The Real Dog and Pony Show

Before I get this here missive going full-steam ahead, I want to issue a disclaimer before I unwittingly offend anyone on staff who happens to bring a four-legged furry friend to school on a consistent or inconsistent basis. The subject of this particular entry is not the Daisys, the Moccos, the Marges, the Lexys, or the Lacys of the La Entrada world. The above-mentioned title and following essay are not in ANY WAY about those dogs; I actually like those little critters. What follows is intended to be about the other furry, four-legged creatures that roam about campus NOT between the hours of 8 am and 3 pm.

So, are my intentions clear here, or what? Good. Now, read on.

For as long as I’ve been alive, I have been allergic to dogs (and cats and horses; frankly any animal with fur is on my allergy list). Whenever I am exposed to a dog in a confined space I get a serious asthma attack within about ten minutes of initial contact. In the past, my only antidote to the attack was to leave the area where the dog was located and within an hour or so, my breathing would return to normal. Why not use an inhaler, you ask? Well, for whatever reason, when I was a kid and first found out about my problem, my doctor never prescribed one and so I’ve learned to just deal with the situation as I have described it above. With the commercial availability of Claritin a few years ago came major relief for me. I could actually spend hours at a time in the presence of a dog and not suffer much at all. Of course, I would be a little congested when the pill wore off, but overall. things were looking up for me.

Now that you know all about my history with animal-related asthma, I just want to point out that while I have nothing against dogs, I could just as easily spend my life avoiding them and be a-okay. In fact, when I am out in public, and this I swear happens to me every time, dogs seem to be able to sense my allergies and subsequent avoidance of them, and they flock to me like I am wearing a suit made out of marinated steaks.

This little routine even happens to me when I am at school on the weekends, nights, and during the summer. If you’ve ever been on campus during school hours, you will notice that we are a relatively dog-friendly campus. But things are just ridiculous on the weekends and at night during the school year. There are easily 15 to 20 dogs a day roaming around this place, with and without their owner nearby. Just a few weeks ago, when I first started working for the year in my classroom, around 5 pm-ish, this dog ran right up to my classroom and started barking at me. This woman, I assume she was the owner, who was up the hall, asked me if I was a teacher, explained to me that the dog is just territorial and was guarding it’s turf. Well, lady, I hate to tell you, but this is actually MY turf, thank you very much.

There is also this GIGANTIC brown poodle that gallops around this place like a dinosaur did during the jurassic period. I swear this “horsie dog” (my pet name for this thing) literally gallops across the blacktop and has a not-so-nice temperament when relating to other dogs.

But the best was a few years ago when I was working in my room and I heard the familar sounds of the jingle jangle of dogs roaming through the halls and for whatever reason I got up out of my chair and walked to my classroom door just in time to see a dog drinking from our school water faucet that the owner was holding in the on position for the dog. I mean, doesn’t the vision of a dog lapping water from a water fountain seem appetizing to you as a thirsty, water drinking human? Incredulously, I stood there, loudly cleared my throat to get her attention, and I watched as the embarrased pet owner quickly and quietly left. I couldn’t believe it either.

At least to everyone’s credit who uses this school as their personal doggie park, there aren’t a lot of noticable dog-bombs unpicked-up around campus. But then again, I don’t get out onto the large expanse of green grass we have here all that often, either.

Gotta love the dog and pony show.

Back To School, 2006 Edition

Well, well, well, whadya know. Can you believe that school is in session already? If you’ve been reading my blog so far this past August, you would know that I’ve been working towards this moment for the past three (or so) weeks. But if you are just hopping on for the first time with this particular entry, then hey, I can’t believe that school has already started.

We started yesterday morning and, I have to say, after having taught 10 periods so far this year, that I really do enjoy working with these students. It is day 2 and we’ve already had our first homework assignment and homework quiz. We’ve also heard two lectures about order of operations and exponential notation so far also. Very cool stuff indeed.

And the best part is that it’s Friday and tomorrow is the weekend. It’s funny how weekends don’t mean so much when you aren’t working; except that you get to hang out with your working friends. The ironic thing about this weekend (and pretty much every weekend from now until the end of the school year) is that I will log just as many hours as I did during the week. Oh well, it’s the life of a public school teacher.

