Catherine started it

Catherine started it when she came back from a weekend in Ithaca.  She had one of those  save-the-date postcards for an AIDS benefit ride around Cayuga Lake.  It was her way of saying that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I lost a few pounds.
But I thought it sounded like fun: one hundred miles around a pretty lake on a crisp fall day.  Nice, right?

So, after letting the card sit on the kitchen counter for the better part of a month, I signed up, raised a few hundred bucks, and trained all summer.  And when September came, I cranked out the hundred miles and all I could think about was riding more.  Since then, I have spun my skinny bicycle tires over thousands and thousands of miles of roads both dirt and paved.

This past weekend, I struggled to 18th place in the Tour of the Adirondacks and, if my thumbs and fingers are correct, that slog marked my 10th race.

Now, there are a lot of bike blogs and, as a cyclist, I find more than a few of them interesting for a variety of reasons that only other cyclists understand.  Cycling, to be sure, is one of the many subsets of subsets of social groups that exist in the world.  And as much as this blog is all about me, I do have some empathy towards my dear reader (hi, Jane).  So, after my 10th race, I would like to share a few observations that I have made about bicycling, bicycles and bicyclists.

The sound.  I had never ridden in a pack or peloton before.  I, like other casual watchers of the Tour de France, had heard it again and again: riding with a group is faster and easier than riding all alone.  Well, what can I say?  It’s true.  What I didn’t understand was that it is more like flying in a swarm of bees than riding a bike.  Not all that many people have heard the sound of ten or fifteen pairs of wheels each with 20 or 24 spokes each ripping through the air and each with a narrow tire inflated to impossible pressures working the grain of a country road.  And this is something I think about when I am riding with the club or some other group:  how lucky I am to hear this sound, to hurtle inches from other bodies all doing the same as me, trusting the others to keep from crashing and bringing the whole thing down like bowling pins.  It’s thrilling.

The pain.  We, as people, can’t remember pain.  We only remember that there was pain but the actual feeling can’t be stored or recalled…or so I believe.  Now, I’m very sure there is some pain in cycling.  I know it.  But as I write, I am hard-pressed to give it the respect it probably deserves.  When I am driving to the race, I completely forget the pain and visualize myself laying big patches of smoking rubber as I attack relentlessly on the hills.  But when the race begins and the peloton flies over the first few little climbs or ‘kickers’ I begin to remember the pain.  It’s really more like a low-level insurrection at that point but half way up the first major climb and the insurrection has become an all-out rebellion.  Those imagined attacks on the climb?  Long gone.

The beauty.  Earlier this spring I was riding with two other guys and a storm was brewing as we headed out over the broad, lush flats that drain the foothills of the Taconics.  When the storm hit, sheets of rain lashed us like movie-set waves washing over the decks of a crippled vessel.  But as quickly as the storm was upon us, we popped out the other side to see a golden sunset set the hills on fire and the hayfields turn to molten gold while the storm, a dark gray ball of cloud, sent streaks of lightning dancing over its surface in the west.

Thanks, Catherine.

Usual suspects

It was funny.  Wasn’t it?  Sure, it was funny.  And, besides, the kids were laughing as the skinny boy with the buzz-cut unzipped his pack to reveal a fat bundle of pens, pencils and other stationary.  OK, he had stolen it all but you had to be impressed by the size of the haul.  Even the kids he had stolen it from nodded their heads in approval.  There had to be sixty or seventy all bound neatly with several rubber bands also stolen.

She can do the angry voice, this teacher.  I’ve only been teaching in the alternative program for a week but I have heard it once or twice already.  I’ve seen her look over her glasses at some girl or boy during DEAR when a giggle or snicker breaks the silence and all their eyes return to reading.  But, now, she smiles sweetly and tells him to spread the loot on another kid’s desk.

“Find what’s yours!” she says.  I watch, expecting a frenzy of payback theft, but there is none.  They take what is theirs and return to their desks.

A period later, she waves me over and points to her laptop.  She has the local paper on her screen.  A mugshot of a man with a familiar-looking buzz cut stares glumly out at us beneath a headline that reads, “Local Jewelers Hit Twice, One Arrested.”

It’s the pencil thief’s father.  The article was posted only an hour ago.  The kid doesn’t even know.

When I left at the end of the day, I checked in at the main office to let the principal know I was leaving but he was on the phone ordering a pizza.   Next to him, elbows on his knees and head in his hands, was the pencil thief.

My room part II or Do desks deserve tenure?

It was a symbol.  Not a desk.  Not a collection of wood and nails and laminated oak paneling.  A symbol that I had disassembled without the use of tools and slid neatly out the fire window.  And, although my mouth has spewed several apologies since then, my heart was glad.

