Top 5 Musicals - SSR

One of my students blogged about a favorite musical of his for his weekly class blog post and it got me thinking about all the musicals I've seen in my life. When your mom's a music teacher, having a good working knowledge of musicals becomes common household knowledge.

My top 5:

5. Pippin - This is a musical that does not translate to film very well. It's primarily only ever been done on stage, and it was done at my high school my senior year. I played the drum set in the pit orchestra and got to watch the musical come to life. I enjoy the story immensely, and the ending leaves the whole thing up to interpretation. 

4. The Sound of Music - Oh, Julie Andrews. Your warm songs thawed a cold man's  heart and brought joy back to his life. And of course, you have to hate those nasty Nazis.

3. Godspell - Another musical that's primarily shown on stage. It's an interesting take on the life of Jesus as portrayed by hippies/children. This was also performed at my high school, and I was again in the pit orchestra.

2. Mary Poppins - Julie Andrews again. Notice any themes here? And once again, we have a father whose cold heart must be thawed with music.

1. The Music Man - This musical is just straight-up fun. You have a lovable bad guy, a clueless town/lynch mob, a musically-gifted heroine, and comedy. Doesn't hurt that the music is insanely catchy, too.

Honorable mention: Rent, Frozen (it IS a musical), Phantom of the Opera, Schindler's List South Pacific. 

A Letter to My Debaters on Opening Weekend

(I have three young debate teams traveling to Nickerson tomorrow and I can't drive them there since I am in Topeka with four other teams. So to completely make up for it, I wrote them this letter)

To my brave opening-weekend debaters:

You are embarking on a great journey. A journey that will transcend many miles. Like 20 of them.

There are many perils which lie before you. But knowing the effort, care, and determination that you have put into preparing for this, I have no doubt that you will conquer your fears, exceed your expectations, and destroy those who stand in your way.

You are a Crusader! Like the brave knights of combat who sought the gates of heaven in days of old, you too seek a great treasure. Namely, a winning record at a local debate tournament.

This step is the first of many. And as you cross this first threshold, you will become emboldened by realizing that you are capable of accomplishing so much more than believed possible. And as you face and overcome these challenges, remember these words of wisdom:

• Don’t just talk good. Talk gooder than the other team.
• Your judges don’t care about how fast you speak, but they do care about how well you wield those words in verbal combat.
• Double negatives are a no-no.
• The words “I think,” and “I believe” sound good in your head. Make sure those words stay in your head and don’t leave your mouth.
• Don’t just make good arguments, but point out why your opponents’ arguments are bad.
• Judges are like spies. They’re everywhere. Even when you think they’re not. Always act like one is watching you.

My last piece of advice is simple. Help your comrades. Make certain that you not only have everything you need, but that your teammates do as well. You are a squad. A team. An indivisible unit of power. When one succeeds, we all succeed.

I look forward to seeing you on Monday. Go forth. And do well!

Mr. Bauer

Time

You might look at my blog title and think this is a post about the passage of time, or about time as a phenomenon in and of itself. But no. This is about the lack of time.

There was once a time when I thought I was busy. I took 21 college credit hours in a semester. I also participated in musical ensembles through percussion and ran the student newspaper. In retrospect, though, that was cake.

Somehow, I still managed to play video games, hang out with friends, talk with my girlfriend, and even follow some sports teams. But I thought I was swamped.

Maybe that's a weird human condition, to constantly think there is less time than there really is. Or, probably more accurately, we try to wear our own busy-ness like a badge of honor. "Man, I was up until 4 a.m. doing work." "Oh yeah? I only slept for a minute. And I was drinking coffee during that minute."

I suppose this makes us look like hard workers? Or maybe it gives us a built-in excuse when things go wrong. We can default to how busy we are when something doesn't work out. "I couldn't do it because I was doing 800 other things."

Lately I've been trying to make a conscious effort to restore some solid balance to my life. Yes, that does mean being more productive, but it also means spending more time with my family when I can. I hate going home and having to work when I should be playing with my daughter. Those two things go hand in hand. If I can get more done during the day, then I can enjoy my time at home easier.

