Sometimes this teaching gig ain't bad!

Well, folks, while you're all slaving away, I'm one of those overpaid teachers who gets a spring vacation. Actually, since I teach at a Christian school, it's EASTER vacation. And in Arizona, you can't beat the weather. Wait -- out-of-staters, I'm exaggerating. Rattlesnakes attack you when you're eating lunch, and Gila monsters meet you at the airport when you start to get off the plane. Oh, and scorpions are everywhere. You don't wanna come here.

Now that's settled -- Katie and I have had a lot of fun messing around this week. She went out looking for snakes with me one morning, and we went out to a big mountain preserve to scout out an area where I'm taking the whole junior high population on a field trip next week. Spotted a few lizards (whiptails, sideblotched lizards), a snake (desert patchnose), and Katie got a refresher course on what plants not to touch in the desert. There are quite a few of those, actually. Once upon a time, Ann Woodin, author of the old book Home is the Desert, noted that a friend of hers stated: Everything in the desert stings, stinks, or sticks. I suppose her friend wasn't far off.



That cactus is well over 100 years old. I believe they don't even get their first arm before they're about 50. I was thinking about the maximum age estimated for saguaros, and noted to my students that there are more than a few of them in this state that were growing when Thomas Jefferson was president. And you thought that only big redwood trees were old!

Then we have my favorites: any of a variety of plants called cholla:



Chollas have a unique way of reproducing themselves. All the spines on the one in the picture are barbed. One type of cholla (pronounced CHOY-a), called the teddy bear or jumping cholla, is REALLY spiny. Almost furry in appearance, that's where the "teddy bear" moniker came from. As for the "jumping" part: cholla have sort of segmented branches, and the barbed spines catch on animals walking by and pull segments of the plant off to hitch a ride on the poor animal until it scrubs them off on a rock a few miles away. When you brush by these plants, no matter how lightly you do it, the spines will hook on you, thus giving people the impression that the cholla segments "jump" at you. Where the plant segment is dropped, a new cholla begins growing. Unique way of plant propagation, but sort of hard on the animal. I should know. Once upon a time I wasn't looking where I put my feet (not smart in the desert) and kicked a fallen cholla segment with my cloth sneakers. It stuck like a growth, and the spines penetrated all the toes of one foot right through the cloth. Those things are so sharp they go into human skin like a needle into butter. Anyhow, I sat down to remove the thing from my foot and, once again, not looking, SAT on another cholla segment. So now I had a growth on my butt, too. By the time I got everything off, I had no pants on, and no shoes on, and was yanking the rest of the spines out of my clothes before I put them back on, when OF COURSE a group of hikers strolled by, snickering at me standing there in the middle of the desert barefoot and in my boxers.

It's been a fun week, though. Got a chance to reconnect with my daughter outside of the school community, and just to mess around. Tomorrow we're going to take her bike out to the park, and she'll ride while I do a little coinshooting in the park (metal detecting). And Saturday, I'll finalize my lesson plans for the upcoming week. Argh.

However -- end of May, I'm off for a couple of months. I think I can live until then!

Happy Easter!

I broke down, after having The Passion of the Christ in its cellophane wrapper for over two years, and decided to watch it yesterday. I was sort of shamed into it by one of my students in the 6th grade, whose mother, a rabid anti-Harry Potter fanatic who believes that there are "real magic spells" contained in the writings of J.K. Rowling (she didn't take me up on my offer of a hundred bucks to get one of those "real" spells to work), showed her 11-year-old son (my student) the movie. He saw nothing wrong with it. I'm conflicted, personally.

For years my standard Easter movie has been the 1959 version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, starring Charlton Heston and with a wonderful supporting cast which included Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith, Sam Jaffe, and Jack Hawkins, among many others. It's a timeless depiction of a man's story on the periphery of the story of Jesus, and how they intersect and the man, Judah Ben-Hur, gains a new faith, remarkable after everything he and his family have gone through at the hands of the evil Roman tribune Messala. I believe Ben-Hur still holds the record for Academy Awards, and with good reason. It was the last of the true blockbuster movies from MGM, right at the beginning of the surge of television ownership. A huge movie, with all the stops pulled out, just the chariot-race scene alone took over a year to film.

At the end of Ben-Hur, we see Jesus being whipped and dragging his cross to Golgotha (or Calvary, depending on your preference), and he is crucified. But here the similarities to The Passion become a bit extreme in their divergence. In The Passion of the Christ, one has to watch different implements being tried on Jesus, both front and back, whipping and scourging him until his body seems to be one open wound. My guess is that Gibson got it down a bit more accurately, but it was so intense, and so brutal, that I had to take periodic breaks. It was extremely tough on me to watch, and I was a bit glassy-eyed at the movie's end.

With Ben-Hur, I find myself with tears in my eyes, and uplifted. With The Passion, I have the same tears, but I find myself dwelling on the inhumanity of the gleeful tormenters of Jesus as they shred his body. It wasn't enough just to crucify him; they had to make him look as though he had been through a huge garlic press. There is no disrespect intended with that description; it's about as close as I can come to what he looked like when he finally died on the cross. With the Passion, I feel sorrow. Not very uplifted. Just stunned.

