The evening of Thanksgiving in 2015, about a year and a half ago, I experienced the worst stomach ache I’ve ever had. We were staying in a hotel visiting family, and I spent several hours writhing in pain on the floor of the room. No stores were open, and I didn’t have any stomach remedies with me, so I just sat there and suffered. I figured that I had over-eaten, and left it at that.

After that, not too long afterwards, it happened again. I figured that I was either eating too much, or there were certain foods that no longer agreed with me. So I began watching how much I would eat and tried to pay attention to the kinds of foods that would trigger it.

I figure over the past year and a half, I’ve had similar episodes of severe stomach pain 4-5 times, with some lesser ones thrown in as well. Sometimes, if I realized it was likely to happen, I could stave it off by going for walks.

Historically, I haven’t really been one for seeing doctors. I’d never been to the emergency room. The last time I was a hospital patient was when I was born. I knew something was going on with my health, but I didn’t know exactly what, or what to do about it. But after my last stomach episode, I decided if it happened again, I’d go to the doctor or ER.

Last Saturday evening, after a delicious meal of crock pot roast beef & potatoes, the pain started up again. It was the worst I’d ever felt. I was coughing, vomiting, and had unbelievable discomfort in my gut, a pressure that couldn’t be relieved. Finally, around 11pm, I decided to go to the ER.

Now the hospital is 15 miles away and I decided to drive myself there. Probably not the best decision to drive myself, but it was late, and I didn’t want to upset the family. I told my wife where I was going, and let the kids sleep. When I finally arrived at the hospital, it felt like it was taking forever to get checked in and answer all of their questions.

Oh, it hurt! But it seemed like it was taking forever to get any relief. Drawing blood. Asking questions. Trying to figure out what was going on with me. Finally, they gave me an IV and some pain killers and I was able to relax. I was getting woozy, and had to lie down. Soon, I was getting X-rayed and CT scanned, and with those results we knew I had a problem with my gallbladder, and it had to come out.

I had to go to another hospital an hour away to have surgery, so that meant I’d go for my first ambulance ride. I called my wife and told her to meet me there. I was so tired, I slept most of that ride. Once I got checked into the Salina hospital, there were more tests, more questions, and explanations about what was going to happen. I would be having emergency surgery. It was all happening so fast. Incredibly fast, really. In less than 20 hours, I would go to the ER, transfer to another hospital, have my gallbladder removed, and return home again.

Here we are, just before going into the operating room. I was obviously feeling no pain at this point.

I probably should have been more nervous about things than I was, but heading into the operating room, it only took a couple of minutes and it was lights out for me.

It only felt like a couple of minutes later, and I was awake again and the surgery was already done. I was amazed that I was able to walk within a few hours after surgery. I was sent home on the same day. I was able to take my dog for a walk that evening. A big part of the speedy recovery is that it was a laparoscopic surgery done with cameras and four small incisions instead of one large one.

The wifi was good in the room.

I used the walker to regain my legs. My daughter asked me to do a dab.

Recovery has been pretty quick. I’ve had some tenderness and soreness, but overall things are getting back to normal pretty quickly.

Today I was reading Fulton Sheen’s book Life of Christ when I came across the word “valedictory” and I had no clue as to its meaning. That is what happens when you read Sheen, he is going to lay some big words on you and you are going to learn something along the way.

Sheen was referring to Mary’s command at the wedding of Cana to the wine stewards, “Do whatever he tells you.” These are the last words of the mother of Christ recorded in scripture. And being so, they are a clue to the meaning of the word “valedictory.”

When I want to understand the meaning and origin of a word, many times I consult the online etymology dictionary. So I looked up “valedictory” and I learned it means “departing words.” Ok, that makes sense; Sheen is referring to Mary’s departing words.

Intrigued, I dig a little deeper. Valedictorian is a common word stemming from the word valedictory. It means one who speaks departing words. Digging a little deeper, the Latin root words are Valere – “be strong” (like valor) and Dicere – “to say” (like diction).

Again, I had no idea that the job of valedictorian literally is to tell departing classmates at commencement to “be strong.” I thought it was just an honorific bestowed on the student with the highest GPA. I learned something new today.

This past Sunday at church we heard about the letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote to school children shortly before he passed away. To me, the essence of the advice he gave was this:

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Indeed, make your soul grow. Today is the beginning of the season of Lent, a time when many Christians reflect on the state of their own souls and on their relationship with God. Our pastor used the Vonnegut letter to bring in this new liturgical season.

I have a couple of confessions to make. One confession is, I haven’t been practicing much art at all even though it is one of my most favorite things. A year ago last Christmas our family got a new electric piano, and I spent weeks playing on that thing. Now it’s probably been a year passed since I was last on it. I’ve started up sketch books, journals, watercolors, blogs, etc. etc. but life gets so busy I don’t keep them up. So this Lent, I hope to do a little more of these favorite things and a little less of things that are distracting but ultimately time-wasters.