There are some tricks I'm going to try to do to make this happen:

1. Grade at debate meets. There's a lot of work into coaching debate. However, there's not a lot of work that goes into sitting around waiting for my kids to get out of rounds. That's arguably almost 7 hours of potential productivity. 
2. Important work early. I found out about this cool thing called a circadian rhythm, which goes about every 6 hours. I'm going to make an effort to time my important work for when I'm feeling energized (early morning), light work for 1:00 p.m.-ish. 
3. Coffee. Just. Yeah. 
4. Less multitasking. I don't think it works. I don't think it ever has worked. Time on one task should be time on ONLY that task. 
5. Destroy my phone - maybe I would be more productive if I had a faster phone. I doubt it, though. I think I do better when my phone is doing something else. Like, not being around me. 

First Day Reflections

For whatever reason, I've been hooked on the TV show Scrubs over the last two weeks.

Most of it is because I've been watching Ellery while Christina's started back up at school (saving money on a babysitter FTW!!) and I didn't want to watch something that required a lot of my attention. But part of it I think is because the theme of the show works perfectly for the start of a new school year.

For those who don't know, Scrubs was a sitcom about a young doctor who goes from medical school right into a hospital to serve his internship. He's scared and nervous. He doesn't know little things like where he could find extra bandages. He struggles to apply things he learned in school even though he desperately wants to be a good doctor.

I think the show resonated with people because everyone has that moment where you're thrown into the fire. Where preparation ends and performance begins.

To an extent, every teacher goes through that. Sure, you have student teaching before you get your license, but that is, by and large, a controlled simulation. You're borrowing another teacher's class in order to gain some valuable experience. It's still someone else's classroom, someone else's procedures, and someone else's curriculum.

Your first weeks in a bonafide teaching job you find yourself surrounded by people you don't know, in a building you're unfamiliar with, and in a profession you have no experience in. There's a lot that you don't know. In fact, you feel strikingly similar to how I imagine incoming freshmen feel. Here's a short list of everything I was ignorant of:

• Where's the cafeteria?
• How do I get to the cafeteria from my classroom?
• How do I set up a lunch account?
• How do I request a sub?
• How do I enter grades into my online gradebook?
• Where's the faculty work room?
• What's our lockdown procedure?
• How many tardies result in an office referral?
• How do I RECORD tardies?
• Where do we go in the event of a fire?
• Holy cow, when can I duck out to the bathroom?
• What the heck is Buhler Frolic?
• Can students leave my classroom without a pass?
• Where can I get posters for my class?
• Where can I get T-shirts supporting my school?
• Will I be socially ostracized if I forget to pay my relationship committee/booster club dues?
• How do I record reflections for professional development days?

And keep in mind, none of this has to do with actually teaching, which opens up its own can of worms but can be summed up with the following:

• WHY CAN'T MY CLASS LOOK LIKE THAT OTHER TEACHER'S?

But what I had a hard time making myself understand was that the other teacher usually had at least 10 years more experience than I did. Like it or not, experience counts for a lot in education. Your first year you have so much to learn that it's unreasonable to expect you to be THAT good.

Your first year of teaching is not when you find out if you're a great teacher. But it is when you find out if you're willing to work to become one.

So as my district gears up for the start of its first day of school, I can't help but look back at my first day of my first year and reflect on how far I've come and how far I still feel I have yet to go. A presenter for our district, Joe Coles, showed us a quote. I can't remember the exact words, but the gist of it goes:

"If you think you've made it to the top, you're probably right."

And that's when I realize that I'm not the only one who still thinks they need to get better. In fact, the best teachers in our building still think they can get better. And I'm smart enough to still realize that I want to be like them.

A lot changes after your first day. But a lot still stays the same.

Hot cars and kids

Earlier this year, I woke up and prepared for another normal school day.

 It was my turn to take Ellery to the sitter. So I got her dressed, changed her diaper, and gave her to Christina to feed her while I put on dress clothes.

I gathered my satchel, grabbed milk from the refrigerator for the diaper bag, and buckled Ellie into her car seat before carrying her out to the car. I then fastened the seat to the fixed base, put my satchel in the back seat and began driving to the babysitter.

