I Hate My Job, I Love My Job

 Working at a small independent school has been my life's work. I am not a perfect teacher or coach, but I care deeply - very deeply - about my student's growth.

Increasingly, though, it has become apparent that I no longer work for a small, community-based institution where we all labor, laugh and struggle together. 

I work for a corporation.

This makes believe in the mission of the school so much harder when I am not longer treated as a respected teacher with the independence to act on my own expertise and experience. As if things couldn't get any worse, yesterday we had a consultant firm come in and tell us that we will be instituting a radical new schedule next year. As he himself admitted, this will be very disruptive and we will struggle for at least one year, more likely two, to adapt to this new schedule.

The time we have with our students is precious and all most of us really want is the tools to teach them as well as we can. The Covid year of 2020-21 was so hard not simply because it was hard, but because we couldn't teach well. We knew we weren't teaching well, and it was soul crushing. Now, we are going to voluntarily teach poorly for a year or two to institute a new schedule that the consultant firm basically implements wherever they go. There really is no solid evidence that it's better, but they get paid to "disrupt" the "paradigm."

My wife and I are a few years from being able to retire. I would have liked to make it to 30 years here, but if I had the money, I would retire now. To paraphrase a political expression: I didn't leave the school, the school left me.

Happy New Year

 It has to be better that the last one. 

Right?

Small Rant

 This is about something personal, so I'm sorry to my five readers who were expecting something pithy about the world. 

We have a new Head of School, and he has a mandate to shake some things up, as we have been run mostly the same way for the history of the school, which stretches back to 1890.  Fine, we need that.

One thing that has happened this summer is that we have had a lot of renovations of administrative offices and the transitioning of a couple of classrooms into administrative offices. What we have not had - for many years - is the renovation and upgrading of classroom space. We had a small spasm of doing that over a decade ago, but there are some classrooms that are essentially what they were like either when I returned to teach here in 2000 or when I graduated in 1985. All we've really changed is the addition of a massive screen that allows us to project our laptops. 

It became clear to me many years ago that I was never going to be on the administrative track, so I dedicated myself to being the best teacher I could be. I concede that my definition of "best teacher" does not always gibe with the current pedagogical fads, but I have kids who come back and thank me for their experiences, and that strikes me as the validation for my pedagogy.

The trend since the new guy came here has been to expand the administration of the school, and there's a compelling argument that this was needed. The old Head ran everything out of his office and things got missed as a result.

However, prioritizing administrative spaces over teaching spaces strikes me as an extension of the problems facing higher education. We charge a ridiculous amount of money for a high school, and it's not going to massive pay increases for the teachers. 

Luckily, I'm hopefully about 6-7 years from retirement, but I worry about the long term viability of all this. 

Transitions

 In the past few weeks, we have said goodbye to our 14 year old dog; driven to Georgia for our son's graduation; driven back; flown to Europe; spent 12 days driving around the Alpine region; flown back; gotten an offer on an old house that has been in our family since 1962; driven there to empty the house of items before the sale; and driven home.  We will close in the next ten days.

That's...a lot. 

We think certain things will always remain the same. The dog will never die; the child will never grow up; the four walls around us will stay the same.  Obviously they don't. 

Trying to make sense of the gulf between one way of looking at the world and another - between stasis and change - isn't easy. However, we are looking at a global politics that also struggles to accommodate that dynamic. Some people simply can't fit change into their world. I think putting my pronouns into my email signature is a bit silly, but whatever. I can accept that. Obviously tens of millions of Americans and billions of humans cannot.

The problem for them is that change is going to come. It doesn't care if you don't like it. It's indifferent to your preferences. I'm not sure how we find a way to drive that point home.

Soooooo

 Anything happen while I was gone....

We Said Goodbye To Our Dog Today

 A million years ago - or maybe 15 - we lost a truly great dog, Garp, to congestive heart failure. He was to my eyes the perfect dog: docile, loving, a bit lazy. We had to let him go in late August. I was not ready for another dog.

By late October, my wife suggested we "go look at" some rescues. I should've known what that meant. We came home with Heffley. (We name our dogs alphabetically after literary characters.)

She was part Lab, part...something. A bit skittish, especially at first. It took me about a day to fall in love with her. For my eldest son, who was struggling in school, Heffley was home; she was loyalty with a wet nose and soft eyes. The world of school kept kicking him in the teeth and Heff kept licking his wounds and laying her head in his lap.

