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Welcome to echsdoc. In this blog, written for former students and old friends, I mask the actual name of the school I work at by the name of Salt Mine High School. Welcome all SMHS grads and other visitors of good will.

By the way, my username refers to my own high school in Wisconsin, Eau Claire Memorial High School, known in my day still as ECHS, naturally.
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Dec. 23rd, 2009 @ 09:30 am A taste of retirement
Yesterday I spent what must be a typical day for a retiree. I puttered around a bit, then went over to the Bellevue DMV super license place on Bel-Red road. By eleven o'clock the parking lot was literally full; there were a couple of hundred people in those plastic chairs, all waiting for their numbers to come up. The actual time needed to renew a license was less than five minutes. The wait for one's turn was over two hours. After that lengthy wait, I went to the Honda dealer and had the Accord serviced. That was just under two hours. By then the day was gone, so I drove home and took a nap. I think retirement is going to be that kind of slow movement towards tiny amounts of action. My whole life has been run by bells beginning and ending class periods, with the natural rushing to and fro. It will be different.

Last night I watched an excellent History International program on the month of April, 1865. Beautifully done.

Is it time to start thinking about Christmas shopping?
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Dec. 23rd, 2009 @ 09:02 am Interesting words
"Einstein has told us that he had sometimes the sense that the was following, in his plumbings and probings of the universe, the track of an Intelligence far beyond the reaches of his own."
Archibald MacLeish
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Dec. 22nd, 2009 @ 09:57 am Interesting words
"The public library is one of our few remaining places of privacy, the refuge of the individual who wants to be left alone."
Lawrence Clark Powell

{Personally, I would add the casino to the library for aloneness.}
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Dec. 21st, 2009 @ 09:33 am Winter equinox
We have reached the swing time back to longer days and shorter nights. And winter has officially started. I awoke at seven o'clock and went to the kitchen door to see what was making all the throbbing noise out there (wind or rain). I couldn't actually tell, though the trees were not waving back and forth. It was super gloomy, though. Now I am thinking over the various tasks before me. I want to make some dents in various little things. And I have a pile of actual work to do, grading, etc. Also need to get my driver's license renewed, do some shopping, probably over in Bellevue. Do some serious throwing away of stuff. I also am reading book number 2,000, the last title that will go into my blank book covering 1987 to 2009. I find that number surprisingly significant to myself, though it is only an oddity to others. I want to make some phone calls regarding pension figures for next fall, too.

And... A week ago I bit down hard on my lower lip. Ouch. But even worse is that I daily find myself adding another chomp or two, a stupidity of action that infuriates me. How can it heal, when I exacerbate the wound?
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Dec. 21st, 2009 @ 09:13 am A poem I posted in my FB notes
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The Guest
(A Christmas Prayer)


Tall, cool and gentle, you are here
To turn the water into wine.
Now, at the ebbing of the year,
Be you the sun we need to shine.

It is the birthday of your word;
And we are gathered. Will you come?
Let not your spirit be a sword,
O, luminous delightful lord.

Harold Monro
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Dec. 21st, 2009 @ 08:37 am Interesting words
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"Mass culture destroys all values, since value judgments imply discrimination. Mass Culture is very, very democratic: it absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody. All is grist to its mill, and all comes out finely ground indeed."
Dwight McDonald
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Dec. 20th, 2009 @ 06:48 pm Tree up
We got our tree up this afternoon. S took the son-in-law and the grandson over to the puppet theater over on NE 92nd and 15th NE. This was a silent show in the Commedia del Arte tradition. When they got back we got help with the tree. K***n helped Gramma put on ornaments. N**k helped me fix the vcr/dvd/cable doohickey. Well, actually, he did all the fixin'. We have a sterling son-in-law who loved to do techy stuff. Now all three parts work. S made hot buttered rums for the adults and we ate cheese and sausage, Wisconsin style, then watched a cable show on Wisconsin (looking at Hayward, Lake Geneva and Monroe, the Monroe segment being on Limburger cheese and making me hungary for some). It was a nice afternoon. Christmas seems more fun when you have a four-year-old around.
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Dec. 20th, 2009 @ 10:36 am Interesting words
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"Now I live so much more in the people, the books, the words of art, the landscape than in my own skin, that of self little is left over. A complete life may be on ending in so full an identification with the not-self that there is no self left to die."
Bernard Berenson
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Dec. 19th, 2009 @ 10:01 am Mooovin' slow on Saturday morning
Talk about crawling over the finish line. Every muscle and bone aching this morning, trying to actualize the reality that this is the first of sixteen days of Christmas vacation. Dragged into the kitchen on this gloomy, cloudy morning. The Salt Mine has a basketball game this afternoon over at BHS, and I plan on driving over to watch it with a former student. One of the good things yesterday was the large number of grads from over the last, say, four years who visited SMHS. They all looked happy to be there again and were full of good wishes. That is nice.