Only I didn't go to the babysitter. Instead of turning right at Highway 50, I turned left and began driving toward Buhler. I had been getting poor sleep lately, was thinking about my first class of the day, was stressing over making sure I had drivers for forensics meets and had requested enough vehicles for transportation. In the midst of all of this I just automatically turned toward Buhler like I had hundreds of times before.

Ellery was in the backseat, facing the back of the car. Out of sight and, temporarily, out of mind.

It was only five minutes later before I looked in my rearview mirror, saw my child there, realized my mistake, and turned back toward the babysitter. My colleagues at work gave me some good-natured ribbing over how it was almost "take your daughter to work day."

Would I have gone into the building with Ellery still in the car? No. I always put my satchel with my laptop in the back seat and I can't work without it. I would have gone to grab it, seen my sleeping child, and cursed myself in the process at having to turn around and spend an hour driving to the babysitter and back. But fortunately I learned my mistake just five minutes into my 30-minute commute.

If I had a yellow T-shirt with zigzags on it, someone would have called me a blockhead.

But this summer has made the incident less and less humorous in retrospect as 18 reported hot car deaths have occurred in 2014 alone. And according to the statistics, there is no correlation between the people who let it happen. It's happened equally to the rich. The poor. The educated. The uneducated. It's happened to loving parents and neglectful ones. Foster parents, lawyers, soldiers, rocket scientists.

Men. Women.

It's happened to people who love their children very, very much.

And those people go through the unspeakable misery of having to live with what they have done.

But that's not our reaction when we see those stories, is it? Our reaction is, "How the heck can you forget that you have a kid in the car!? How can you remember your cell phone but forget your child!?"

We become angry. We want to assign blame. We want these people to be "locked up in a hot car themselves," according to one Internet commenter. We even see district attorneys press charges as severe as 1st degree murder against these parents.

But before these people judge, they should remember that the absolute worst thing you can do is simply assume it will never happen to you. It's pretty easy to find what exactly caused this forgetfulness and in almost every case it turns out there was a perfect storm of things going on to cause the problem to happen.

The parent is usually stressed. There's been a lack of sleep. There are distractions. There are meetings, groceries, schedule changes, route changes, cell phone alerts, all the things that demand your attention instead of the child riding along with you. I have yet to meet a parent who has not experienced a level of stress like this, and who has not had to rely on their ability to "autopilot" through some tasks while they focus on others.

Before 1990, these types of deaths were incredibly rare. Many parents placed their child in the front seat because that was acceptable at the time. However, researchers determined the back seat was far safer, and that rear-facing child seats were safer still. That means you routinely place a child in a place you cannot see for the entirety of your drive.

Out of sight. And tragically, out of mind.

I can't feel anything but incredible sympathy for the parents responsible for these tragedies. And I cannot assume they were anything but phenomenal parents with their child. Yet we see time and time again parents being prosecuted for what happened and almost every time we see a jury come to the conclusion that there is not a whiff of criminal intent, that the parent was not even being willfully neglectful of their child.

But it's not enough for most people to throw their hands up and say, "Well, what can you do?" Because ultimately this is something that's preventable. There are strategies to prevent this from happening. Some groups recommend doing what I've done, which is to put their phone, purse, or bag in the back seat where the baby sits. Putting up a mirror that allows you to see your child while driving can also be beneficial. Doing something that forces you to see your baby can help tremendously. Technology even exists that can detect whether a child is still in the car, but it has not become industry standard.

But all of this seems to get lost every time this happens. We wonder what an appropriate punishment should be for something like this. Almost half the time, police and prosecutors press no charges at all. They see that clearly there is nothing that the court system can do that can compare to the unthinkable grief of being responsible for your child's death.

If you have children, I highly, highly encourage you to read the article in my first link. It's the most comprehensive piece over hot car deaths I have ever read in my life. It, more than anything, has changed and shaped my perspective on this issue.

A mistake is made that results in a terrible tragedy. And who am I to judge?

It could have happened to me.