Remember how I mentioned earlier that I had already taught ten periods of class this year? Well, the bell signaling the end of my prep period is about to ring and I need to get ready to put the eleventh and twelfth periods in the book as taught classes in about two minutes. Adios.

Life at 24 (Hour Fitness, That Is)

Have you ever been so annoyed at someone, so irritated at the actions of that person, so perturbed with their very being, that you just want to grab them by the sweatshirt sleeves and say, “Dude, what are you thinking? Why are you doing that? Just answer me that.”

Well, if you have ever felt like that, then I have a feeling you might enjoy this MAJOR rant. If the above-described situation seems a little out of context to you, then, wow, can we trade places in life sometime? I’d love to live life free of annoying people and situations like you seem to be doing. Either way, though, on with the rant.

I was at the gym the other day, and yes, it was a 24 Hour Fitness as you may have surmised from the title, and I was going about my usual fitness routine. I had just recently added about a half hour of weight training to my regimen of cardio and crunches during the past three weeks, just to give you a little background of the situation.

About twenty minutes through running on the treadmill, I look up and notice a guy get on the elliptical machine a few rows in front of me wearing the hood on his sweatshirt over his head and a weightbelt around his waist. Mind you, we’re indoors, it’s warm, and he’s getting on a stationary cardio machine with his weightbelt on and a hood over his head. I knew that this was a character to keep my eye on.

Ten minutes or so later, I was midway through my three hundred crunches when I heard the loud and heavy slamming of the weights on a weight machine smashing down on themselves. I turned around and I saw Mr Hooded Sweatshirt and weightbelt strutting around a shoulder press machine. Hmm. Interesting. Three minutes later, I hear the same crash, boom, bang coming from his little corner of the gym. Hmm.

So, when I finished my crunches, I made my way to the chest press machine right next to where he was resting after a set. Then as he finished his last set on that machine with the usual sonic flurry, I realized what he was doing. He was the kind of guy that likes to let go of the weights (the handles more aptly) and likes the sound of them slamming on the rest of the stack of black weights.

Guys like that just burn me up. He obviously needs the attention that the sound of slamming the weights down brings him. I mean, everybody looks to see what happened and there he is, all puffed out and pumped up, looking like he just hoisted a ten ton girder of steel in the air. And the hooded sweatshirt, come on man, don’t even get me started. Yeah, I get it, that you may sweat more, but dude, you look ridiculous wearing a hood inside a building.

But you know, at least you weren’t wearing sunglasses; I’ve seen those guys in the gym, too. With their hooded sweatshirts on and their clacking weights. Talking on the cell phone. Trying to chat up women, who wear makeup to the gym.

Yeah, don’t get me started.

What Have YOU Listened To Today?

For as long as I can remember, I have always really been into music. Being the son of a professional musician certainly makes exposure to music a little easier than being the son of someone who doesn’t know the Beatles from a beetle. I remember being a young little tyke wanting only to watch cartoons on any given weekend morning and having my dad play jazz music for me and I had to count out time for him before I could tune in to Scooby-Doo and the Superfriends.

Well, flash-forward thirty-plus years to today, and I ask you the question: What have YOU listened to today? I spent the entire balance of the day in my classroom (mainly working on my August/September calendar, amongst other things). Rather than toil away in silence, I decided to break out some tapes and cds from home to listen to that I haven’t ever or haven’t listened to lately. I don’t know what I was thinking around 630 am this morning when I made my decisions, but I have to say that I did enjoy the soundtrack to the day.