Another confession, I’ve not read Kurt Vonnegut before. That is before last night, when I downloaded an e-book of Slaughterhouse-Five. Something about that title I suppose that didn’t attract me. But once I started reading, I was hooked. He was talking about the Bombing of Dresden in WWII. I’d never heard about that part of the war, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Incredible. Unbelievable. Tens of thousands of people killed in a few days.

And in reading Vonnegut, it sounded like he’d actually been there. He was. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden, and survived the bombing by hiding in a meatlocker of the slaughterhouse where he was being held prisoner. I haven’t read a lot of the book, but I get the sense that maybe this is a book that all war veterans, such as myself, should read.

I know Slaughterhouse-Five is a classic and I should have read it before now. But better late than never, right? Like I said, over the next several weeks, I hope to be doing lots of things that help nourish and grow my soul. It’s about time.

Our Canvas CMS has been out for half of the day today. This is where student assignments, grades and course content are stored for our whole university. I knew it was bigger than K-State when I saw a faculty friend from Mizzou wondering if others couldn’t use Canvas.

I soon learned that Canvas is hosted on Amazon Web Services or AWS, and that was the source of the difficulty. This is a service that is normally very reliable. So I started searching on Twitter to see what people are saying. And I found these memes about it already.

White House confirms: #AWS #S3 functioning as expected, no reports of outages. pic.twitter.com/Zzh6wOFRLP

— Will Dunn (@xiaodown) February 28, 2017

Amazon S3 according to the #AWS status page. pic.twitter.com/WpMAyHs0nY

— David C. Campbell (@DCCampbell) February 28, 2017

Amazon technicians right now fixing Amazon S3 outage #aws #awsoutage pic.twitter.com/CVij8sevzO

— Suhaib Malik (@suhaibmalik) February 28, 2017

Mr. President, is Amazon S3 down today? #amazons3 #aws @realDonaldTrump @amazon pic.twitter.com/2vzQW7cP1p

— James Hopkins (@Endgax) February 28, 2017

My kids have attended school their entire lives under No Child Left Behind, and more recently the Common Core. They are now in 7th and 9th grade. Each spring they undergo a barrage of preparation and testing assessments. It is easy for a young person to equate these measures of academic ability with a measure of their value as a human being.

I’ve seen it in my own kids. They encounter a baffling question in homework or a practice test, and they feel dumb. If I happen to be there when these questions come up, I don’t feel dumb and I don’t think they should either. I know better. Sometimes the questions are way off base. They are ill-conceived or even just plain wrong. They simply don’t measure what they purport to measure.

Today I read an article by Sarah Holbrook, a writer and poet whose work was used on a standardized reading test, and she couldn’t answer the questions about her own work. Why couldn’t she answer the questions? Because, she says,

These test questions were just made up, and tragically, incomprehensibly, kids’ futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to made up questions.

How is this kind of testing fair to kids and their teachers? I’ve tried to teach my kids not to put too much weight into this stuff. I teach them coping mechanisms. I teach them to simply do the best they know how to do and to not worry about individual questions that are troubling. I tell them the tests are composed by semi-literate monkeys and they shouldn’t worry what the monkeys think. I tell them if they don’t know the answer, just say “potato.” Or on a multiple choice test, they can use the four finger test by slapping four fingers on the desk, and whichever finger hurts the most denotes an A, B, C or D for the answer.

Mostly we just joke around about it and I tell them not to worry too much about the tests. But they still worry. I think it’s sad that kids go through their entire education with this cloud of this testing hanging over them. And I have to wonder if this testing environment isn’t at least in part to blame for my college students’ obsession with getting the “right” answer, instead of having a curious mind willing to ask questions and think deeply?

If I had a magic wand, I would wave it and compulsory standardized testing would stop. We would respect teaching as a profession. Educators would be responsible for the assessment of their pupils, not for-profit businesses who put the bottom line ahead of kids.

HT to Lunar Baboon

I try to live by this principle when it comes to teaching. Don’t say or do anything in classes you teach that you wouldn’t be proud to have made public in the news media. This is sometimes easier said than done, because after all, I’m human. I make mistakes from time to time. I’ve probably already made one today, and it’s only 5am as I’m writing this.

But I am reminded of this principle as I read the news out in California in which a student recorded the rant of a professor about president-elect Donald Trump.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/12/08/orange-coast-college-student-threatened-with-expulsion-after-recording-professors-anti-trump-tirade/#.WErc-XD8uFw.facebook

Every student carries a mobile recording studio in their pocket. Yes, it is probably bad manners to record someone secretly. And it might even be illegal. But if you need lawyers to keep students from recording and sharing what goes on in your classroom, you are probably doing it wrong.

