NoJoMo 15: In Bloom

Holy crap people did I have a good dinner.  I have no picture because I forgot but it was Indian chicken korma.  Made it here and from a jar but holy moly it was good.  The best part was that I made some naan bread.  And yeah, again it was from a package but it was mixed, kneaded, rolled out and baked by me, so it was fresh and warm with the korma.  I am stuffed.  And eating cheesecake, because there is some left and I am a glutton and a total slut for cheesecake.

On Mondays I open the pre/after school daycare at 7:30 and then I usually have a free hour before swimming starts at 9:30.  But today someone was sick so I sat in on the third grade’s first hour as an assistant.  I was with this class a lot when they were in first grade and I am not sure some of them have even matured in the last two years.  One of the boys in this class is real trouble.  He is hyper and the class clown and knows it and loves it.  He is also the kid who got busted taking a crap in the school yard (that led a parent conference) and peeing in the playhouse.  

I thought perhaps he had calmed down a bit but holy cow, not at all.  That class is chaotic.  It took forever to get them to actually listen to anything.  And then they started a project.  Writing an adventure story.  Of course this kid starts it and gets frustrated because he can’t write very well and he draws like a preschooler.  So he rips it up and spends the rest of the hour walking around the class, under the desks, in and out of the hall bothering everyone and disrupting the whole hour.  And several kids told me he does this every day. 

I think the teacher is a little soft actually, but this is difficult to deal with.  He has no respect for adults or authority and has figured out that we can’t tie him to the chair and we certainly can’t physically force him to do things he doesn’t want to do.  And there is very little you can do beyond that, other than take it up with the parents.  Because this class has 27 kids and there aren’t enough teachers to do much else but let him do whatever and just try to get some learning into the other kids. 

This is one of the things I point to when I hear some talk about how American public schools suck, the teachers suck and the schools are to blame for the poor performance of American school children in comparison to the rest of the world.  First, I can point out that every single country that scores better than America has a robust public school system.  And then I point to things like this, with kids who don’t want to learn and parents who in this case we know aren’t really involved enough.  The poorest performing students in the US are not dominated by minorities because they are minorities but because the poor as a class are dominated by minorities.  And the poor as a class more often have single parents or two parents who are working more than one job and have neither the time nor energy to get involved in the school lives of their kids.  Or, in some cases, you have parents who have so many of their own personal problems they can’t take on their kids problems as well.  And of course there is this expectation that the schools have sole responsibility for education.

I guess my whole point is that teachers have it rough.  It isn’t easy to teach these hellions (ha!).  There are surely bad teachers out there, but for the most part teachers deserve medals for making it through a year without taking a life.  Patience of saints, I tells ya.

Videos!

I could fill entries with cool industrial videos.  But moving on in my timeline will get us to the early nineties.  And like the rest of the world I found guitars again.  Suddenly punk was back and grunge took over.  I think Nirvana was great but I don’t revere them like some do (do you remember where you were when you heard Cobain was dead?  Pretty sure I was at work and heard it on the radio).  I always liked In Bloom better than Teen Spirit.  "Nature is a whore!"

 And Pearl Jam.  Who would have guessed that they would be the band from this era who would be making the most compelling music almost 20 years later?  (20 years?  Holy crap….) My favorite song on the first album is Even Flow.

I could probably do a whole entry’s worth of Pearl Jam songs.  And maybe I will, later.

Ditto Smashing Pumpkins.  Not actually grunge per se, but what I consider the third leg on the early nineties guitar attack stool.  I’ll do a whole entry on them too, but to complete the grunginess of this entry I present to you the first song released from Siamese Dream, which blew me away and made me run out and buy it when I heard it on the radio.  Cherub Rock.

Zaphod