Dear Friends,
Last night I was watching the Lakers and the Warriors face off in the ‘other’ series in the Western Conference. I don’t really know why. Probably because I was killing a few minutes of time between picking up children from their jobs. I think these teams are going to beat the snot out of each other. Whoever wins is going to be pretty gassed when they play the Nuggets.
Chris Paul is out for the remainder of the year. On the news yesterday it said that he would be evaluated in a week, but the Suns will be out of the playoffs in a week. They probably weren’t going to beat Denver with CP3, but without him, it’s a done deal.
It sucks, but what can you do? Hopefully they can do some good things in the offseason, improve the bench, and put together a really good team for next year. I think they can learn to play really well together with some time to truly figure it out. Right now, they just don’t have an identity outside of Booker and Durant being great.
*****
As a dad, it’s kind of cool to have the two young’uns working. I’m proud of them. They have so much to learn about real life, but it’s good to see them having a good work ethic at this point in their lives. I wasn’t quite there yet when I was their age.
As chronicled last year, when I was 15, I was working at Taco Bell and then McDonald’s. I was a pretty good Taco Bell employee, but I couldn’t give two fucks about the McDonald’s gig. It was just something I was supposed to be doing and then, a few weeks into it, I decided to move across town and live with my mom.
For L & T, though, I think they care more about their first jobs than I did about mine. Taxi dad in full effect, though. Yay!
*****
It becomes more and more apparent to me that critical and thinking are dirty words when you use them together. Most of my students have no desire to look at a problem and try to solve it by thinking critically. This is so depressing to me.
How are they going to learn to be functioning people on this planet if they can’t think outside the box? According to the AI overlords, ten-year-olds are perfectly capable of critical thinking. They should know, too, because they know everything.
We do a lot of games and puzzles in our classroom. These are great tools for learning to problem solve and think critically. I’d like to think it is rubbing off a little, but when I introduce a new concept, it is often met with dumb looks and the occasional fearful one, too. I think I need to buy some sort of tool that extracts heads from asses.
Today should be good, though. We are getting ready for a big writing project tomorrow, so we are going to do some practicing. Dust off the old skills that we were honing pretty well early last month before testing took over. When we get our writing done tomorrow, we’ll go over to a 3rd grade room and trade writing with them. This will be enlightening and entertaining, I hope.
Wish me luck.
See you tomorrow.
Go around and round.
I read this post yesterday and started replying but for some reason, I couldn’t post my reply.
I really like the idea of putting your 4th graders against the 3rd graders in an all out “write off” and I think I will borrow that idea to challenge my 3rd graders next week.
keep up the posting. You have a following!