Earphones

Earphones and music CDs are a big part of some student's day.

Each youngster has their own set of earphones in labeled plastic bags and most can operate the sound system without any adult help.

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Movie Day

Friday is Movie May for the All Stars--sometimes celebrated with popcorn but today, since the bean cup was full, ice cream.

(The all-engrossing movie was the new kidsflick, Rio.)  

About the All Stars: A technique for encouraging good behavior for younger children. Each student is issued a sheet showing activities to be completed during the day. The teacher places a star on each activity as it is completed. An "All Star Day" is one in which the child has been given a star for each completed segment. An "All Star Week" is a week in which all students have received stars for every task during every day.

About the bean cup: this is a schoolroom trick used by some teachers to help encourage good behavior. Every time the teacher notices something worthy, he adds a bean to a transparent cup placed in a prominent place. When the cup is full he gives the class a reward.

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Art

Art

Different things to different people.

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Morning Lesson

The morning lesson.

Sometimes the morning lesson is quite simple--meeting with the teacher and going along with his directions.

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Big Boy Lunch

For a big boy, hot school lunch is always good! (2/8/12)

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Holy Grail

Thanks to Tanya for this cartoon idea! TM

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Trinidad Beach

Drying Seaweed. (Tommy Photo 2012)

We now live near enough to the fishing village of Trinidad, CA that we can drive there in less than an hour.

You must walk down a long log and packed dirt staircase to visit the public Trinidad Beach.

When you arrive, the beach is awfully nice, with sand, rocks and seaside plants.

When we were there recently there were a few people playing with their dogs--some with children-- all having relaxed beachy fun and a couple of harbor seals were sleeping on the nearby rocks too.

T&T (Tommy Photo 2012)

Trinidad Beach is one of those places where everywhere you turn there is a beautiful scene just asking to be photographed.

Isn't it?

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Albert

Albert

Subbing again--one of the college-age students was concentrating on his drawing and since he was holding still and since I was there I made this quick sketch and later colored it in.

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More Subbing

More subbing. 

This time for a high school computer class.


Perhaps students not interested in classroom-type education should be excused from attending such classes.


Years of student and teacher's time could be saved which now is pretty much wasted with fooling around.


Probably most students would prefer to simply have a period of social clubishness--with mild adult supervision--than the more or less pretended traditional academic classroom situation as it now exists.


Take the one or two percent of really interested students and give them solid instruction with highly qualified teachers and expect them to perform to high standards--demand it, in fact-- and let the rest of them pass along the path of least resistance.

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Algebra

Sub's View

It's a high school algebra class and I am the new substitute teacher--very new in fact. I haven't been in a classroom for years and I feel pretty much like a fool.

I was called late so I am late--I walk in and introduce myself to a silent class and find a student teacher already hard at work!

To my great relief he takes over and offers me the comfortable, padded seat behind the teacher's desk.

He is a student teacher from Humboldt State and he has been here for some time--he knows the students and the routine--I am just here to satisfy the legal requirements. (Every class in California has to have a certified teacher in charge and, lucky me, I am certified!) 

So here we go with algebra.

It hasn't changed as much as I have over the years.

I look around the class of sixteen-year-olds. Pretty much the same as I was. Doing what they have to do to get through.

In a couple of years they will all be out looking for jobs. I wonder how this algebra will help them. There are presently no jobs for anybody in the United States--except in the military--and they don't care much if you know algebra.

I have spent a fairly long lifetime in this body and I don't remember that I ever used anything algebraic--not a thing--yet here they are and if they don't pass the course, they will take it again and pass it or they won't get a high school diploma.

What an exercise in futility.

Maybe one in ten thousand high school graduates will be in a field that actually requires a little knowledge of algebra--but here they all are.

It reminds me a lot of high school Latin. Yes, we had to take it in the old days because it somehow did us good--the exercise of the mind and all. But when the last Latin teacher finally died unlamented, the high school I went to finally decided Latin was not all that essential and it was dropped as a subject.

Arithmetic, yes. But algebra?

So many wasted hours. Such an awful joke. Algebra.

