How to Make the Class Experience Better

Response to a query for suggestions on a SQL Optimization class I took recently:
**** ******* *********

Yes I enjoyed the class. Yes I have recommendations.

How to make the experience better next time:

Work harder at making sure each student is orientated to the page/exercise/script/folder/screen that teacher is working on at the moment: Too many students including self miss a beat, not know how they got to where they are, lose contact with flow of talk, quickly get discouraged and miss the exercise. When everything builds upon the previous thing learned, keeping orientated with where the class is supposed to be and getting there is paramount.

Spend time working with the students through the labs instead of just turning them silently loose for an hour and a half. Get them orientated again and make sure they get started right. Too many people are lost too much of the time. Just because a few basically already know it and stay with the teacher, doesn’t mean everybody does. Students are just too embarrassed to admit they’re not keeping up. It’s the Teacher’s responsibility to ensure everyone is onboard. Just asking, “is everybody with us?” and no one answering is not sufficient.

Orientation. Orientation. Orientation.

Ensure the student is orientated with where we are and how we got there.

Ensure it!

Look over her shoulder if you have to. If they’re not on the same page, they’re not orientated.

Too Bad for You - Suckers. My Wife Cooks.

Preacher gave a sermon yesterday. Said, "So, when did 'cooking' become a four-letter word?" His message series was titled "Marriage by the Book."

Not being very interested in the sermon, I leaned to my wife eventually and whispered, "Is this relevant?"

She tuned me in with, "Oh yeah, you'd be surprised the women that don't cook."

I said, "Huh? Really? Well how do people eat then?"

After sitting through the pretty boring sermon - mostly describing the ideal woman from Proverbs 31 and how she was industrious and cooked and was a pleasure to behold and on and on - I went to the Sunday School class only to hear the women laugh and carry on how they don't cook at all. One prominent lady said she doesn't even bother to bring home fast food. It was pretty much a joke of an idea to even think about cooking. The male teacher himself said his wife's stove had been broke for two years. And the wife didn't even know it. Another minister's wife joked how she had just informed her husband no Sunday dinner would be ready for today and he'd have to take her to a restaurant.

As church was ending a man in the foyer was practically crying, shaking, and telling me how these sermons on happy marriages were killing him. He couldn't take much more. He said he was ready to "just give it all up" and to "cut losses and get a divorce". He said he was embarrassed that his children had to hear what a good mom was like.

After going home I asked my wife more about these other women that don't cook.

She reminded me of some friends of ours who are on the edge of divorce. She doesn't cook, the house is usually a wreck, and she doesn't particularly prepare herself or any greeting for when her husband gets home off of work.

She complains her husband isn't being the loving kind of husband she wants. She may leave him.

I thought of another person. I was his best man at his wedding. He has two children.

His wife used to broadcast often that she "does not cook and never will. Period." They pack up the kids and go out somewhere every night - if they want to eat.

They're going through a divorce now.

We went home after church and ate:

• Chicken fried chicken w/ gravy
• Green beans (grown from her garden)
• Fresh tomatoes and cucumbers (garden again)
• Homemade brownies
  

I brought in the leftovers to work today and ate it all again.

It was really really really good.

Mmmmmmmmmm.........

The Rightness of Playing by the Rules

A conversation yesterday caused me to rethink my primary supposition that playing "with" the rules is a superior mode of behavior than playing "by" the rules.

I'm a much better boundary pusher and game designater than player. I find it more fun to alter games with more interesting rules than to play by someone else's pre-defined rules.

I'm talking of course about social interaction, rules of engagement, unspoken rules, rules of etiquette.... that sort of thing. Purely the abstract and unsaid norms that are picked up by culture and mimicry alone.

What Clint forced me to note is that there is a chord of discongruency between a Machiavellian approach to social orders with moral values. This may seem obivious to most, but being a bit of an elitist and rebel and having grown up under the air of suspicion that everyone and everybody's basically hiding some kind of original intent - I can't help but being this weird Machiavellian Christian paradoxical misanthrope.

I don't trust the world but I trust in some ephmeral omnipotent Good.

So I'm changing my way of thinking.

I see that there is a fundamental "rightness" to "playing by the rules" and a fundamental "evil" and arrogance to "playing WITH the rules."

Systems themselves sustain the individuals. Thus any system resists subversion (by making rules, and punishing rule-breakers) to sustain itself while the individuals who "play by the rules" sustain themselves by sustaining the system.

(some of this has to do with the science of "emergence" - guess or google it.)

The conclusive moral of the story for me is to:

FIND THE FLOW

.... and GO with it.

2 B Faithful to the Green Godess or 2 B a Damned Hypocrite: That is the Question

While chatting with a drunken neighbor the other day the discussion of native songbirds being displaced by non-native intrusive species came up. You know - how European Sparrows and Starlings and such have displaced the original American Buntings and Tanagers and such? They've been doing it for hundreds of years now encouraged by the encroaching landscapes of agricultural and suburbian growth.

He intensely tells me how he hates these intrusive birds and says he takes a gun out and shoots them every chance he gets.

Him being an aggressive, redneckish, self confessed drunkardly sort of person, I was surprised to see him have such a passion for native species ala the "environment."

I was surprised just to hear him act like he liked anything really other than beer.

Thinking I was in some kind of normal semi-intelligent conversation, I started reasoning with him how, "Well, these other birds are creatures of nature also and just want to eat... blah blah ... the earth changes, animals migrate... etc... I'm not sure despising, trapping and shooting all of them is the answer... and so on"

Foolish me.