If I think carefully about who my “influencers” are with respect to my teaching and my philosophy of education, probably the most influential are Postman and Weingartner and their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity. My own experience as a student, particularly before college, was frequently one of suffering. Some of my friends liked going to school, but for me it was painful drudgery. I enjoyed learning, but I did not enjoy school. While the suffering subsided in college, there were still a number of times when it arose again.

What was the root cause of the suffering for me in school? The inauthenticity of the experience. Those times when the teacher was able to “make it real” for the learners were the times that I was at my best as a student. I never bought into playing “The Great Trivia Game” that Postman and Weingartner describe:

It’s a kind of rigged quiz show. And it seems to work only if the participants value the “prize.” The “prize,” of course, is a “grade.” An appropriate grade permits the participant to continue playing the Trivia game. All the while, very little, if any, substantive intellectual activity is going on.

Examples of times the learning for me was not authentic:

• Taking a public speaking class in which most of the time was spent listening to the teacher talk about public speaking
• Taking a computer networking class in which the teacher read to us straight from the textbook
• Taking a teaching methods course in which the teacher lectured to us 99% of the time.

Instead, I preferred to be involved in something that seemed important, interesting and real—something I could really sink my teeth into. Something where the students were actually doing something. Some examples from my own education experience when learning was authentic:

• In 6th grade, social studies students (taught by Mark Treaster) were arranged into three groups, Europeans, Mestizos, and Indians/Slaves. The slaves worked their rear ends off doing academic drudge work – worksheets mostly. The mestizos worked less, and were supervisors of the slaves. The europeans assigned the work to the slaves and mestizos, but did no work themselves. I was a slave. By the end, I was angry, because the europeans kept moving the goal posts by which we could secure our freedom. When the tables turned, and the slaves became europeans and vice-versa, we really socked it to our former masters.
• In Navy electronics service school, we were taught with lectures and with hands on labs. We had practical tests, usually each week to show what we had learned, using the exact equipment we would work on in the fleet.
• In college, I had a history professor who engaged us in critical thinking. We had only one date to memorize – 1066 – the year of the last successful invasion of England. He made us think about all sides of an issue using evidence. We participated in many class discussions and we never knew where he personally stood on particular issues because he was fair in exploring all points of view.

While I am far from perfect in my own classroom, I do take pains to actively engage my students. It is something I am continually working on. It also varies on class size and topic how much I lecture and how much we are involved in activities.

One of the ideas I regularly try to convey to students is that Social Media can be used for serious, professional purposes. A good example of this was an online conversation I participated in this past week about teaching literature.

It all started with an innocent post from my Internet friend Scott Andrews, a professor of literature in California. I’ve never met Scott in person yet, but we’ve become connected online through a mutual acquaintance.

I really appreciate these discussions, because I can see what professors from other disciplines are thinking about.

I shared a comment about a speaker I saw earlier this year, Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me, and researcher of young adults and their culture.

I couldn’t remember where the data on the plummeting levels of reading came from exactly, Dr. Twenge shared so much with us last spring. But I need to find out. In short, it is a real challenge getting students to read anything substantial these days.

But I seem to recall seeing a graph that showed the rise of the smart phone and the decline of substantial reading happening around the same time. Certainly Internet access has reduced the amount of novels, magazines and newspapers we read. But mobile tech has taken our reading habits to new lows.

My approach lately has been to break a text down into manageable chunks and have each student read and report back to the group. Although no one reads an entire work, we can get a summary of one with a group effort.

Anyway, this was a great discussion online, and a good example of how teachers can collaborate and learn from one another using social media, even if they’ve never met in person. Anyone can use a similar approach to learn in any field, if they desire.

Yesterday proved to be insightful when talking with my students. I am constantly stumbling over cultural references when trying to reach them. I grew up in the 70s. They grew up in the 2000s. I realized just how big of a gap this is, when I asked them if they had heard of the Internet phenomenon, PostSecret.

Not one student had heard of it. I thought that PostSecret was pretty common knowledge, especially among Internet-savvy youth. I thought wrongly. So it is apparent to me that the tide has shifted from one where my students and I explore the Internet together sharing a wonder of discovery, to one where I can serve as a knowing guide on a well-travelled path. Of course, I will always be able to learn new things from them, but even while to me it is still quite new, I really, truly know much more about the Internet and it’s short heritage than they do.

The reason I mentioned PostSecret is that I was hoping for establishing a common reference point that speaks to the vulnerability and hurts that we all have. I am trying to build empathy for others.

Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart. If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world. – Frank Warren

I remember hearing the PostSecret founder state this truth, and it has always stuck with me. Probably no one has heard more confessions than Frank Warren, except perhaps the Curé of Ars, so he certainly has a firm understanding of the human condition.