I use to study algebra

To balance x and y--

And now I study people

I really don't know why.

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Flying Time

Teacher's Cottage, Stillwater Cove Ranch, Jenner, CA by "Starship", 1971.

1977. Where was Tommy Morganstern back then?

 "Assistant Everything" at Stillwater Cove Ranch, of course!


I was "Starship" back then and the CEO of Little Red Hen Published Communication of Jenner CA, thank you very much.


Well, SCR was really not so  seriously much back then and it is much changed now--but it WAS good fun while it lasted.


The beautiful sixty-five acre ex-boy's school ranch, across two-lane Highway One from the big Pacific Ocean, was a six-room motel in those days and a very funky and small-time, but so--may I use the word--"wonderful" a place to work and to be that I would have to call it one of the best places I have ever hung my hat.


If you were a guest there in the old days you were lucky. 

It is closed to guests now so you missed your chance.

I made this highway sign for the ranch thirty-some years ago. Don't time fly?

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Protected

Of course one of the reasons the kids in the Special Ed class are so different is because they have been sheltered and protected in school from the very first. 

Being educated without unnecessary stress, they have every advantage--close supervision by specially trained adults--small classes--individual attention to their needs--medical help on call--free transportation from home to school and back and practically guaranteed paid work at their personal level of efficiency when they themselves become adults.

"Normal" kids are most usually thrown into regular classes to swim or sink--and, unless they are helped and protected by parents or other interested adults, most will sink to the least common denominator.

They are SO normal they are given little instruction about how to behave--so they behave like their peers in order to survive in a hard world where there are no guarantees--and most of their peers get their  patterns of behavior from TV, movies, computer games and slightly older children.

Kids will soon learn enough "blackboard jungle morality"--to lie, cheat and steal--the common morality of their peers and of their most looked-up-to adult heroes--and slow learners will not survive long.

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Subbing Again

Bob

I got a call this morning to be a substitute teacher at a local school and I went.

It has been four years since I took a substitute teaching job. 

I quit doing it because I didn't like to be in a classroom with always more than thirty kids who automatically despised me. That's what a substitute teacher is most of the time in California--someone for the kids to be mean to--one adult they can get revenge on the whole system against.

This class was a Special Education class--that's why I went. All the students in the class are more or less handicapped--and they are great. These kids are not normal. They don't treat their teachers as some sort of joke and they don't hate substitute teachers.


Since they are not normal, they have been taught to be accepting of each other and of the adults helping them--teaching them. I was even told "Thank you" twice today by kids. Once for helping a girl count change in a game and once for helping a boy tear open his wrapped lunch sandwich. They are taught to be polite and are genuinely concerned about the teacher--even if he is a substitute--and each other. It is such a change from the competitive ME, ME, ME of the regular classroom.

I hope they call me again soon.


Tommy Morganstern

(This is a page from a coloring book I colored when I was helping some kids.)

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Marsh Poem

The blueness of the sky,

The duckness of the pond.

Hmmmm...

And you and you and you!

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Carson Mansion

Carson Mansion, Eureka, CA. (Tommy photo)

There is a magnificent Victorian mansion on the waterfront of Eureka which is all wooden gingerbread. Called the Carson Mansion, it is presently off limits to all but members of an exclusive club made up, according to a local worker we met today at the at the Humboldt Historical Society, "of doctors and lawyers".

Here as everywhere in the USA. doctors and lawyers are the richest folks in town.

Since the old manse is decorated for the holidays, we drove by this evening to get an eyeful and I snapped the above photo.

Though we are not doctors or lawyers we hope to be inside some day soon.

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Don Pedrito

 Don Pedrito.

I read about Don Pedrito some years ago in a little booklet I found by accident in a public library. He was a a simple and humble Mexican Indian who lived in Texas more than a century ago who is still remembered for his ability to cure the sick--often using such common "medicines" as water.


He would accept no payment for his cures.


He seems quite a saintly character and, though I don't know much about him, he is one of my very favorite people.


Below is a line from a Wikipedia citation about him.