He got extremely irrate, looked at me in appalled disgust and said, "Why you're nothing but just a God-damn hypocrite!"

He hollared at his wife he was soundly going home now and stomped off. I thought he wanted to punch me. (We were at least friendly acquaintences before that.)

I didn't know what to say and really felt dumbfounded.

I don't believe I've ever been called a hypocrite before. It didn't make sense. How can you be a hypocrite about basic nature and the environment with a "things-like-to-eat" stance.

(I have a degree in Environmental science and I sacrifice much to live in the Texas hill country wilderness where I live. I love animals and nature. I never use pesticides. I gave up hunting cause I don't like killing, and I'll carry a spider or insect out of the house to set it free outside instead of killing it.)

I pondered for weeks why he so vehemently dispised and rebuked me so under his "realization" that I was hypocrite.

Then it finally dawned on me.

This was some kind of religion to him.

He's a member of some kind of Green Goddess cult.

It's religion. How else could one become a hypocrite, except within the confines of some kind of a religious proclamation?

(By the way, he works for a construction company that claims to be very eco-friendly and has the green image built into their marketing.)

First Great Adventure

my little 5 year old nephew was swimming in the Blanco river the other day..... water was high and rapids were flowing. we got caught up in a flow and kind of got swept downstream... i was struggling a little bit but being very sure to hang onto his arm.... i was going to drown myself before I let him get into trouble... he couldn't swim, but I wasn't really too worried cause i knew that the rapids weren't too long and they were shallow. we were never really in any danger though i'd had a beer or two and i shouldn't got caught up with this little one in the rapids in the first place.

we came out of it after falling about and sucking water a few times. I pushed him to the shore and came out myself.

he walked up to his dad, who was a little bit bit worried and would've jumped in to save us both at any given moment, and commented, "I just had my first great adventure."

It was cute and funny and dramatic.

What struck me the most was just the awareness that this little boy had of his own life - to the extent that he could frame up in his own little mind his own life to the extent of viewing his whole life in his mind - and he figured this was his first "great adventure."

I was honored.

I hope he'll remember me and his first great adventure.

driving home drunk

i was driving home this evening and i realized that you should wear your seat belt especially if you're drunk. I was kind of swerving across the double yellow lines without my seat belt on and it struck me - if I wrecked, I'd be hurt even worse without my seat belt. So I'm going to try and remember and encourage everyone else. When you drive drunk, be sure to wear your seat belt. It'll give you a little bit more protection in case you wreck.

Open Response to cousin Kirby Grider in Iraq

Sent Fri 5/25/2007 9:10 AM

Dear Kirby Grider,

What an honor to receive such a complimentary letter. Just this one letter expressing appreciation for the work I’ve done gives me hope that it’s not done in vain. Knowing there are others like myself who just want to know and appreciate those people that came before us and generated the seeds that today have become myself - makes it an honor for doing it all. Thank you very very much for expressing your appreciation.

I hope this letter finds you and you can forgive me for the long delay in response. You may have been put aside, but you were not forgotten. Thank you for the bravery it takes to keep up such faith.


[Your letter has been sitting on my desktop as I’ve pondered and played and forgotten. But I’ve left it there to remind me to make the time to reply in a proper manner.]

In response to your letter:

So you knew Goldie, huh? That’s cool. I’ve got some pictures and video of her and me in her last years. She gave me lots of good material, documents, and photos. I need to trace back to where you say your family and mine tie and maybe I can find some pictures you’d be interested in.

So you remember stories of Grandma Phoebe, huh? That’s super cool. There’s maybe one or two people left alive that actually remember her. One of them is my Uncle Roy who was a child when she was around. He is about 80 now. (I’ve named my dog “Phoebe Dove” as a keepsake of her name.)

Scotch-Irish blood is a bit of a misnomer. There was hundreds of years of warring and land switching between the three sections of northernmost England between the mixed bloods of Scotch/Irish/English. This is what has come to be known in common language as just “Scotch-Irish”. They in reality were migrants from those warring tribes in that three-fold area that arrived into the 13 colonies right AFTER the main English settled the coastal plains. Since all the good lands were taken, they were forced to reside and “settle” the backwoods lands and into the Appalachian foothills.

They were a warring and migrant class of people where the women kept what little homes they maintained and the men did mostly warring. They were tough and fit into the rough life of mountain living and Indian fighting. These were where the original hillbilly archetypes come from.

The families moved up and over the Appalachians and up the Ohio valley which pretty much ends in the Kentucky, Southern Illinois, Missouri valleys and bottom lands. (Look at a relief map and you can envision it.)

That’s the high level view of what populated these areas and where our ancestors in Southern Illinois came from.

As far as your personal family history goes… considering that you have two children and the interest is deep within your heart, I would strongly recommend you not put off pursuing your father and his history.

Get at least the names and pictures before it is too late. Don’t put it off. Your mother may be embarrassed or something, but she needs to get it off her chest also. It will make for a blessed conversation between you and your mom.

Thanks for being a soldier and taking on the hardship of being over there in Iraq.

My advice:
Research, find, and write down who you are, where you came from and what you think.
You never know who it might help plus you’ll make it that much harder for them to forget about you.

Again, my sincerest apologies for such an extreme delayed response.


Your friend and cousin,
Mitch Sanders