This coming Friday, he graduates from college. He was tied up in his final project, so he couldn't come home to say goodbye, as she rapidly declined from kidney disease and just being very old. Saturday, she could hobble a bit. Sunday, she could barely stand. Monday, we had to hold her up to pee. This morning, she couldn't even stand. To watch her slowly fade from this world, until the vet came to ease her journey, was both crushingly sad and sadly beautiful. 

She came into our lives when our boys were boys. She left it, as they became men. Her job was to always be there for them, but especially our eldest, who so desperately needed her. Her work was done, and she needed rest.

To try and ease our son's anguish over the phone was probably even more heartbreaking. We could see her decline. We could see her slowly dim, her confusion, her steady thinning in this world. All he wanted to do was to hold her once more.

To have a dog is to know love in about as pure a form as it gets. To have a child is to have a constantly exposed nerve, sensitive to every blast of cold air life throws at them - and thus at you.

Yet for all that heartbreak, I can't help but feel blessed for having that love in my life. The cost is dear, only because the reward is so precious.

Our Old Dog

 We have three dogs, including one 15 year old rescue. She's very infirm, can barely heave herself up off her bed (and not at all off a smooth floor), has accidents in the house and seems genuinely unhappy more than happy. In a few weeks, we are leaving for a celebratory trip to Europe for our son's graduation. We have a house/dog sitter, but leaving her to be watched over by a stranger seems wrong. On the other hand, when the boys went off to college 9+ months ago, we told them to say goodbye to her, because she was unlikely to live until Christmas, and she continues to trundle along.

Making the decision to euthanize her is really hard, because she still does have happy moments and does not appear to be in an immediate health crisis or real pain. She is not, however, going to "get better" from her kidney disease and advanced arthritis. She's absolutely skin and bones right now. 

I think we find ourselves hoping that one morning we will come down and she will just have faded away in her sleep, but that seems unlikely to happen. We are going to have to make a very, very hard decision both for herself and what feels like a selfish decision for ourselves. 

Lots of things suck right now in our immediate personal lives (it's not all bad), but this is the shit cherry on the sundae of suckage.  

Holidays

 After a grueling couple of weeks, I just finished what I hope is my last work until we return in early January. After a year's sabbatical, it was a rough readjustment to working every damned day (including Sundays, damnit). The school is also going through some transitions under our new Head. Meanwhile, we are about to buy a plot of land to build a retirement home on, while hoping Trump and his assorted idiots don't destroy the country or economy. My wife decided that she wasn't up to a regular Christmas, which she usually pours a lot of work into. So we are all off to Florida to lay in the sun. (We have a house sitter, so don't think you can break in, Wet Bandits.)

Anyway, Happy Holidays. May your days be merry and bright.

This Is A Hard Job To Love

 When it's December and you have coaching, competitions, end of semester rush to grade, make up exams, conduct review sessions, give the exams, grade the exams, write the class comments, write the advisor letters, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Let's Hope December Will Be Better...

 November obviously began...poorly. We have spent the rest of the month careening around Trumpistan and his desire to stock his Cabinet with uniquely unqualified and contemptuous people. As for me, the Thanksgiving was a bit rough for reasons I need not get into, and now we have the three week sprint of wrapping up classes and all the grading that comes with that, giving exams and all the grading that comes with that and then comments, with some longish wrestling days thrown in. Should be a gas!

Pray for me now, a sinner, in the hour of my need.

The Hammering

 With the latest outrage Trump's nominating process is visiting on the idea of competent, nonpartisan governance, it's almost as if he was specifically trolling the 50% of the country that hates him and voted him out last time. Putting a quack like Kennedy at HHS is designed to outrage. The point is to flood the zone with so much lunacy that there is no single target to focus on.

As Josh Marshall notes, we can't simply accede to his attempts to erode American democratic governing institutions. Some of this can be seen on the breathless takes about his "landslide" victory, when he's likely to have less than 50% of the popular vote. Some of this is a pre-surrendering on a lot of issues. I've basically reached some version of that, in that I am not going to forfeit my mental well-being reacting to every outrageous thing he does. 

My goal is to survive the next four years. The way he's staffing his administration I think we can expect either a war, a plague or a financial crisis. At the very least, we are going to discover exactly how much the government does or doesn't do in our daily lives. The degree to which I can insulate myself and my family from the fallout is important. 