I wanted to sleep in today but couldn't quite do it.
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Dec. 19th, 2009 @ 08:59 am Interesting words
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"There are two cultures in the animal world: herd animals like elk and loners like bear. In herds the individual does not count for much. Caribou, for instance, are dependent on each other. But with a bear there is a difference. He makes his own decisions. I admire that."
Dr. Olaus J. Murie
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Dec. 18th, 2009 @ 10:32 am Last day before Christmas break..
This is one of the nice days of the year, the day the alarm awakes you to the thought of no more alarms for the next sixteen days. The atmosphere at school is expectant, Christmas is a week away; little shopping has yet been done. Many classes avoid actual work on this day, though I always do some actual learning, just so nobody can say that I wasted any class day. But there is a good feeling at my workplace. I have to admit that the vacations that are part of the school year make a solid bit of reasoning for becoming a teacher. I am seeing a few of the faces that I dearly miss from last year, which is a nice bit of seasoning for the day. I get to stay until well into the evening, though, as I have a basketball game to announce. No going home early, but that is fine with me. I like this part of my volunteer work experience.
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Dec. 18th, 2009 @ 07:48 am Interesting words
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"The end of evolution is not the creation of bigger and more complicated societies and more elaborate economic structures but the attainment of a higher and intenser form of consciousness, a consciousness as much above that of the average man today as ours is above the animals."
Gerald Heard
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Dec. 17th, 2009 @ 07:15 pm A ha'penny will do...
I don't know what got into me, but I decided to teach my classes the old English round "Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat." It is always a struggle, but a happy struggle, to get the boys to sing vigorously. Anyway, in 4th period, the kids bought into the round, so I orchestrated a caroling expedition. I led them like a choir director, boys starting the carol, then girls joining at the round. I made them bunch up by sex, then sing three rounds. It was simply wonderful. The attendance ladies get special joy, then the sound brings out the other staff. We did it outside the principal's office, then upstairs by the president's office, bringing everyone out to hear. The smiles were amazing, and best of all, the kids (seniors!) were exhilarated, so happy and so proud. They wanted to go around and sing to various classrooms, which expansion of performance I nixed. But, really, I am so proud of them. They sang beautifully. And their ability to embrace the moment with such purity of spirit reminded me of why I have been a high school teacher for so many years. Moreover, we needed some joyous spirit in the air at the Salt Mine.
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Dec. 17th, 2009 @ 07:31 am Interesting words
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"The crowd's nervous haste conveys an impression of futility: all these hundreds and thousands of little egos, meeting and parting, are running each to its own goal."
Maxim Gorky
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Dec. 16th, 2009 @ 07:06 pm There'll be some changes made...
We had a special meeting of staff/faculty yesterday at which the Salt Mine president announced his resignation as of the end of this year. He is going back east to the city he came from. The news was not surprising, to tell the truth, and I imagine that there was quite a mixture of emotion. Since the principal has already announced his leaving, that leaves only the dean of academics left of the three academic administrators. Letters have been sent out to families. We talked with the students about it. It leaves students insecure, no matter how positive one spins such a thing. One of my colleagues dealt with their reaction in an interesting way. He listed the names of all the previous presidents/principals since the beginning of the school, then asked if the names were familiar. The students knew them not. Then he added the most recent name. The students totally calmed down, knowing that the names that will stay most vividly in their minds are the names of their teachers, not the administrators. Pretty smart tactic. I do remember my high school principal, though: David Barnes.
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Dec. 16th, 2009 @ 07:36 am Interesting words
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"You must learn to make friends with pain, and learn to hold things close to you with open hands."
Toni Rainbeau
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Dec. 15th, 2009 @ 07:34 am Interesting words
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"Grief doesn't kill, love doesn't kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while it still lives, kills it too at last."
Aldous Huxley
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Dec. 14th, 2009 @ 07:36 am Interesting words
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"The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless scepticism."
John Cowper Powys
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Dec. 13th, 2009 @ 10:57 am Interesting words
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"Two attitudes toward life are characteristic of modern man. Either he flounders in skepticism or he clutches at the straw of made-to-order ideologies from which he does not dare to deviate by a hair's breadth lest he lose his last hold on certainty."
Hermann J. Weigland
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Dec. 12th, 2009 @ 10:11 am Dream again, checking out
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Last night I had a dream that clearly signals the theme for the next few months: checking out. My recent dream of the frustration of trying to move out of the house, foiled by forty years of putting stuff into the house, and foiled by my book collecting, was followed by another of that theme. Last night I dreamt that I was back in my old office at the UW, Padelford A403. After thirty years I was going there to clean out the books I had left on the shelves when I left the UW. All that time had actually passed, but no one had disturbed my books, mostly paperbacks that I had acquired in ten years of UW teaching. So I was putting them into boxes, frustrated at the task. I asked someone who had been using my office; the reply was that it was used by graduate teaching assistants. I noticed on box of books on the filing cabinet. It had a class set of Main-Travelled Roads in it. The dream segued into my attempts to get the boxes home. It included the appearance of BB and MM to help me, then a stop at a Government Office, where the boxes got left inside after the office closed. A kindly person got me in to pick them up. Then I was hunting for the boxes that BB/MM had taken across the street (downtown Seattle) to store them in a store. They then disappeared, and I couldn't find the store. Ergh.

I am actually now thinking about the process of moving my stuff out of my Salt Mine classroom, perhaps doing it slowly over the rest of the year. And naturally, moving out is my theme, asleep or awake.

NB, if you look at the B section of today's Seattle Times, you will see a nice photograph of a woman singing mezzo-soprano at the Messiah performance last night. She is one of my former students, and I am proud of her.
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