The Conversation

Kids               I don’t want to run for public office, I never have, but if I did, I would focus on our children and how to set them up for future success. As a member of the first generation in this country predicted to be worse off than their parents both physically and financially, this is particularly important for me . Kids are our future, and we need to do a better job taking care of them and enabling them to have the quality of life we wish for them (which I’m assuming is better than the one we have made for ourselves). I’m a public-school teacher of middle and high school students and have been for over a decade (since before the iPhone came out and teaching fully metamorphosed into an exercise in frustration). As a public servant and one who has a heart for the future success of our nation through the next generation, I find it important to address what we are going to do for our descendants (while figuring ...

Am I actually running for president? Not now. I am reasonable enough to know that an idea borne of frustration at lacking a candidate that represents me and my family is not going to change the world. But an idea can change the world, and these generations are the ones most capable of doing so. I am going to dream of a world where no one is hungry, thirsty, or at the mercy of the elements. If I was running for president, I would need to explain my platform, get feedback, and adapt it to the needs of each community. The problem is most people focus on one or two issues and try to solve them independently. What I have learned as a science teacher and a student of the social sciences is that many issues are intertwined and need to be addressed as a whole, instead of in parts, if they are going to be any good for the average American.               For example, I want to tackle homelessness. That is a doozy and requires so...

  What if a public-school teacher ran for President of the United States? Just to be clear, I am talking about me. What if an average American ran for president?   Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable, as there was no inexpensive and effective method to disseminate information to enough voters. The PAC’s will certainly ignore anyone who has no interest in increasing their wealth, so where would the money come from? Now we have social media, the internet, and GoFundMe. I can share information with the largest voting block without spending a dime; merely becoming viral will get me the support and start the discussions to bring voters around to a new (and old) way of campaigning. GoFundMe will allow a person with student loan debt and making less than living wage to go around the country and talk to fellow Americans about what they need. This is the first thing that will separate me from the pack: I want to listen. I want to know what you need. What we are a...

  Once Upon A Dystopia … housing became a human right. Millions of people were homeless. Hundreds died of exposure every year. Most of those affected were veterans in need of medical care. The people had had enough. But they hadn’t, yet. Those without homes or preferred nomadic lifestyles were less likely to vote, and therefore their concerns drowned out by superfluous issues that the housed could focus on. When a generation was unable to afford a comfortable and consistent roof over their heads, the people decided that housing was a problem worth solving. The Human Rights Amendment narrowly passed on its tenth iteration, but it was responsible for, among other things, providing a stable roof over every citizen in the country for those who wanted one. The HRA was inspired when its prototype, the Equal Rights Amendment, failed a decades’ long battle to pass. The Housing Rights Article in the HRA is the third in the amendment, in honor of the original Constitution’s original thir...

                Many things in life are disappointing. More things are disappointing than might be under different circumstances. What we expect to happen often does not meet the reality after we have met that goal. This sense of expectations being far “better” than reality shows life to be creates dissatisfaction, which in turn creates anxiety and a need to reduce the negative feelings. It is this cycle of dissatisfaction that is Grass is Greener Syndrome. This series of emotional and behavioral reactions to unmet expectations are one of the causes of the social ills we find as an affluent society (or at least the sections of society that experience affluence).               We’ve all heard the phrase “the grass is greener on the other side.” In Hardcore Zen, the author points out that we always expect the grass to be greener, but it is never as gre...

  Sick at School                 Students and staff alike are discouraged from staying home when they are sick. This has been true for the decades that I have been a part of the system. The discouragement stems from the method through which schools are funded and the punitive enforcement policies schools enact to protect their funding. The major downside to this policy is that more people get sick and fall behind in their learning. The band-aid solution to this (alleviating the problem without changing the system) is simple in both concept and implementation.                 Students, parents, and staff dread being sick. The illness itself may only take a person out of the classroom for a couple days, but the road to educational recovery can take weeks, months, or even years. This is far longer than the handful of days that is the...

       It is hot. It is too hot. It is unbearably hot in California this week, especially if you don't have an air conditioner. Even if we all had AC to make this heat wave bearable, there isn't enough energy in the grid to provide it. What do we do about this? What CAN we do about this? I don't want to live through another heat wave when someone has to die because they can't cool off.      AP reported this week that the heat was so bad that California, standard-bearer of clean and green energy for the nation, used natural gas to cope with the 52,000-megawatt demand of Tuesday (the hottest day of the wave). Natual gas is the (haha) natural backup supply for wind and solar. In a couple decades, in part because of the statewide push for moving to electric vehicles and appliances, we will use far more energy in a normal day, let alone extreme heat. How are we going to have the infrastructure to provide for these needs?     Any realistic sol...

Article Title : US Schools Need an Infrastructure Upgrade Source: California Educator (CTA monthly magazine) Date: 2021, month unknown (I tore it out of the magazine months ago)      Okay, both an obvious and boring opening topic, I know. This is also not really breaking news, and I wanted the stories I wrote about to be more recent than last year. This is news because I have only just left the teaching profession in part because of this issue, and the infrastructure issues featured in a graph in this article clearly demonstrate how critical this issue is to the future (of everyone, not just the kids who have to learn in these conditions). When I say school infrastructure, I mean the basics that include running water and roofs that don't leak, let alone mental health services and internet access.             The article itself is only a few paragraphs, but it is the graph that tells the real story. The key takeaway is that at leas...

What If… We treated problems holistically instead of individually?               One of the things I realized early on in my adult education was the relationship between seemingly disparate ideas. My bachelor’s degree focused on the relationship between biological equilibrium, environmental factors, and the mental reaction of individuals. From the beginning, I knew that it was folly to think that any of these categories could be studied in a vacuum. It did not take long for me to realize that it was not only in my own specialty that this was true, but in many other aspects of life. Yet, the compartmentalized view of the world is how the general populace perceives its environment, and social problems in particular.               As an educator, I found myself unable to teach only the subject with which I was tasked. I found the need for students t...

The What If… Series               What if we focused on how to truly solve problems, instead of putting band-aids on bullet wounds? What if we restarted discourse so that we focused on how to help each other, instead of complaining about how we are not as happy as we could be? What if we spent more time talking about the good we can do, instead of the evils done by others? These and other fundamental questions will drive my new What If… series of blog posts.               The inspiration for the series comes from my experience as a classroom teacher. I am a fan of discourse and questions in the classroom, and encourage them from my students. Often, I will hear a “What if” question from my students, usually presented as a source of distraction. My answer to this is often, “Your guess is as good as mine. Think about it and let me know what you come up...