grinding was the growing disrespect she could sense for her profession in the society at large.
Never Stop Learning
• Considering grad school?
• Find a tutor for your child
• Offer: Train for a new career
One such current took a seminal turn in 1978, when California passed a ballot measure known as Proposition 13. With that initiative, the state slashed its property taxes by one-third. Within five years, 37 other states had enacted similar legislation, and within a decade the prairie fire of tax revolt had spread to every corner of the nation.
But property taxes had been the primary source of school funding; that has been an American tradition. When those revenues shrank, something had to give. No one wanted to cut necessary programs, so budget slashers looked for unnecessary ones. The pressure they were working under, however, predisposed them to see more and more programs as unnecessary, as "frills." They had to. Summer school classes vanished, arts programs dropped away, school libraries were closed and many extracurricular activities, such as music clubs and even sports, which had once softened the core programs of basic skills training, were eliminated.
This sparser education gave students less to look forward to at school and less fodder, therefore, for fond memories later. When they became adults, these students were apt to remember school as bitter medicine: Good for you at best, but nothing to look back on with nostalgia, any more than one looks back nostalgically to root canal work, though one might appreciate still having teeth. This feeling surely infects, at least subliminally, public sentiment toward teachers.
The tax revolt, however, was just one current. Coincidentally, in the years leading up to Proposition 13, school reformers were developing a set of ideas that ended up fitting in neatly with the coming funding crisis. They proposed to improve schools with measures that not only would cost no money but actually depended on spending less. In brief, they proposed to replace funding-driven solutions with punishment-based ones. The old view, in place since the 1930s, had held that the key to good education at the K-12 level was to research how kids learn and then fund activities that promoted learning, no matter what the cost. The new reformers by contrast recommended that we as a society decide what kids should learn and then punish those who failed to learn it, ultimately by withholding funds from schools and teachers.
College Resources
• 2009 college rankings
• Kick off your college search here!
• Parent resources
Someone to blame
The new approach failed to deliver the desired results, and this has had consequences. It's true that today some observers see progress, but others see none. Both opinions probably reflect political agendas, and neither rests on indisputable evidence, which leaves the public free to believe, as it does believe, that America's educational system is in crisis. And if there is a crisis, someone must be to blame.
But who is to blame? Potential targets abound, of course: bureaucrats, educrats, the left, the right, the spineless middle, "kids today," funding cuts, throwing-money-at-the-problem, society at large -- each of these is someone's favorite scapegoat. Teachers, however, hold pride of place as potential blamees: They're the hardest targets to miss.
Public school teachers are all the more vulnerable to blame because of another current in that perfect storm of social forces I mentioned above. Throughout the 19th century, when few people went to school beyond eighth grade, teachers were almost universally women; society regarded them as hobbyists working for "pin money" to supplement their husband's incomes, or they were marking time while waiting to get married. Since they supposedly weren't supporting families or even themselves, they didn't have to earn much and they weren't paid much. Things changed, deepened and diversified in the 20th century, but it wasn't until the late 1960s that the teaching profession became unionized. After that, teachers' salaries and benefits improved at a pace exceeding the national average for a period. Teachers never reached parity with high-end professions such as medicine and law; even so, by the 1980s, compared to most workers, they enjoyed enviable benefits including job security, health plans, pensions and summer vacations.
The trouble was, they were flowing against the tide. Teachers were developing dynamic, politically influential unions just as union strength in general was fading: The bulk of the old industrial unions lost ground as manufacturing moved overseas. Many workers, unionized or not, were losing benefits just when teachers were gaining theirs. In the 1980s, private companies began scaling back health plans. Employers cut down on pension contributions. Economic changes eroded job security. Technological changes forced many workers to contemplate not just changing jobs but careers. These trends, which continue to this day, cannot help but feed resentment toward teachers. (It's those summer vacations people seem to find most galling.)
But there's more
When industrial unions struggled for higher wages, they were going up against the owners of specific private businesses. People outside those companies had no stake in the struggle and no personal reason to care which side won or who got how much of the company's profits.
Teachers, by contrast, get their money from taxpayers. When they seek a raise, they seek it from "us," not "them." Teachers and parents may have a natural confluence of interests, but teachers and taxpayers have an inherently adversarial relationship. For a taxpayer, the question is never simply, "Do teachers deserve more money," but "Do teachers deserve more money from me?" Anyone who feels a reluctance to say yes is predisposed to assign a lower value to teachers' work and consider it easy. And indeed, when people reacted to my column about teachers being under- or over-paid, their opinion correlated pretty precisely with whether they saw teaching as difficult and sophisticated or as a rote, near-clerical job that anyone could do.
Want More Tamim?
Read other columns by Tamim Ansary.And now, to complete the perfect storm: School reform based on standards, testing and accountability, the movement born in the 1970s and still going strong, tends to reduce teachers' decision-making powers and their creative role in the educational process. It's the accidental but inevitable by-product of a reform project that seeks to systematize education by establishing exact, detailed curriculum objectives, mandating how these are to be taught, testing to see if they have been learned and dispensing funds according to test scores. This approach tends to reduce teachers to mere conduits between curriculum development specialists and kids, between kids and testing experts, between tests and funding agencies. Their job can be codified into a function. This prevents the worst teachers from wreaking damage but prevents the best teachers from soaring. The metamorphosis in the teacher's role helps to validate limiting their earnings but also reinforces whatever disregard the public may already feel toward teachers.
