Just a note to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. And if you don’t happen to celebrate Christmas, best wishes, anyway, for a fantastic Tuesday, December 25.
When I wrote my letter to Santa this year, I told him there was only one thing I really wanted. It was for him to do something extra special for those of you who faithfully read this blog. Now, considering the sincerity of my request, and the fact that I’ve been a pretty good boy for over seven decades, I was taken by surprise when I received the following note:
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Dear Paisano,
Thank you for your letter. It is always refreshing to receive mail that requests nothing for oneself, but for others, instead. That being said, however, I regret to inform you that I cannot give presents to your readers because the request violates Section D, Subsection 3f, of the North Pole Ethics Code. It states: “Santa shall NOT, at the behest of a person or public enterprise, give presents to others which blatantly resemble patronage or outright bribery, and whose goal is to keep those recipients active and involved in said enterprise.”
I’m sorry, then, but I won’t be able to fulfill your request. Good try, however! Perhaps YOU can come up with something to wish your readers a Merry Christmas! After all, as Mrs. Claus often says, "A little something is better than nothing at all."
Best regards, Santa
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Here, then, is my musical contribution to your holiday season. I arranged and recorded it last Christmas for a family friend who absolutely loves to dance. So, click the link, HERE, and get up and start moving!! “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.” Peace, love, and good health to you all in the New Year.
(WARNING: This post contains vivid descriptions of a type of oral surgery. If you strongly dislike visiting a dentist’s office, or cringe and feel faint when some of the unspeakable procedures conducted there are openly discussed, then close this page and come back in a week.)
Back in September I wrote a post about the “Mayan Calendar and the End Of Time.” Well, December 21, 2012 is less than a week away, and due to an emergency dental referral, I’ll be spending it undergoing an Apicoectomy (Ape-icko-eck-tuh-me) at the hands of my local oral surgeon. Of course, the confluence of this unplanned procedure and infamous date, made me begin to wonder if there was more than coincidence involved. Were those pesky Mayans plotting to screw up my dental affairs? Had they singled me out as the sole recipient of their calendar’s wrath?
Nah…, the procedure didn’t seem to be that big a deal. After all, “ape” means a “large, tailless primate,” and “ectomy” means “surgical removal.” So my initial thought was that my dentist was suggesting a therapy where I visited a zoo, and witnessed a tree surgeon removing a stranded orangutan from the canopy of a fake rainforest. He wasn’t, however. What he meant was far less entertaining than that.
Similar to when I took Geometry twice, it seems an old root canal had given up and failed. To POSSIBLY save the tooth, then, an apicoectomy was suggested. He said it wasn’t a big deal. The oral surgeon would simply cut a trap-door-like incision in my gum, then lift the tissue away and expose the tooth’s root. Of course, he might have to remove some of the bone, too, but heck… he does that all the time.
Now if the root isn’t cracked, this makes the chances better that the tooth can be saved. In that case, the friendly endodontist will whip out his trusty saw, and chop off the root end of the infected tooth. Of course, he might also have to scoop out a little more of the surrounding gum tissue to assure that all the infection is gone. Not to worry, though… he probably has a little scooping tool made just for that. And I’ve heard he makes ice cream cones at Baskin Robbins on his day off.
After the root tip has been truncated, the cavern in my gum will be medicated, and the root sealed with a silver filling. (No, the Lone Ranger is NOT doing the procedure!) Of course, the rest of the crater created by the now evacuated bone and tissue, will be retro filled with an expensive, synthetic bone material not covered by my dental plan. Then the oral surgeon will reposition the gum flap like a puzzle piece, and suture it back in the correct place. That shouldn’t be a problem either… as he learned embroidery from his wife, and it’s become one of his most passionate hobbies.
Anyway, when I awake from my peaceful slumber, my tooth will hopefully be as good as new. BUT… if by chance the good doctor happened to find a crack in the root while he was cutting and scraping and probing and scooping, it’s going to end up just like me in those Geometry classes I mentioned… up and out of there! Yes… upon regaining consciousness, I may learn that dear old tooth #4 has be purged from my mouth, and become a discarded “former” member of the Paisano mastication team.
