What I'm going to miss about the USA...

...is public television! As a public school teacher, I have no life because I'm usually way too exhausted by the stresses of the teaching week to do anything on the weekends. Thank God for public television, which comforts me, entertains me, and keeps me company more than ever now that Anette is back in Norway. I've watched Brother Cadfael at least the past six Saturday nights in a row, and I always try to catch Masterpiece Theater and old Sherlock Holmes episodes during the week or on Sunday nights. But my all-time favorite is Nature, which in addition to being highly educational, will always remind me of curling up on the couch in the study with Olivia on Saturday mornings when we were kids.

Sweat Lodge

My first sweat lodge was in rehab on a snowy mountaintop in New Hampshire. Now it's eight years later...Thought you all would like to know that I drove down south of San Jose with my sponsor today to participate in my second California Indian sweat lodge. The ceremony was intense, and we were joined by some 15 members of a group called Common Vision - total nomadic hippies living in painted buses and traveling around California planting trees for schools. Wasn't sure if it was 2007 or 1967. The man leading the sweat (my sponsor's sponsor) talked about what he remembered from the 60s, and how much these young people reminded him of the good old days. Anyway, as we were driving back at sunset through the scrubby hills surrounding Hollister and Gilroy (garlic capital of the world)we saw a bobcat - a first for me! He was most certainly chasing rabbits who were out to silfay, but he stopped and let us admire him for a while. So, I can now add this rarely-seen beauty to my list of species that I've seen for the first time out here - including elk and quail.

Blogging again?

It's been exactly two years since I wrote "skool," the second post on this blog. I haven't had the time or energy to add anything to this page in the last year and a half, but I've been reinspired by the superhuman efforts of my friend Paul, an American opera singer married to a Norwegian flautist. Their daughter was born on my birthday in 2004, when I was living in Oslo, and just three days ago, their first son was born - on my dad's 62nd birthday. Through it all, Paul has been able to blog almost daily about all the details of his life, a feat I admire and appreciate.

The truth is, though, that I haven't been totally absent from the blogosphere - last summer I led an amazing trip for thirteen of my students to Morelia, Michoacan, and we recorded our experiences on the MexEx2006 blog and in the videos they created. Hmmm...maybe Nobu can help me figure out how to get the videos onto youtube, and then we can link them to the blog...

How ironic that I aspire to live as Thoreauvian a life as possible, yet with a few clicks I can utilize of the wonders of technology to disseminate my thoughts to the world. Well, I am finishing up my Master's degree, after all, and it is 2007, not 1847, so I guess I can reconcile any disagreements Old Henry might have had with computers and bloggers.

Speaking of that degree, that's why I haven't been able to write at leisure; all my writing of the past two years has been for school - either Berkeley High or George Mason. I'm not sure when I'll write my book about the travesties and joys of public education in America (maybe this is it) but I'd like to strive for consistency from here on out. I'm supposed to be be writing a research paper right now, but this is more fun.

As reflect on the "skool" post of March 23, 2005, I'm struck by the fact that good listening remains the cornerstone of my teaching and my classroom discussions. I could write pages about each and every day and each conversation and interaction that that has transpired between then and now, but happily, for all I've grown and been challenged by my students and the reality of their lives, I'm still me. Just today I had a similarly intense discussion as that first one two years ago, but this time with a different set of students. Granted, I know these students on a much more personal level (thanks to the idea of small schools - yeah CAS!) but the ultimate lesson for me is that to be an effective teacher, I simply need to be a caring human being with good listening skills.

I hope to write soon about our recent field trip to see Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings, and the awful irony of Congress passing an emergency war spending bill authorizing another 100 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All I want to know is - where's the emergency public education bill?