1. Dread Zeppelin, “Un-Led-Ed”. If you are in the mood for Led Zeppelin songs performed in a reggae style sung by an Elvis impersonator then you have found the perfect tape. I prefer the first side a lot more than the second side but there are classic moments on both. I used to work with a teacher who knew the band and had them perform at her wedding. Good for a laugh or two.
2. Lenny Kravitz, “Are You Gonna Go My Way”. Besides his first album, this is my favorite Lenny tape. I enjoy and sing along to almost every song on this tape, my favorites being “Believe”, “Come On and Love Me”, and “Just Be A Woman”. Mind you, this was before every Lenny Kravitz song sounded the same as the one that came out last time. A good, quality listen.
3. The Very Best of the Coasters. I’ll bet you didn’t see that one coming, huh? My dad used to have a jukbox in our house that was loaded with Coasters (and Platters and Drifters) songs, so I’ve been singing these songs my whole life. This being my first listen to this disc, I discovered the song “I’m a Hog For You” and I must’ve listened to that about five times in a row.
4. Circus of Power, “Vices”. I bought this tape when I was a college student at Davis and I was into hard rock. The singer sounds like Ian Astbury from the Cult and the band is a serious riff machine that churns out some seriously catchy and well-crafted songs. I remember having this tape in my Cutlass Ciera and, being in Davis in the summer, the plastic box started melting and ended up being a bit warped and lopsided. I still have the box (and it’s still warped). I am going to make it my mission to track down the band’s other studio releases when I go to Amoeba and Rasputins and Vinyl Solution in the near future.
5. Ricky Nelson’s Greatest Hits. Another out of left field selection, I really enjoyed this one too. It was so nice to listen to this disc as I colored my calendar; it was extremely soothing and relaxing and easy to listen to. My current, first-time-ever listened to faves were “Travelin’ Man” and “Fools Rush In”.
6. “Hopelessly Devoted To You Volume 6″. This is the second year that I’ve purchased this Sub City/Hopeless Records annual compilation and I couldn’t be happier. Last year I discovered Avenged Sevenfold thanks to Volume 5 and I could say the same about this year, in particular Amber Pacific. Unfortunately I am currently only on the third track of disc one as I am writing this so I can’t pontificate any more about any other bands included at this time. Perhaps next time around.

So, what have YOU listened to today?

You Can’t Relive The Past

Two years ago, I was assigned to be on the Renaissance committee at school. The main function of the comittee was to promote and nurture scholastic and community achievement amongst the students at our school. There are various rewards and perks available to the kids for being recognized by the committee (as a result of their own actions on campus, both scholastically and socially).

My particular function on this committee was to be the public broadcasting unit for the group. I was given the task each month (or so) to create a video that would then be shown to the entire school during the scheduled televised bulletin time.

I decided to use fandango-esque brown paper bag type puppets to tell the stories that tied directly into the character trait of that month. I suppose in future postings, if I figure it out even, I could try to upload the videos I did here, but for now, I am going to post a few pictures that I used in one of my movies.

The trait of the month was community service and I sent my fandango puppet out to the health fair that our school’s PE Department was hosting to get a sense of what was going down in our community and how so many people from a variety of different walks of life got involved.

The two-fold reason for this post today is to see whether I could figure out how to post pictures here and to revisit the memory of making these movies for the past two years. The first year I did this project everything was new and exciting and I knew nothing about anything and I learned what I needed to learn in order to get something decent in at the deadline. Something changed about the process during the second year, though. While the end product was technically superior, it wasn’t nearly as fun and exciting to create. I guess you can’t relive the past.

I Remembered Liking It But What Was It About Again?

As I was preparing to go to school today, I was hanging out in the office of my condo, folding my laundry, uploading Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman onto my ipod, and I allowed my eyes to wander around the two or three bookshelves that line the walls. I got to thinking about some of the books I had read this summer and I made mental notes of the ones that I wished to read later on. I even looked at the notes on the inside cover of the book I am currently reading to see if the actual novel is how I remember being teased it was. (That book, by the way, is Scott Smith’s “The Ruins”. It is way heavy on the psychological details, the narrative is slow and deliberate and I totally love it. It is just taking me a long time to read it. I guess it is a tough novel to pick up right after Da Vinci Code, eh?).

As I got to the final shelf, I looked down and I saw Stephen King’s book, “The Colorado Kid.” For the record, I dig the Hard Case Crime imprint. I have been a collector of hard-boiled mystery novels for years and this series is almost as if it was written for me. The problem here is that I remembered reading “Colorado Kid” about two months ago but I really don’t remember how the story resolved itself or even ended. I recall it was supposed to be vague and unsolved, by SK’s own admission but for the life of me, I cannot conjure the ending of that story. I remember being satisfied with it at the time but for some reason, at this moment, a mere two months later, I cannot recall what was so cool about it.