Still, when January 21st rolls around, at that point it will be time to get back in the fight. Right now, I just can't.

Home Sweet Home

 Nothing like coming home from a long vacation and finding your ceiling collapsed from a water leak.

Disorienting

 I'm at my 35 college reunion. I haven't really kept up with anyone from my time in New Hampshire, but still, it's a great place with great people.

It's just that I don't know them.

Like, I recognize their faces. I see their names. We have shared memories of youthful hijinks. 

But I don't know them.

Because the person I was, the people they were, no longer exists. We have become new people. 

I was fairly unhappy in college. Some "imposter syndrome" and just not great and being social (some things never change). I wasn't miserable, but I ducked in and out of depressive episodes. Luckily, I'm not that guy anymore. I have a family that means everything to me; I have a career that gives my life meaning and purpose. I have found peace, and that peace is built on strong foundations, and some of the names on the bricks in that foundation are theirs.  But they also aren't those people any more.

So, I've been struggling with this disorienting sense of disconnection all weekend. Which - when I think about it - is me reliving some of those emotions from 35 years ago.

Off To See The Eclipse

 If I'm raptured, I'll be very disapppointed.

The Road Home

 After about a month of traveling through Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, we are headed back to the states tonight. It was a fascinating trip in so many ways. We spent the bulk of our time in Chile, and that's a country that is simultaneously rich and poor.

The US typically ranks in the top-10 for GDP per capita measured at purchasing power parity. (PPP tries to factor in the cost of living.) Most of the states ranked ahead of the US are city states like Singapore or Monaco or close to it like Liechtenstein and Qatar. Only Norway and Switzerland have higher GDP/capita and have larger populations - and even then, they are relatively small. All of this is to say that America is a really rich country.

Chile ranks at 59, beneath Russia, Bulgaria and Trinidad and Tobago. Uruguay a few spots lower at 62, Argentina lower at 65. All of this makes these countries fairly rich by South American standards. What's interesting is that Chile has roughly the same wealth inequality as the US, but with much lower overall income. Using the World Bank's GINI coefficient, the US ranks 108th with a GINI number of 39.8 (1 is perfect equality, 100 perfect inequality). Argentina's GINI number is 42. So they are both poorer and less equal than the US. Chile, which had years of neoliberal economics, has a GINI number of 44.9. That's starting to be "bad". Uruguay is closer to the US at 40.8. 

So we saw some real poverty on our trip, though largely from the window of our car. We saw the same homelessness issue that we see in America. What was most striking was that we saw a very industrious population in all three countries, and yet one thing that stood out was the size of homes.

This is a major feature of American wealth that we only sometimes talk about. Our homes are pretty damned big. In southern Chile, we saw large tracts of cookie cutter single family homes. If I had to guess, I'd say they were probably smaller than 1500 square feet. Given the uniformity of them, they were probably built during one of Chile's intermittent socialist governments. We also saw structures barely better than shanties that seemed to be the main form of housing. 

Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Santiago are huge, wealthy cities. I'm writing this from the wealthy section of Santiago ("Sanhattan") and even here, you can tell that a lot of apartments are pretty small. Really Manhattan itself would seem to be a comparison. 

These three countries are fairly wealthy in the global scheme of things (outside of the US/Japan/Europe axis), yet there is still something that would strike most American visitors. Of course, it's a great place to visit because you can have a luxurious dinner for two with drinks that costs almost half of what it costs in the states. (That's what PPP measures.)

The final metric is the Human Development Index. It looks beyond wealth at life expectancy, education and social equality. This is where the US trails Europe (and Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan). We rank 21st (opioids have not been kind to us). Chile is tied with Qatar at 42; Argentina is at 47, Uruguay - surprisingly to me - is at 58. There are 191 countries on the list. So...pretty good.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this.

I suppose that it's the nature of travel. On the one hand, we've learned so much about how there are different ways to organize a society and "do things". By American standards, the traffic laws are pretty lax, but drivers are exceptionally careful and skilled - by necessity. We drained that from our roads by giving people massive SUVs to drive. Dogs roam the streets and are largely taken care of by the neighborhood. Crime happens, yet it's rarely violent. Family seems SO important here, and children are both adorable and well-behaved - a sure sign they are deeply loved and attended to. 