"Don Pedro Jaramillo, is a curandero, or faith healer from the Mexico-Texas region. He is known as the healer of Los Olmos and "el mero jefe" (English: the real chief) of the curanderos."

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Two Travelers

Tough Tommy, 2011. (Tanya photo)

 It is getting close to the end of 2011, CE. 

I thought it would be good to show you what your hosts at The Life and Times of Tommy Morganstern look like at this time.

Traveling Tanya, 2011. (Tommy photo)

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We Move North

 Tanya and Tommy start in Temecula, CA.

So we just moved up from Temecula, CA to Eureka!, CA--about 750 miles north.

We rented a 14 foot U-Haul truck for our stuff and a towing dolly for our Chevy Aveo and had a very nice trip.

I really like to drive these big Ford trucks--they are so comfortable inside--plenty of elbow room and excellent air conditioning-- great visibility, huge rear-view mirrors and you get a lot more respect from other drivers than when we practically disappear from view in our sub-compact car. BUT when you fill 'em up at the pump--man! There goes a hundred dollars!

There was a terrific wind storm in Los Angeles which caused power outages for several days and which blew sand across the highway as we traveled north but it only made the passage a little more interesting for us.

We went by some signs that read "Congress Has Created a Dust Bowl!"--probably because the water from the northern mountains wanted by the central valley farmers as it passes in canals toward the southern cities has become too expensive for their irrigation projects. We experienced first-hand the dust bowl conditions as the sky turned brown from blowing dirt for several miles.

We both love the old Pea Soup Anderson's restaurant near Buellton and we discovered another one which has opened in Santa Nella which we sampled. It had the same tasty soup as the old reliable and some other good entrees--Tanya had the baked  turkey breast and said it was delicious.

To save money, we stayed mainly at another old reliable: Motel 6, whenever we stopped for the night.

They were all standard good--the McDonald's of motels--no surprises. Clean. Friendly staff and free coffee in the morning. We checked out several other motels, but found they were all more expensive and not nearly as nice. Some have been renovated and these have cool push-button flush toilets and high-tech corner showers with the water coming from the outside of the shower stall---not from the wall as I have always experienced it! You face out toward the the nice, clean white curtain as you bathe. Very different interesting.Thanks Motel 6.

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Print Technology

The Kui Ka Lono was published using the latest photo-offset printing technology.

There were no computers but our electric/mechanical typewriters had reached their highest state of development. For example, they could self-justify columns of copy--but to change the size of type we had to use another photo-based machine.

Cutting and pasting were done by hand with sharp knives, real scissors and a hot, waxy layout paste.

When the full-sized page layouts had been completed by my students, with black patches where the photographs would be inserted later in the process, I would take them into Honolulu where  professional Hawaii Hochi newspaper technicians would photograph them, insert the offset-ready photographs and print as many copies as we wanted.

Creating our weekly newspaper was a team hands-on arts and crafts project--now gone the way of the buggy-whip and high button shoes--but lots of fun in it's time.

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Confusion

As the war in Viet Nam raged on, all over America sit-ins and demonstrations at universities and colleges became daily occurrences.

And another peculiar thing happened in this country--a "generation gap" developed.

The older people--the parents of the rioting youth--seemed to think the war was OK. They re-elected Richard Nixon president by a landslide--Nixon who was absolutely despised by almost all young people. The youth side of the generation gap supported a mellower man named McGovern who, I think I remember, promised to lower the voting age to eighteen and end the war.

Kui Ka Lono  staff had voted to publish their student newspaper as a collective, a sort of leaderless team governed by consensus--that is, no Editor.

This was very convenient when some irate reader came into the office to punch the Editor out for some offensive article about the war because he just couldn't punch everybody! 


Some of my journalism students decided to protest the war by chaining themselves to the flagpole in the center of the campus and I watched them being arrested and dragged away to police paddy wagons. 

What textbooks there were on mass communication and news writing were not much help to me under these chaotic conditions.


I believe in the old-fashioned "freedom of the press" and thought the students had a right to  speak their mind in the Kui Ka Lono but I also tried to encourage them to keep their articles balanced and to avoid lawsuits.

These were exciting times for this new Associate Professor!

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