Best and brightest
Lee Iacocca once said, "In a truly rational society, the best of us would be teachers, and the rest would have to settle for something less." Although this is clearly not how it works now -- people whose grades and SAT scores give them broad options tend to favor more lucrative professions -- some extremely gifted people do still go into teaching, simply because they feel a calling. It's the same reason some people become artists. But if the concept of "Great Teacher" doesn't exist in the public imagination, what will draw the best and brightest into this career?
In a 1969 survey, 75 percent of parents said they would be proud to see their children grow up to be public school teachers. By 1982, that number had dropped to 46 percent. I haven't seen more recent surveys, but I would bet money it's dropped further still. If the best steer away from teaching, teaching will justifiably strike the public as a lower-grade profession: It's a vicious cycle built on a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Many people feel that bad teachers should suffer appropriate consequences. They're frustrated that our current system makes it hard to demote or fire a teacher. I agree. Why should teachers enjoy immunity from the consequences of doing terrible work?
By the same token, however, teachers ought to be able to look forward to reaping appropriate consequences for doing great work, and I’m not talking about money. I'm talking about respect. I'm saying, as a society, let's find our way back to making "teacher" an honorific, so that our greatest teachers will enjoy a prestige equal to that of our greatest artists, generals, orators, inventors and sports heroes. If we do that, I predict we’ll wake up one day and say, "Hey, what ever happened to that 'crisis in the schools' people used to fuss about?"
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Goodbye to the Holidays
I like putting up the Christmas Decorations. The front room gets all sparkly and glows at night, the presents look so cheerful, and the Christmas music plays in the evening. It’s cozy and warm.
At the same time, I enjoy putting up the Christmas decorations. I can put everything in its place, I can remove clutter, and everything goes back to normal. My house looks like it does all the time, and I start to get hopeful for the changing of the seasons, and warmer weather, and longer days.
By the time that Christmas is over, I guess I’m over Christmas.
At the same time, I enjoy putting up the Christmas decorations. I can put everything in its place, I can remove clutter, and everything goes back to normal. My house looks like it does all the time, and I start to get hopeful for the changing of the seasons, and warmer weather, and longer days.
By the time that Christmas is over, I guess I’m over Christmas.
Monday, January 5, 2009
In review
It’s been a rough ending to the year 2008 around here. Along with my awesome stint with pneumonia, including a great trip to the hospital (did you know chest x-rays can cost up to $600? I sure didn’t!), my old job broke up with me. That’s right, I got laid off. In fact, they told me the same day I went to the emergency room which really just shows poor planning on everybody’s part, I think.
Having never been fired or laid off before, this whole experience was pretty new to me. And because I really liked the job I had, and the people I worked with, it did, in fact, feel like I had been broken up with. I actually cried. More than once.
I was jobless for the whole month of December which was both nerve-racking (shopping with no prospects in mind=cheap but really thoughtful gifts), and nice, because I missed driving in at least 3 or 4 days of bad weather, and I baked cookies and other Christmas treats. I caught up on some TV such as The View (ugh), Days (ugh), and Oprah (ugh-ugh). I wrapped presents, mailed out Christmas Cards and slept a lot. Mostly to get over Pneumonia, but also just because I could. I was very well rested.
I kind of forget how much I hate to search for jobs and begin a new job until I have to do it again. I must have mailed and emailed my resume out to at least a hundred different places and checked Careerbuilder and Craigslist everyday for new postings. I wrote cover letters that were great, and cover letters that were bs.
And I sat around and waited for somebody to call.
Somebody called and I started a new job last week. Woot.
At least my old job had the balls to break up with me face-to-face. I’ve had boyfriends that couldn’t even do that.
Having never been fired or laid off before, this whole experience was pretty new to me. And because I really liked the job I had, and the people I worked with, it did, in fact, feel like I had been broken up with. I actually cried. More than once.
I was jobless for the whole month of December which was both nerve-racking (shopping with no prospects in mind=cheap but really thoughtful gifts), and nice, because I missed driving in at least 3 or 4 days of bad weather, and I baked cookies and other Christmas treats. I caught up on some TV such as The View (ugh), Days (ugh), and Oprah (ugh-ugh). I wrapped presents, mailed out Christmas Cards and slept a lot. Mostly to get over Pneumonia, but also just because I could. I was very well rested.
I kind of forget how much I hate to search for jobs and begin a new job until I have to do it again. I must have mailed and emailed my resume out to at least a hundred different places and checked Careerbuilder and Craigslist everyday for new postings. I wrote cover letters that were great, and cover letters that were bs.
And I sat around and waited for somebody to call.
Somebody called and I started a new job last week. Woot.
At least my old job had the balls to break up with me face-to-face. I’ve had boyfriends that couldn’t even do that.
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