World Cup Babywatching

Top Five Reasons to Watch the World Cup

In some groups, admitting you like soccer is a bit like admitting you're a vegetarian. Sure, it doesn't really affect other people at all, but you get the sense people are thinking, "Well, that's one way to live your life."

I love soccer. I also love football and basketball. I really like baseball and I enjoy going to hockey games. It's really not like there's a limit on what sports someone can enjoy. Jim Rome apparently doesn't think so. He usually devotes at least one show every four years to how he "doesn't get" soccer. You might think, as a sports analyst, it would be his job to "get it," but I digress. Even he was able to admit that the U.S. games in 2010 were exciting. That by itself is proof that you don't have to be a huge soccer fan to enjoy the biggest sporting event on the planet.

So, here are five reasons to watch the U.S. at the World Cup:

1. A little something called "Patriotism" - Even if you don't watch soccer at all outside of the World
Cup, you can still enjoy supporting the United States. You know. 'Merica. Ever heard of it? There is a lot of satisfaction in going up against another country and reminding them just who exactly is the last remaining superpower on the planet. And the team always needs the support in order to destroy the forces of evil. The reason we lost to Iran in 1998 was because YOU WEREN'T WATCHING.

2. The United States are perpetually the plucky underdogs - I love the Dream Team. Or whatever they call the U.S. Olympic basketball team nowadays. But I also don't ever watch them play. I just expect them to win. We're pretty dang good in basketball and if we're just going to show up and stomp on Bosnia every four years, then there's not much point in me watching the game now, is there? There's no drama. Very little risk of failure. But whenever the U.S. wins, there's always a sense that they're beating the odds. We're progressing as a soccer nation, but the rest of the world often doesn't view us that way. Soccer is satisfying because the U.S. is always metaphorically smacking the smug smile off some stupid Frenchman's fat face*.

* please note that I said "metaphorically"

3. No. Stupid. TV. Timeouts - Once again, I love football and basketball. But there are things I love and hate about every sport. One of those things I hate is how stinking long some games take, ESPECIALLY because of something as useless as TV timeouts. Christina and I went to the Alamo Bowl in 2012 and watched Baylor and Washington score over 120 points in a single game. We were there for over FOUR HOURS because the players spent half the time standing around on the field because Fox would take a commercial break after every score. In soccer, there ARE no timeouts. There are 90 minutes of playing time. There is a 15-minute halftime. There are maybe seven minutes of added time at the ends of the halves, but that's it. The game's over in two hours. 

4. The U.S. players are very easy to root for - There are no prima donnas on the U.S. squad. In general they don't make a ton of money and most of them started off their rookie careers sleeping on the couches of older, richer teammates. One player gets paid just $90,000 a year by his pro team (yes, I would love to make that much money too, but for an international-caliber soccer player, that's not a lot). The goalkeeper, Tim Howard, suffered from Tourette's when he was a kid. Two other players play their professional ball IN KANSAS. That would be Matt Besler and Graham Zusi. Besler himself is set to become the first Kansas boy ever to play in a World Cup.

We even have a few players who were eligible to play for other countries and then had to make the extremely personal decision whether or not to represent the United States. That means that player had to ask themselves: "Do I feel more American or German?" Some soccer players have a mother from one country, a father from a second country, was born in a third country, and then perhaps grew up in a fourth country. It's compelling to see people redefine what many consider what it means to be an American.

5. It's incredibly easy to catch games this year - ESPN and ABC are broadcasting all the games. And because it's in Brazil, the games can be broadcast live during prime time. The first World Cup I seriously watched was in 2002 when it was in Japan. I remember staying up until 2 a.m. or waking up at 5 a.m. just to watch some of those games. Not so this time. You have no idea how much of a gift this is. And seriously. What else are you going to do? Do you know what the big news in the sports world was four years ago during the World Cup? It was an entire month spent pondering what NBA team Lebron James would end up on. That was it. No other sports. Well, except baseball, but there are 161 other games during the season. Statistically, you're probably okay missing one or 12.

Really. Really. Boring. Thank goodness ESPN didn't devote much time to this story...