Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Changeful Stress

Happier every day

Sad waves in sets

Time missed

Look around

See where I'm found

Waking up

Unbound

Changeful stress

Evolutive growing pains

Chipping away at bad habits

Sore mind muscles

Feeling good can feel bad

At first

---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 8/28/2002 09:14:00 PM



Sunday, August 25, 2002

War makes you sore. The tops of my legs are killing me this morning from the horror that is paintball. This is why they jog so much in the military I bet, It was short thrilling moments full of regretted moves, surrounded mostly by waiting in uncomfortable environments for long periods of time, much like real war I hear. We were 40 miles inland from San Diego, the desert proper. In coats, pants, helmets and big shoes. Sweat was the norm and you can't take your motocross helmet/face shield off ever while on the fields (3 different battle environs). As in never, not even to wipe sweat off your head between games. The refs shot a tomato just to drive home this point. It's not a pretty site.

Interestingly I made the same mistakes I make in Quake. I moved too much, got to too wrapped up in the adrenaline rush and didn't think clearly. Mostly I just didn't keep my head down enough.

I did have a Matrix moment though. In one of my many moving too much adrenaline rushes through the scraggly chaparral terrain, a well camoed enemy team member suddenly stood up about 10 ft from me and shot. I jumped/fell backwards and shot before I hit the ground hard on my back. His gun jammed and I somehow hit him on the knee, leaving a huge welt.

Luckily we were pitted against a mellow bunch of newbies out for a birthday party. Later in the morning a platoon of off duty cops and military heads showed up. They were scary serious and big, both in the stomachs and muscles. Then the regulars showed up. Even more battle fantasized out. Camo face netting, 1000 round speed loaders, flack jackets, attitudes, large bellies. At first they were intimidating, but after playing a few rounds it occurred to me that they presented a bigger slower target in the end and perhaps wouldn't be anything special if you got over the psychology of it all.

The people I played with who had done it before said they'd seen a slight bodied young man dressed in hunter orange consistently kick ass, so there you go...

---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 8/25/2002 12:56:00 PM



Friday, August 23, 2002

Idea via Jared S.: It’s not how best to teach; it’s what to learn.

Thus not the specific pedagogy but more what you choose to try and teach. Is it the old standard of math, English, history, or is it psychology (history?), computers (science?), business networking (psychology), community building, and personal economics (math), research writing (English?).

If you teach no old style rote math, what happens to a kid at 18 who wants to be a physicist? Can they, will they, learn pre-algebra at 18 in order to do that, or will it be too hard at that age? And how do you test this idea? You can’t isolate students and not teach them things depending on your theories, can you? Is that what charter schools are trying to do? Perhaps trying, but charter schools are dependant on standardized state scores, which ask for a set of old school knowledge. Perhaps the School Around Us (<30 student elementary and junior high, holistic, consensus run school) with its consensus framework is different enough to test. What about schools that study the Koran only?

Or does it even matter what you teach, as long as you learn how to learn? And what predetermined factors such as families, reading, culture, etc. cancel out large chunks of school influence anyway?

But the point of Jared’s idea is this. We are pretty good natural teachers and we train well to be better ones. But what to teach? That is an interesting question.

---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 8/23/2002 07:13:00 AM



Thursday, August 22, 2002

30ft in the air with a death grip on my 100lb boss and a strap digging into my crotch. It’s a strange world, one in which you occasionally get paid to climb high in complete safety, play with logos to smooth communication, and try and get your team people through a spider web of rope by passing them vertically through gaps as if you were all in some sort of a bizarre funeral procession.

This is “team building” during our high school’s staff development week. My distain for it was deep and angry leading up to it. Once there, it was actually pretty fun. The teamwork, communication exercises and ropes were pretty exciting and yet almost all could participate. And we were outside and had cool equipment to play with. Thanks to lawyers, danger wise the drive up on a California freeway was much more dangerous then the activities.

And I realized why I had been so pre-distained. Nobody had asked me if I wanted to do a ropes course, it was just planned by the higher ups. Once again, buy-in and empowerment rears its beautiful and powerful head. Next year I hope they as me first so I can skip the angry preamble and just have fun.

---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 8/22/2002 08:31:00 AM



Wednesday, August 21, 2002

So there we are, getting a bagel and a vision of beauty appears with their partner, laughing. We envy the one we don’t want to sleep with and covet the one we do. That night at home we remember them while we sit and watch TV alone feeling like our lives are being sucked into the tube of the digital opium.

Seeing other people for fleeting moments in public is dangerous. It seems as if these moments are their lives – it’s all we can see so we’ve got nothing else to go on. Our minds being powerful and restless things, they fill in the missing 23.99 hours for us in a split second, before our logical sense even gets morning coffee. But it happens and it’s bad for self-esteem because these glimpses are like advertisements, or good public relations vs. reality.

Therefore, if someone is good at advertising themselves, or has a good PR agency behind them, we can be hooked unconsciously since logical thought takes a lot more energy.

In other words, your life is probably much better then you think and theirs is probably not one long advertising moment.

---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 8/21/2002 05:35:00 PM



Tuesday, August 20, 2002

My blog has moved to a new directory. Time to write more.
---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 8/20/2002 09:49:00 AM



Tuesday, August 06, 2002

I'm back from two excellent weeks in New England. Can you say LUSH, GREEN, JUNGLE? I knew you could. More to come.
---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 8/06/2002 06:46:00 PM