Man Can I Relate…

Sometimes I want to do this in class, too, when kids think that answering a phone and chatting is more important than a lecture, or that it’s okay to text-message during exams, and so on. Not that I would do this to a student’s phone, but I sure want to, sometimes. (Usually, instead, I ask, “Is this a life-and-death emergency?” when the phone rings, or, with repeat offenders, I take the phone and speak into it in English, or, once, in somewhat-simple but all-the-same-comprehensible Korean words, I informed the person’s girlfriend that he was in class and unavailable to talk. …

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Mr. Boechler

Thoughts have bubbled up in the wake of a post by Stephanie. So I had this gym teacher in middle school — I think from 7th to 8th grade — named Mr. Boechler. I heard when I was in 9th grade that he had been promoted to vice-principal at some small-town school, which seemed about right to me since in my experience, vice-principals are often mentally ill, violent assholes. Maybe the job makes them that way, but every one I’ve directly dealt with behaved like a petty Mussolini on the job. Anyway, this Boechler guy, he was this hulking thug …

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whitney music box

The very cool Shawn Scarber emailed a bunch of us something too good to miss: whitney music box takes me back to the days when I studied electronic music. We had a very early synthesizer in the Electronic Music Studio, a room that had gone unmarked for years at the University of Saskatchewan. I swear, the synthesizer looked like something out of Star Trek — you controlled it with cables and pins stuck into various appropriate-sized sockets all over the front. I did nearly nothing with it, though some of the guys in years following mine spent hours in there …

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