EleCivil

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/c0KYU2j0TM4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> I just stayed up all night reading this book. This TEDTalk is a pretty good summary. Love it.

True story: Student 1: "Mr. Civil, Student 2 just tried to bite me!" EC: (Turns and glares at Student 2) "I knew it!" Student 2: "What?" EC: "You're a vampire! I've been saying it for years, but does anyone ever listen to crazy old Mr. Civil? No. Well, now they'll see that crazy old Mr. Civil isn't really all that old. I mean, crazy." (Rolls up a newspaper into a cone.) Student 1: "What are you doing?" EC: "What must be done. Hold still, Student 2, you're going to feel a slight stakey sensation." Student 2: "I'm not a vampire!" EC: "That's exactly what a vampire would say." Student 1: "That's paper. The stake has to be made of wood." EC: "Well, paper is made from wood pulp...which is made out of wood. I'm sure the transitive property applies to vampire slaying." Student 2: "I'm not a vampire!" EC: "...You sure?" Student 2: "YES!" EC: "Oh. Well, then. Stop trying to bite people. Now, where were we? Math? Yeah, let's do some math."

Last year, the food service at my school was miserable. Undercooked chicken, spoiled milk, and sometimes even bread-and-water were on the menu. Now, I'm in a high-poverty area, so the kids all get breakfast and lunch free of charge...but for a lot of them, those were the ONLY meals they got. "If you don't like it, pack a lunch" was not an option. My 5th graders formed a student union, passed around a petition, and staged a boycot. There MAY have been certain...faculty advisors...pulling the strings, but I won't confirm that. Now the food is pretty decent. On par with other school lunches, at least. Change can happen.

There's an interesting documentary about the MPAA ratings board called This Film Is Not Yet Rated. It's available for streaming on Netflix. It reveals how completely subjective the ratings process is, and how impossible it is to get ratings overturned - the ratings board won't give straight answers on what needs to be cut in order to drop a rating, or they will give a list of offending scenes/dialogue, and once it has been edited, they give a different list. Very interesting watch. My school's policy is to not show anything rated higher than PG, so even if it's dropped to PG-13, we're out of luck. Granted, most of us know how to lock our doors and do what we need to do in our classrooms...but we are a non-union school, so we know we're taking a huge risk every time - one complaint and we're gone.

Hugo is based on the children's book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" - a great book for reluctant readers. It's a very thick-looking book, but there are pages and pages at a time that are purely illustrated, with no text. It's an interesting combination of visual storytelling and a traditional novel. Almost all of the physical descriptions are shown in (very detailed) images rather than text. If you know some reluctant readers, this will catch their attention and instill some reading confidence. The kids I hand this one to usually carry it around for a while after they've read it, just to say "Hey, look at the size of this book I read. Yeah, I'm that awesome." (And then you can tell that they're my students, because they judge awesomeness by the size of the book in one's hand. Heh.)

Poll: Santorum Comes From Behind in Alabama Three-Way No new information, I just find the title of that article very amusing.

It's a shot of my city's skyline, with lyrics from one of my favorite songs, "Bike Rides and High Fives" by Rosa. I thought it matched well with the name banner I made for my author's page on Codey's World, which is the same skyline with the city's old railroad map juxtaposed. Call it "urban wanderlust" meets "nostalgiac resilliance." Heh.

Haha, the Saluki reminds me of Camy's emu avatar.

Indeed - if you wanted to be technical, I would consider myself an agnostic atheist, in that I do not believe it is possible to know whether there is a God, and I currently do not believe in one. (It is equally valid to be an agnostic theist - admitting that there is no way to prove the existance of a God, but believing in one anyway.) But most people don't understand that, so when asked, I just say "skeptic" because it's shorter. And if they don't understand THAT, I tell them I'm a Discordian.

Des - I love that Alan Watts quote. He and Carl Sagan are some of my biggest influences when it comes to my views on religion.

Silence is a virtue - when you're talking, you can't listen. When you can't listen, you can't learn. In general, I try to remind myself that there is something I can learn from every person I meet, provided I take the time to do so. As a wise man once said, "Never miss a good opportunity to shut up."

Eh...not really. Well, not to me. I see no practical difference between my shoulder, my butt, and my crotch - it's all anatomically pretty similar. Skin, nerves, bones, etc. Your right to place your palms ends where my flesh begins. Quoted for truth. Agreed. Words are words and touching is touching. I only bring this up because I don't like to be touched even on the best of days. Handshakes make me nervous, and putting your hand on my shoulder without warning can lead to me swinging and busting you in the jaw purely on instinct. I don't even let close friends or family hug me except on special occasions, when I'll grin and bear it for their sakes. Point being, if you don't know who you're dealing with, keep your hands away from them. Physical contact is aggression, and it can trigger a fear response that you might not like.