Yet, for all the wonderful things we have seen and done, I'm looking forward to home. Even if it means I'm getting 3 hours of sleep tonight.

Intermittent Signal

 Blogging could be very sparse over the next month or so. "I'm off on an adventure!"

Merry Christmas

 Very weird waking up before the boys on Christmas day.

Whelp

 As we slowly drain our inheritance to pay for two kids college educations, it's troubling to see that college degrees don't necessarily pay off. There is undoubtedly a lot of noise in that data, as every college degree and every college is not the same. If we were to take the $250,000 that four years of college costs and just give it to the boys and let them work a trade, maybe that does create more wealth.

Luckily, both seem invested in fields where they are likely to make more money. Since we will be able -via intergenerational wealth from our own parents - to pay for their college, they will graduate without debt and hopefully be able to buy a home by the time they're 30. There seems to be some energy around the general scarcity of housing, and hopefully actual solutions will help bring the cost of housing down. At the same time, you look at Canada's housing situation and...yikes. It's not reserved to us. Same goes for Europe in some places.

My parents and grandparents' wealth allowed me to become a teacher, a career I deeply love, and yet still allow my sons to graduate without debt. That's an unbelievable blessing. However, I'm not 100% sure where we will retire to after we lose school housing. 

Does this make me "economically anxious"? Not really. I once had to pawn my bike and a gold coin my uncle gave me to make the grocery bill. Even then, I could always go home and not starve. 

I'm not sure how the disappearing wealth premium can be addressed. I think a wealth tax would help, if it was directed at making housing and healthcare more affordable. How many people see their savings wiped out because of medical bills? 

Still, one can't help but wonder why college is so damned expensive, if it doesn't give you a return on investment.

In Transit

 Moving about. Blogging will be light. 

Don't try and overthrow democracy while I'm gone.

American Airlines Is The Worst

 Last Saturday, I did my duty and showed up early to the airport for my flight to San Francisco. I was at the gate and ready to go! I got on for the first leg of the flight to Charlotte. As soon as I'm settled and turning on the Champions' League Final, the pilot announces a needed check on the airplane. As I am on American, I know this means an engine has fallen off, and soon enough we all deplane and four stricken looking gate agents try and re-book an entire flight.

My agent eventually realizes the only way to get me to San Francisco is on United. I ask if they should send my luggage out for me to rebook on United. She assures me that it will be sent with me without having to re-check it.

Four days later, I still don't have it.

United did their best. The flight from Hartford to Dulles was behind schedule, so the pilot flew like Maverick from Top Gun and - my favorite part - slammed on the brakes when we landed so we could make the first taxi way to the gate. I managed to run through the concourses in my Travel Crocs and made the connecting flight to San Francisco that got in at 1:30 in the morning. 

My bags went to Dallas.

Why Dallas, one might say. But one would not understand that American Airlines exists to make me miserable. It's in their corporate bylaws. For three days, the bag sat in Dallas until some woman there called me and asked me about my bag. She simply read the number on the tag and wanted to know what she should do with the bag. It was on the next plane to SF. All the fucking about with corporate Twitter accounts and calling a customer service rep who never answered his phone and some West Indian woman (I'm guessing from the accent) calls me up and puts it on a plane.

Then, it sits there in SFO. I'm travelling all over the place with my wife. I finally work my way through three different phone trees and I'm talking to another woman in some room inside the new airport and she promises to put the bag on a plane for Medford Oregon tomorrow morning. If that happens, I will finally get my luggage.

I suppose as a politics blog, there should be a broader point. 

Because my actual body flew on United, they were supposed to handle the bag once it got to SFO. Since American wouldn't send it to SFO, there was nothing they could do. However, the numerous agents I spoke to in India were all super helpful. Meanwhile, no one at American would answer the phone. I tried calling American at SFO directly. They said I needed to call baggage control, and when I asked for that number they hung up!

People - generally speaking - are nice and want to be helpful, especially if that is part of their job. Organizations, however, can make that impossible. American is such an organization, but it strikes me that this particular situation - two different airlines waiting for the other to act - suggests the need for a specialized, non-airline organization that specifically receives any late bags and reunites them with their owners.

Meanwhile I was stressed and miserable in Sonoma wine country and several national parks. 

My poor son is supposed to fly on American in July and I'm terrified of what will happen to him.