Had I shown somebody up?  Was it, therefore, a symbol of someone else's ineffectiveness or incompetence?

Perhaps.

But I began to think of it as a symbol for something that has been on my mind for a while; tenure.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have tenure and my status as a tenured teacher allowed me to feel secure enough in my job to rid my room of a dangerous eyesore.

But tenure is under attack.  Seen by most as a guarantee of continued employment for bad, lazy and incompetent teachers, it is in the crosshairs of many politicians and a cocktail party punch line.

But this is what I was thinking.  That desk did not have tenure.  No law protected it and still it remained very much like one of those lazy, stupid teachers that nobody can seem to get rid of.  So, perhaps, it is not tenure that protects.  Maybe it’s a system that protects.  A system in which nobody is really responsible or, more accurately, several people are responsible.

Fact; administrators can fire teachers who aren’t doing a good job.  All they have to do is document the teacher’s shortcomings, make recommendations and follow up.  If that teacher still has not managed to fix what was broken, that teacher can be dismissed.  Will the union challenge the dismissal?  Of course!  But if the administrator has her ducks in a row, it’s a bad day for that teacher.

But that would mean administrators would have to observe classes in their schools.  In nine years of being a tenured teacher, I have never been observed in the act of teaching by any administrator.  The fact is that they are too busy dealing with the myriad other tasks a principal has to deal with;  disciplinary stuff, leaky roofs. and, yes, teachers who commit savage acts of demolition in their planning periods.

My room

This year is going to be different. I have been saying this for pretty near two months now but after today, I am sure it’s true.

I am in room 5. It’s the first time since my internship twelve years ago that I have had a room. Back at the high school, they were shared properties; communally decorated and maintained and, sometimes, defiled by upwards of five inhabitants.

But now I have a room. One room. For my students and me.

It’s typical, I suppose, in a kind of public school, ground-level, looks-out-on-the-puddled-parking lot way. Yes, a giant garbage pail collected a tea-colored liquid that dripped steadily from the sodden ceiling tiles above and, yes, there was a sadness to the room that turned the walls a depressingly mediocre hue of yellow, but what really caught my attention was that…THING!

What was it?

“Oh that!” said the veteran of a decade of teaching in the building. “That was for training bank tellers. See the cameras?” She pointed to the corners of the room. Indeed, video cameras of varying antiquity stared at us from every direction. So the town police had constructed a mock-up of a bank and used this room to train bank tellers. And that aforementioned thing? That monstrosity of gold-flecked Formica and oak wood paneling? That, she explained, had been the desk behind which the tellers had stood awaiting the entrance of their assailants. Presumably, a policeman had posed as a bank-robber and, in something that instantly made me think of Monty Python skits, burst into the room yelling, ‘Stick-em up!’ or “Gimme all the dough!’

“Can we get rid of it?” I asked.

Well…no.

She confessed that she had tried but the building maintenance staff had stopped her fearing that she would electrocute herself.

“It’s not wired, though” she said. “There’s no power going to it.” She had, in fact, made a pretty good whack at destroying the beast to the extent that it’s flimsiness was exposed for all the world to see as well as several, snaggled ten-penny nails that protruded nastily from both its ends.

So there it was. And there I was.

I examined the structure and then, carefully, lifted the countertop a cautious inch just to see what would happen. I met no resistance at all and soon I had the thing in pieces and out the fire window and half of it stacked neatly in the parking lot next to the maintenance truck.

And then the trouble began.

Same as it ever was...

I’m firing up the blog again. Kimbob is back. When I started the blog the first time, it was in anticipation of a trip to Mongolia to teach civics. When the trip ended, so did the blog. Simply put, there wasn’t a whole lot I thought anyone wanted to read about so, I reasoned, why write? And, truthfully, I think it scared me to see no definite end-point.

So, you may ask, since I am blogging, does that mean that my life is about to become more exciting again? I may hope so but in reality, no. Yes, another school year awaits and that is on some level exciting to me but I am not planning any trips to far-away lands. OK, we (that means Catherine, Chloe, Marcus, and Jane, my mother-in-law) wedged ourselves onto an Airbus A-who-put-these-seats-so-close-together and went to England to check up on my relatives and see a few castles. That was pretty exciting. Maybe I can put together some words worth reading on that. And, since my return from Mongolia, I have taken up cycling which might be worth a few posts particularly if I crash. And I have also discovered that I love cooking and now you are saying to yourself, “Not another Goddamn food blog with all those artsy, backlit food pictures,” but, yes, that’s exactly what I intend to provide. You can skip those ones. I understand.

My plan is to have some kind of plan to writing. Perhaps readers should expect three posts per week. One on cycling, another on cooking, maybe one on teaching and, wait, that’s four right there.

Organization was never my strong point.