Er, yes. More than a few times. I'd say I've seen it a "handful" of times, but the pun alarm would go off. ...and then I'd be taken to the Punitentiary .

Check out this article - http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html It's all about how Star Trek replicator technology would effect the economy. IThe main thrust is how in a post-scarcity world, B.S. becomes the most valuable commodity - "Oh, you're wearing REPLICATOR shoes? Mine were hand-stitched by a human artisan...very expensive, you know," or "We only sell authentic tree-grown apples - much more Earthy and satisfying than replicated apples! Totally worth paying for!" You'll probably like the article's discussion on the internet's effect on book publishing and libraries - how the internet and ebooks are basically replicator technology, and how publishers are responding to post-scarcity data and information.

This might be a long one. I'm going to preface this by saying that this is all the opinion of EleCivil, the eccentric weirdo whose advice you probably should not heed for any reason. It in no way represents the views of the site admins, etc. etc. legal stuff. I recently got an email from someone telling me that they enjoyed my short story, Fistfights with Flashlights - this was a short story that I wrote while in the middle of Leaves and Lunatics, when I was about 18 years old. To be honest, I remember almost nothing about it. It's about 90% autobiography, 10% fictionalized. I wrote it in one quick burst and then submitted it without going back to edit or even re-read it once. I then deleted the file and have never gone back to look at it again. As such, I can't speak for the quality - it was pretty much just an hour of catharsis. I haven't thought about the story in a LONG time, but this email brought it to mind, and I wanted to reflect a bit. One of the major themes of this short was religion, and how it can mess with one's perceptions of the world. Specifically, it was about how, when I was a kid, I believed in things like demons, possession, and the apocalypse, and how that screwed with my head to the point where I was deathly afraid of the dark, carrying a flashlight with me at all times to scare away any demons that might try to possess me. I used to read the book of Revelations and compare it to current events, searching for signs of the coming rapture and subsequent end of the world, which I was eagerly looking forward to. Yes, I was six years old and my main hobbies were Eschatology and awaiting the end of the world. But the part that I wouldn't - couldn't - admit to anyone was that I was a skeptic when it came to the existence of God. I felt it, but couldn't even admit it to myself. I didn't think God was real. I didn't think that he sent his son to die for me, and in fact I found the idea of parents sending their children to die for them to be terrifying - if God, the source of all morality, sent his son to be tortured and killed by the bad guys, would my parents do the same to me? Now, there's some cognitive dissonance there - I fully believed that Satan and his demons existed and were out to get me, but I was skeptical about the existence of a God that wanted to save me - but come on, I was six. And let's face it - it's easier to believe in perfect evil than perfect good. You can SEE perfect evil every day. Perfect good is something far rarer, and there wasn't a lot of it going on around me. So to summarize my childhood beliefs: There is a devil who wants to get me. There are demons who work for him who are roaming the Earth looking for me. The world is going to end any day now. God can save me, as long as I believe in him. I believe in God a little less every day. Therefore, my only hope is that the world ends or that I die soon, while I still sort of believe in God, so that he won't condemn me to an eternity of torture for not believing in him all the way. This is what was running through my brain every day, every night. I couldn't turn it off - everything reminded me of it. And keep in mind, this is all before I started thinking that maybe I was gay, and even MORE of an abomination in the eyes of the only entity that could save me. Holy shit, no wonder I attempted suicide as a child. I still called myself a Christian and told myself that I believed until I was about 17. I wrote Fistfights with Flashlights when I was just starting to admit to myself that I was really an atheist, and that WANTING to believe in something can't make you start believing in it. Making that admission - giving myself permission to admit that I didn't believe in the religion of my parents - was the biggest relief I have ever felt in my life. Why? Because if I didn't believe in God, I didn't need to believe in any of the things that scared me - the devil, demons, hell, and the apocalypse - I didn't have to spend my life waiting for death. I didn't have to seek to end myself to please a God that could never be pleased with me. (This is a theme I revisited in the later chapters of Laika.) Back to the reader response - the writer of this email wrote that he assumed I was a non-believer, and identified himself as an atheist. This gave me pause - I haven't sat down to really consider my religious beliefs in quite some time. I try to make it a habit to "re-draw my map" - attack my own philosophical and intellectual views with logic to see if they hold up, or if they need to be reconsidered...but I haven't done that with religion in a long time. So, what's the best way to sort out one's beliefs? Stream-of-consciousness writing! Hence, this blog post. I suppose I am an atheist, in the dictionary definition - I do not believe in any gods, and do not follow any religions. But at the same time, I don't fit in with the "New Atheist" movement that's been gaining traction, lately. I've read the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins, but I don't really agree with their view that, as Hitchens wrote, "Religion poisons everything." If you read my above experience of being driven to self-hatred and suicide by religion, you might be thinking "What the hell, EleCivil?" but hold on. I don't think religion makes a big difference one way or another in day-to-day life. I tend to see human goodness on a whole as a bell-curve distribution - about 5% of us are completely evil psychopaths, 5% of us are completely good-natured saints, and the other 90% are somewhere in between. And I believe that there are religious people and non-religious people in every segment of that progression. The religious guy who gives half his income to charity and goes on "missions" to distribute medical supplies in disaster zones? If he wasn't religious, he'd probably be doing the same thing, but in the name of "humanism" or "personal conscience." The atheist who is found with a pile of torsos in his basement, who claims he went on a killing spree "just for kicks"? If he were religious, he'd be doing the same thing, but instead claiming that he killed them in "a glorious cleansing for the Lord!" The religious guy who hates gays because "the bible says it's wrong"? If he were an atheist, he'd still hate gays; he'd just say he hates them "'cause it's gross!" I don't think religion (or lack thereof) can turn people "good" or "evil" or "open-minded" or "bigoted". I don't think it has that much power. I think we are drawn to our beliefs and come to define them by our innate qualities, not the other way around. There's a saying that if you ask ten preachers to interpret the bible, you'll get twenty different interpretations. Thanks to a blend of archaic language and confirmation bias, we will always see what we want to see in religion. If you read the holy text of your religion and see a call to help your fellow man and live a life of service, then you were probably going to live such a life even if you had never seen the text. Likewise, if you read the holy texts and see a list of people you should dislike, you were already looking for a reason to dislike them. Or, to put it more simply - Douchebags are gonna be douchebags. Amen.