Perhaps I read too many books, better yet, too many comic books and graphic novels, to be bothered with all the small things of a particular book, like, say, the ending. Oh well, perhaps tonight I will thumb through the ending and see if that jogs any memories.

If I remember to do that, even.

San Bruno Lions Baseball

When I was a kid, I had this friend named Sean. We were friends from the age of 6 until we were 15 when I refused to continue playing Dungeons & Dragons with him because we were about to enter high school. This proclamation of my emancipation from the realm of the dungeon master, hit points, 20-sided dice, and paladins and goblins caused an irrepairable rift in our relationship that lasted throughout the entirety of our time at Capuchino High School and well into the years beyond. The last I heard, he had moved to New Mexico with his family and I wish him well.

Way back when, when I was 7 years old, I was a year too young to play baseball but I signed up to be the batboy on Sean’s team, the San Bruno Lions. Our uniforms were navy blue jerseys with Lions written across the chest in yellow block letters. We wore white pants with blue stirrups. Because I was one to three years younger than everyone on the team (and subsequently the smallest), I got stuck with the number ONE on the back of my jersey.

I remember bugging my coach, Mr. Quigley, every game in a vain attempt to get in the game. He was always nice about it but he steadfastly refused each and every time I asked him. I did get to be the guy that catches the ball during infield practice for the coach and I did enjoy doing that.

As my time as 7 year old batboy passed, so did my years as an 8, 9, and 10 year old on the San Bruno Lions. My playing time went from 3 innings to 5 innings to the whole game at fielding pitcher, second base, left field, and center field. As my playing time increased, so did my offensive prowess. My last year, we finished the season with a 16 – 2 record and I batted around a .680 clip.

To this day, I can recall the smell of the eucaplytus trees at diamond 3, the look of the snack bar and the taste of fun dip candy near diamond 1, the prospect of the Samoan rugby players and their game spilling over on to diamond 2 and interupting our game for a few moments, and the feeling of running the bases after I hit the “snot out of the ball”, just like it was yesterday.

Those were the days, man. When all that mattered every day during the summer was getting home before it got dark and who you were playing the next time you suited up. The reason I am strolling down memory lane today is because I glimpsed a trophy at my cousin Tracy’s house yesterday that belonged to her son, Andey, and it was his San Bruno Pee Wee league all star trophy and it really brought me back.

Back when I was a Pee Wee all star.

So I Lied and I’m Running Out of Excuses

I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten a sandwich from the Plantation deli on Alameda but if you haven’t, let me be the first to recommend trying one. I mean, a sandwich is a sandwich, but there is just that intangible something going on about these things. Plus, the ladies there are very nice and I prefer to spend my money at a place where I actually like the people (not like the people at Eric’s up the street who could never really be bothered to get my order close to correct, even though I was a weekly customer for years). So, if you are ever hungry and you are driving/walking/biking/crawling by Plantation some time in the near future and you are hankering for some good eats, cruise on in and try it out.

So, why the heck am I talking about sandwiches today and where is this all going? No, I’m not hungry but I am trying to make a connection to yesterday’s post where I exclaimed to all the world (more likely the none of you that are reading this column so far) that I was planning on starting work on my curriculum yesterday. And to make things worse, I have been at school for approximately five hours today and I still haven’t broken that seal yet today, either.

Here’s why and a list of things I have done instead of the dreaded curricular-based activities:

1. Transferred materials from an old (newly destroyed via the broken zipper) teacher bag into a new one. The jury is still out on the new one; the price was right (it was free, thanks to Johnny) but it still needs to be battle tested.
2. Threw out useless papers and refiled useful papers from the bag in example one.
3. Tutored two kids (Ana in algebra and Monique in geometry)
4. Worked out at 24 hour in San Carlos. Half hour on the treadmill, 300 assorted crunches, and approximately 20 minutes on various weight machines.
5. Sushi dinner at Ariake’s. I had a half order of terriaki chicken and rice.
6. Worked out again at 24 hour, in our regular Sunnyvale locale this time. It felt like we were cheating on the gym in SC yesterday. The only thing SC has over the ‘Vale is the extremely cold water in the water fountains.
7. Shopped for teacher classroom supplies at Target and Office Depot. Fehmeen and I are the kind of teachers that buy what we need from our own pockets. That’s just the way we are.
8. Put away all the random, remaining junk on my student desks in my room.
9. Because I teach eighth graders and realizing that most of those kids are relatively tall to every other student on campus, I attempted to raise eleven of my shortest desks. After an hour of work, my makita power tool and I were successful in elevating seven out of the eleven. I was getting tired, sweaty, annoyed, frustrated, and sore so I stopped before I threw something out the window or before I said one of the illustrious words that you shouldn’t say while on a public school campus. Let me just tell you, some of those bolts were on way too tightly. I suppose I will give it one more shot before school starts, but if the results are the same (no results), I will be satisfied with that.