Perhaps I'm wimpy, and I have posted this question on Outcast Conservatives, but is it really appropriate to show this movie to 11-year-old kids when it damn near kills a 55-year-old man to watch it?

I doubt that I'll be watching The Passion again anytime soon. I note that Mel Gibson released a new version, entitled "The Passion Recut," with less of the violence, possibly because he, or his audience, shared the same concerns I have. In any case, one thing it DID do for me: it made it impossible for me to again rationally repeat the words "he died to save us from our sins" as though he just died. Jesus was tortured, mutilated, and slowly allowed to die, hanging on a cross. I'll never just be able to mindlessly gloss over the thought of his sacrifice again, and God forgive me for having gotten used to the idea so that it seems as just another part of the liturgy. If Gibson's treatment of the events of the death of Christ shocked a few people into believing, then I guess the movie did its job. I think I'll revert to the Ben-Hur tradition next year.

Regardless of what you watch, or what you do, may God bless you all on Easter, the celebration of the event upon which Christianity stands or falls: the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. He's waiting for all of us who believe.

On the subject of older dads...

Six years ago on St. Patrick's Day, we had a surprise arrival. Well, sort of a surprise. At 49 years old, I hadn't really considered starting over with kids, having had my first ones fly the coop a while back. My wife surprised me at a dinner party, and once the info had sunk in, we got it checked out and, yep, we had a youngster on the way.

One of the things I found out about myself was that the second time around wasn't as scary as the first. I didn't believe Katie was going to die with every cough or sniffle. At the time I was working on getting a post-baccalaureate degree in education, and so I stayed home a couple days a week with Katie and substitute-taught on the other days. It was a life-altering experience for me. Not only wasn't I disconnected from my daughter's upbringing, but I got to use her as a guinea pig for information I needed in classes like Educational Psychology.

However, Katie has blown our expectations out of the water -- because we apparently didn't expect enough. She surpasses anything I could have imagined in her intelligence -- I only half-jokingly tell people that she'll think I'm stupid in a couple years. Her reading is fluent; she's going to finish first grade when most kids start it, her vocabulary is about fourth-grade level right now, and her oral reading has more expression and correct emphasis than most adults who read aloud (not a common thing these days). She doesn't blow by unfamiliar words when reading -- if she doesn't know what they mean, she'll ask for the definition. I prided myself on my reading ability at an early age. Katie is carrying on the tradition, and I hope for great things for her.

So, even though, on her 6th birthday, she'll be getting all the packages, she has given me the present of my lifetime. She goes to the same school where I teach, so we go to work and come home together every day. We talk about everything from Yoda to rhinos ("Dad, it's not a 'rhino!' It's a RHINOCEROS!") and we listen to the same music (she thinks the Doobie Brothers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and the Eagles are cool, not to mention Neil Diamond). She has her own lizard, likes snakes, and has told me she wants to learn to shoot when she gets bigger. And sometimes, late at night, I find myself in her room, just watching her sleep, and wishing for her all the contentment and fulfillment that she can have. As a parent, you wish you could foresee the future, and can protect your kids from anything bad. I know this isn't possible, but I think she's well on her way to growing up to be someone special. Or even MORE special, I should say.

So -- to the once-newborn in my arms in that picture (my wife's stepdad took that picture about ten minutes after Katie was born, and caught me telling Katie she was going to grow up to be a Republican nun -- and I'm not Catholic) who is now growing up rapidly -- thanks, on your birthday, for believing in me, for thinking I can do no wrong, for running to me when you have a problem, and for making me realize that there are a lot of things more important than bad people who invent stories about me on the internet. I don't think they'll be taking THIS present away from me.



I love you, Katie.


Dad

Well, the Oscars were boring...

And Daniel Day-Lewis, as predicted, took Best Actor honors (these days they call it "Actor in a Leading Role" so as not to hurt the self-esteem of the LOSERS). The rest of the winners were a hodge-podge. The Best Picture of the year was No Country for Old Men, I believe (not what was predicted).

What I find interesting is that very few people watched the show, although it's not all that surprising. No one saw any of the movies, other than Juno apparently (which took Best Screenplay). The Academy wants to pick "good" movies rather than movies that did well at the box office. This means that few people have an interest in seeing a show about movies they've never seen. I heard on the news that the ratings for the show were lower than they have ever been. And no one was particularly stupid onstage, so even THAT source of entertainment was taken away from me. Argh.

What really bugs me about the Oscars these days is that "And the Oscar goes to...." stuff. As opposed to: "And the winner is...", which is what they did before they started worrying about hurting some millionaire star's feelings. Life is just too weird these days.

Anyhow, I struggled through the whole show. And I'll probably do it again next year, masochist that I am. You can tell that, between work and home, my life reeks of excitement.

So, not a very exciting blog update -- but perhaps next year. My daughter's birthday is coming up this month, and THAT should be exciting.