Hm. The article starts with "He made an unwanted sexual advance," which to me implies talking. It later states "He grabbed the other man's crotch." TALKING is completely different from TOUCHING. Now, murder is out of the question, of course, but whether you're gay, straight, bi, asexual, or anything in between...if you put your hand on my balls without permission, you are foritting your right to keep that hand in working condition. I'm not going to play around with "Hey, I appreciate the attention, but..." Granted, I'll give you a good, clear warning along the lines of "Keep your hands to yourself or I'm going to leave you crying in a pool of blood"...the first time. Dislocating their shoulder or snapping their wrist is a legitimate response if they continue. No one has the right to touch you, and you do not have to react politely to sexual assault. I've heard arguments along the lines of "Hey man, you should be flattered! What's wrong, are you closeted or something?" Switch up the genders, and see if that still applies. Picture a sleezy straight dude in a bar grabbing at a woman's chest. She pulls out a can of mace and lets him have it. Nobody sees a situation like that and says "Man, what's her problem? She should be FLATTERED that the dude wanted to drunkenly paw at her. What is she, a lesbian?" That kind of blame-the-victim bull doesn't fly in heterosexual situations - why should we tolerate it within the GLBT community? (Don't get the wrong idea - I'm not making any claims about THIS case in particular. I don't know the details about what really happened - the crotch-grabbing may well have been a lie to gain jury sympathy, and even if it wasn't, you can't round up a crew to go hunt down and murder people for molesting you after the fact.)

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/E4cMHnWIR9k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Des, check this out: <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/sMOVrVS75cM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> I think you'll dig it. It's one of his more "Zen" poems/raps. --- Back on the topic of using rap in the classroom - it's cool, as long as it isn't forced and gimmicky. This guy seems to be having fun with it, throwing his energy behind it, and the kids are responding to that energy. Ron Clark does similar things at Ron Clark Academy with stellar results. A couple years ago, our administration bought a pre-packaged "math rap" program - professionally produced tracks that the kids rapped along with, along with work books with things like "Find the radius of the 24-inch rim" and "Count the diamonds on the bling" and other such uninspired BS. It failed miserably. The teachers hated it, because all teachers hate being told to use specific methods that don't match with their own style (It's like if I told a writer that he HAD to write in the first person, because I used it and it worked for me). The kids hated it because they saw it as pandering at best and offensive at worst. The people who put together this program clearly did not "get" rap; they were using it to make money from schools desperate to close the "racial performance gap" (which is another topic to itself - I could write for hours about that one). Once, one of our more astute students left that class to come talk to me (I am sometimes assigned as a mentor for kids who get in trouble all the time, usually for being too clever for their own good - they have standing passes to come find me when they're upset). He said "You know why I hate that class? It's a white woman acting like a black rapper stereotype to be funny, or ironic, or something. It's a minstrel show. If she really liked hip-hop, or knew anything about the culture, it could be cool, but this... It's like they looked at us and said 'These kids are too ghetto to just learn math. Let's teach them rap music instead. That's all they can understand." (I miss that kid - we used to play chess during lunch. He graduated last year.)