Considering this flood of new information, then, I must reluctantly admit there may well be a Mayan connection between December 21, 2012 and this pending apicoectomy. And for me, it might truly spell disaster. Perhaps those “end time” theorists who are predicting a world-ending “polar shift,” were basically right, but made a slight translation error by switching two letters in the code. Maybe instead of a “polar shift,” it really should have read, a “molar shift.” That sounds like a tooth extraction to me… and a shift from my mouth to a trash can!
These days, one of the saddest things for local teachers, is they no longer have the time to teach creatively using materials they’ve developed and tailored for specific subject areas, as well as for the various learning styles of the children they serve in their classrooms. Instead, they have a rigid schedule to which they must adhere, so as not to fall behind in that ever important task of year-end test preparation.
The era in which I was taught the craft of teaching, stressed education and development of the “whole child.” And what we did each day was based on an honest attempt to give them skills for an entire lifetime. These days it seems too many kids are being treated as “heads on a stick.” The short-term goal is packing their brains with information which is known to be on the statewide tests, then drilling them day after day until they become numb and just want the whole “learning” thing to end. Of course, there is no long-term goal in this scenario, that is, other than perpetuating the myth in the public’s view, that good scores are always synonymous with a good education.
Now, this post is NOT meant to be an in-depth discussion of how education of young kids has gone down the crapper. If it was, I’d probably get comments from irate parents who couldn’t care one whit if their kids are being taught to THINK AND PROBLEM SOLVE, as long as those test scores are looking good. Let’s face it, there’s no real way to measure the benefit of things like art, music, discussion, and critical thinking in the classroom. Maybe if there was, and a quantitative score could be compiled, such parents might cut old schoolers like me some slack, and wouldn’t see us as so cranky and out of touch.
The REAL purpose of this post, then, is to briefly contrast how radically classroom instruction is changing. Recently I found a song I wrote in 1999, to use in my Second Grade classroom as a final review of the information we had gleaned in a science unit on “Whales.” As I began collecting the information that might find its way to the final quiz, I thought the kids might enjoy singing this song each day while reviewing for the test as they sang. There were at least twenty-five “mentions” of things embedded in the song’s verses, that actually ended up on the unit final, either whale vocabulary, life-cycle facts, or geographic references that every smart whale would need to know.
Just for perspective, the way local primary kids would learn about whales THESE days, is to read a half dozen pages about them in the state sanctioned science book, then complete a similar number of “fill in the blank” pages in its companion workbook. Little more would be added by the teacher, lest he or she veer off schedule and fall behind the district mandated timeline. And, since “singing” is not important in the current curriculum, use of my whale song might be considered an almost treasonous waste of classroom time.
Anyway, for all you “modern” educators and testing specialists out there… sure, I have NO PROOF that reviewing for a quiz by singing a silly song I wrote, made a statistical difference. All I know is, the kids passed their unit quiz with flying colors. Of course, it could have been because of my superlative teaching :), or the great notes we took, or the excellent books we read and video’s we watched. Or maybe it was the drawings and diagrams we made, or the notebooks and picture files we compiled, or the art projects we crafted about all aspects of a whale’s life.
Maybe it was the tapes we heard of whales “singing,” or the whale artifacts we made into a classroom display and actually touched with our own hands. Or it might have been all that whale math we did, computing and comparing their weights, and figuring out the mileage between locations on their migratory trek. Perhaps it was because we collected money and adopted a real humpback named, “Lightning,” and followed his “sightings” in at least two of the world’s oceans. Yeah, come to think of it, that dumb ass whale song probably didn’t make one bit of real difference when everything is said and done. Oh, well… at least it had a catchy tune, and was great fun to sing!
(A Paisano Postulate: The Creator thought it important enough to equip us with five senses. It seems reasonable, then, that the more of these senses children use as they learn, the wider and deeper that learning will become, the clearer and more interestingly subject matter will unfold, and the more relevant and permanent their knowledge will be. And, if education is truly about LIFE preparation, it should equip boys and girls to deal with the complexities they will certainly face when they become adults, not simply make them good test takers.)
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If you’d like to hear the song and learn a little about whales yourself, click HERE. Thanks to Lo-Fi for “cleaning up” the original cassette recording, and showing me how to link it to this blog.
