My Phonetic Alphabet

I used to work at a shop that used the phonetic alphabet like it was going out of style. Everything was Golf Alpha Yankee. In my spare time I created my own alphabet designed specifically to confuse everyone in the world. Here it is:

A: air
B: Bjork
C: czar
D: duel
E: Ewe
F: fjord
G: gnat
H: heir
I: eye
J: Jew
K: knight
L: llama
M: mnemonic
N: Nat
O: Opossum
P: Possum
Q: queue
R: right
S: see
T: tzar
U: Uwe Bole
V: view
W: won
X: Xavier
Y: you
Z: zebra ('cause some things never change)

Strategery, Part 2

Well, here I sit. 5 o'clock on a Thursday. Usually I'm almost home by now but today, once again, I have my club meeting. Strategy club is an excuse for kids to get together and pretend to play strategy games but wind up playing Halo, Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War.

Luckily I like video games.

I just got through schooling this kid on how things are done in my 'hood. When the kids have to play split screen they forget that Mr. Rugen was playing Goldeneye on split screen ten years ago. They've been playing on wide screen HD's while I learned on a fuzzy Magnavox in my friends bedroom. Put on the split screen and my instincts take over. They're toast. I'm watching their screen, figuring out where they are, sneaking up behind them and putting one bullet in their virtual head.

8:30 can't get here fast enough. Even though I like the games, I like my family more.

The Number One Problem Facing Parents Today

I took a parenting class at church a few weeks ago and it ended with a lesson titled "The New Goliath". That lesson went on to describe the internet and media as "Goliath" i.e. the biggest problem parents face today. I don't believe that for a second.

If you live in a cave or are mentally retarded then you may not have heard of Myspace or Facebook. You may not know that TV shows contain sex, violence and disrespectful children. You may not even know that the main goal of most television commercials is to get you to buy a product, and they're very good at speaking to children. If that is the case, then the internet and "the media" are a problem you may face, but the bigger problem is you. It's easy to blame the internet or "the media" but you need to look in the mirror first. That's why I'm going to start my own parenting class aimed at the real "Goliath" that parents really have to face. That Goliath is...other parents.

A few weeks ago my cellphone got stolen from my classroom. It happens. I was stupid enough to leave it out and even stupider to trust that it would be there at the end of class. All my fault and something I have no problem accepting responsibility for. Part of that responsibility, unfortunately, was going to the Sprint store to buy a new phone. While at the Sprint store I parked at the same time as a mom, her two kids and her Chevy Suburban. The five year-old boy seemed starved for attention. He was running around, banging into his mom, pulling his sisters arm and causing general havoc. The sister, no more than 14, was acting like she was the boy's mom while the actual mom was making super important phone calls in between sessions of yelling at her 5 year-old, pushing him away and telling him she's "had it with him", which always makes people feel better about themselves.

I heard things from the mom that I just hate to hear. Not only was she yelling at her son, but she was yelling at whoever she was on the phone with, as well. I heard that the whoever was on the phone was "incredibly selfish" and was "ruining Christmas".

I was surprised, in that way that you're not surprised at all, when the mother bought for her 14 year-old child a $500 cell phone. I was similarly surprised that my prediction of behavior and attitude came true when I saw them get out of the poorly parked Suburban.

The trip ended when the 5 year0old ran out of the store only to be chased by the 14 year-old and told he was being a spoiled brat. I thought to myself that we tend to ape the behavior we see most often.

Why are these other parents the biggest challenge facing parents today? Because these are the kids my children will spend their day with. Like I said, we tend to ape the behavior we see most often and I fear the day when my kids spend more time with these kids than with me. I can model appropriate behavior for my child until I'm blue in the face, but if I haven't instilled a sense of individuality, courage and humility then it may all be for naught.

I'm bleeding Sivler and Blue today.

I was awake for almost an hour before I remembered that my heart is broken.

Finals, finally.

I teach a class that is only a semester long, which means I get to teach the same thing twice a year. So the time has come for my kids to present their final speeches. They are persuasive speeches designed to make the audience change their beliefs on a fundamental level. So far I've had kids tell me that meat is murder, illegal aliens should be rounded up and shipped back to Mexico (usually with several children of illegals in the classroom) and I've even had a kid come out of the closet. My how times have changed.

Since it takes so long to do speeches we started last week and will finish up on the 14th, leaving the actual finals day open. That's when I'm going to show the Charlie Chaplin film The Gold Rush to all my classes.

I had to make the movie relate, somehow, to communications, so I went the non-verbal communication route. Nothing more non-verbal than a silent movie. My kids are not looking forward to the movie, but I told them that I wasn't looking forward to the movie the first time I saw it, either. Now The Gold Rush is one of my all-time favorites.

I hope some of the kids give it a chance.

Back to School

No, I'm not Rodney Dangerfield, I'm Mr. Rugen
and I am now back at school. When I worked in
television I never took two consecutive weeks off
work, unless I was unemployed. As a teacher I
took a full week off for Thanksgiving and one
month later I took two weeks off for Christmas. Like I said earlier, this is the time of year that it really pays to be a teacher.

Being a teacher is strange, though. I didn't expect it to be so much like the real world. There are teachers that don't give a crap about anything and are just there for the paycheck (which in itself is strange considering the salary) and there are teachers that love what they do and put 100% effort into every day. I get discouraged when I walk the halls and see teachers dressed in sweat pants complaining about the school while students pass by and hear them.

So anyway, being a teacher is just like being anything else, except for some reason people expect you to be okay with making less money.

Clubs and some such.

Being a first year teacher has many challenges. Mostly, no one thinks you're going to be able to last. But there are others. When you're the new guy at a school, new teacher or not, you get the short end of the stick. You don't get your own classroom so you have to float, you have a crappy computer, you don't get the computer lab when you request it, you get the lunch period that dissects your fourth period class rather than the lunch before or after fourth period and most of all when a bunch of kids want to start a club featuring games like Risk, Stratego and Chess, guess who they ask to sponsor it.

So far I've managed to escape most of those traps. I have my own room, for the most part. I have a good computer, I am one of a few teachers with a flat screen monitor and I have the computer lab all to myself for four of the last five days of school prior to Christmas break. However, I have B lunch, which sucks, and I am the sponsor of the brand new Strategy Club.

Once a week I sit in a classroom that isn't my own and listen to a bunch of kids play Risk and try to cuss without my hearing it. Good fun, right? Tonight is our kickoff party, which means I get to sit in a room, thankfully my own, for four hours while kids that I haven't even met yet eat pizza, play Risk and don't care if I hear them cuss or not. At least I'll get ahead on my lesson plans tonight.

Strategy Club, it's not just for nerds, it's also for people that want free pizza.