Ouch. Some low-blows in this topic. I'll just leave these here: <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/b1S7qTsW5SY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/2dmqqUGFCzg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Rap is much like all other forms of music: the vast majority is unlistenable crap, some of it is decent, and if you're willing to dig, you'll find a precious few moments of brilliance.

Yes! Something I love about the story is the way it handles the subject of gifted children. The way Ender, his siblings, and his Battle School classmates (especially in the Shadow books) are looked at by their parents, the state, their teachers, and each other all rings very true. (SPOILERS AHEAD) One of the most difficult things to remember when dealing with gifted children is that they are intellectually able to understand concepts that they are not emotionally ready to handle - teachers of gifted children are trained to watch for signs of depression, suicide, stress, and mental breakdowns. Ender's "voice" in this story is spot-on - he knows how he's looked at, how he's treated, and what people are expecting of him. He knows that he's being abused by the system in a very deliberate, calculated way to achieve certain results, but he also knows that he's in no position to stop it. Concepts like moral relativity, duty, and the use of people as tools by the state are within his understanding, but when faced with the enormity of the situation, he still feels helpless to change his position in the world. He knows that the world is counting on him, and the stress of trying to live up to it breaks him quite thoroughly. For a lot of gifted students, this sort of feeling is familiar - they're often told "You're too smart to __________," or "I'd expect better from you, because you're _______." They're told by the world that they were given a gift (that they never asked for), and now owe the world something in return. Or even worse, the feeling that they are not being asked, but simply being used by teachers, parents, or "the system" in general. The basic story of Ender's Game - a genius gets recruited by the military, trained/brainwashed, and turned into a weapon - could be told using teenage or adult characters just as easily, but by using children, Card really addresses the mental stress of being labeled a prodigy at a young age. I think he's at his best when writing along this theme - Ender's Shadow and the Shadow sequels continue along that line more so than the rest of the Ender series, and I think they're stronger for it. (Although in the Shadow books, the realism is lessened quite a bit, because Card writes the main character as a superhero-level genius rather than just a gifted child - Ender is as smart as the adults around him, while Bean is smarter than anyone in the history of humanity. The classmates from Battle School get much more development, though, and the way they are treated by the governments post-war plays along the theme of being simultaneously used as a tool, feared as a weapon, and counted upon as a savior.)

Awesome. Also, here's rollercoaster chess: There's a whole page of it here: http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/

Harrison Ford as Graff sounds good. I really hope they do this right. This is the director that brought us X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which worries me. Man, I love that book. I'm currently reading it aloud to my after school tutoring group. And I agree with Pecman - Card's books on writing (Characters and Viewpoint, How to Write Sci-Fi and Fantasy) are great. Card's a jackass, but that doesn't make his work (well, SOME of his work) any less beautiful. I think it's possible to admire the art and not the artist.

Hahaha, true. Oh, Garth Ennis. You with your interesting characters and storytelling buried under ten tons of intestines and bodily fluids.

As a teacher whose job description has, in the past, included recess duty, I've been hit with every piece of playground equipment imaginable. Even the occasional errant shoe. I've climbed trees and jumped fences to retrieve said equipment (and shoes). I've torn dress clothes in rough games of tag. I've had one kid distract me by asking me about books while another kid snuck up behind me and climbed up my back like I was a jungle gym. I've seen it all, done it all, and have written it all on 3x5 index cards for quick reference. And I would never in a million years consider banning balls from recess. The other day, one of our school buses broke down, leaving some kids stranded at the school. Another teacher and I quickly organized a football game on the back parking lot (we don't have a field or a playground or anything - just concrete), with the two of us on opposite teams. We played our hearts out, regardless of age or ability. It was a chance for the kids to work together as teams and learn good sportsmanship, as well as an opportunity to see their teachers in a different light (gasp - we took off our neckties!). This kind of activity is important. Especially in a time when most schools are cutting gym and recess to cram in more test-prep so that they can be in compliance with NCLB. I'm of the opinion that if you're so concerned about bumps and scrapes that you take away a kid's balls...you should probably be more concerned about your own. They seem to have come up missing.