And here we are now. All those accomplishments and nothing done in terms of actual algebra lesson work. After I hit the publish button on this entry, I suppose I could (and most likely should) get to work on the curriculum, but seeing as how it is Friday afternoon, I will probably opt to not work on that stuff.

Aren’t you excited about checking in tomorrow (or the next day) to find out if I actually did do anything? Yeah, that’s what I figured too, but still try to stop by. Hopefully by then I will have found a more concrete direction to take this column.

Have a nice weekend. Late.

I’m Back…So Now What?

“I’m back…So now what?”

This is the sentiment I am wrestling with at this moment. Yes, I suppose the concept can apply to the writing of this post (because, to be quite honest with you, this missive is about nothing at all right now), but it also applies to what is going on in my classroom right now, approximately two weeks before the start of the school year.

We (Mrs. Picetti, formerly Ms Khan, and I) have been back at school for about a week prepping our classrooms. After our honeymoon in Kauai, we entered a deep state of extreme lethargy and laziness for about a week. Once we pulled ourselves out of those doldrums, we decided to slowly start making appearances at school, doing an hour or two, here and there, until we are now at the point where we are dedicating a large part of our day in our respective classrooms working.

Now, the easy part of this transition period is over. My classroom is about 95% set up and the only thing that is really left to do is put pencil to planner and dig deep into to curriculum planning. That can be both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, planning and lesson writing is fun and can be a huge creative undertaking that is extremely rewarding, but, on the other hand, the hard part is where the heck do you start? I have been putting this task for the entire summer. I even went so far as to lugging all my lessons and paperwork home for the summer where it sat, undisturbed and un-worked-on, in the storage space in my garage.

So, that brings me back to the central question of the day: I’m back…so now what? Well, I suppose I should just bite the bullet, roll up my proverbial sleeves, break out the old trusty number two pencil and red felt tip pen and start planning my second year of teaching algebra one to eighth graders.

(Pause for reflection)

(More pausing, less reflecting)

Come on, who am I kidding. Forget this planning stuff. I can always start on that tomorrow.

I’m going to lunch.

Witness the return of Rants and Raves.

Way back in the year 2000, when I first started teaching at La Entrada, I created my website with the dual purpose of posting math class related content and, more importantly, to perpetuate and elucidate and ennunciate the Picetti Doctrine. While the first stated purpose was functional enough and politely received, it was all the extra junk that I put on my site that seemed to meet with the approval of both my students and their parents alike.

Years flew by in the seeming blink of an eye and things on my site got a bit stale so I tweaked the format a bit last year in an effort to make posting a little more exciting for me to post and update. Well, it was fine through the first month or so of school and then I all but abandoned the old site by January 2006.

Now, here we are, on the virtual eve of the new school year and I am fresh and rested and full of energy to dive back into the old school routine and to even try out some new things. It is in the spirit of new things that I roll out my old column, Rants and Raves, from my website of yester-year in the new format of a wordpress blog. This is something that I feel will be fun to work on (almost) daily and I can’t wait to see where this new project will be in a few weeks, a few months, and perhaps a few years from now.

So, for the time being , please pardon our amateurish appearance. I plan on figuring this thing out as I go. If you are a fan of rambling discourse and random, trivial minutae, then you have landed on the right page. All I know is that my dream of having a place of my own called jason.com is actually a reality. So what if it is jasondotcom.wordpress.com; I can live with that. The question is, can you?

Welcome to jasondotcom and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Jason