The Long Descent

The trip took 37 hours. Actual flight time: 12 hours with a brief jaunt to southern Ecuador due to bad weather in Quito, but hey we wanted to feel the tropical climate anyway and at hour 30 who cares if you are delayed another 7.




For anyone out there designing airports, I highly recommend seats without armrests.
Nobody really needs to rest their arms anyway.
I also recommend light dimmers.



But really who cares, what would I be doing for the last 37 hours if I was at home. Working? Sleeping? We have already established the over-ratedness of sleeping anyway. Much better to get no sleep and end up here:

Here is Parque de Condor, an outdoor avarium (I think that is the word) on top of the mountain in Otavalo,Ecuador. The oxygen is sparse and beauty grand. The clouds have this sort-of mystic quality that gives you the sense that god exists on top of these mountains. Maybe it is the lack of oxygen. Most incredible to me is the patchwork landscape of farms that creep up the mountain. There are these really vibrant red areas which are quinoa, the real reason I believe god exists on these mountains.
From there we hiked up further to El Lechero, The Magic Tree. The story goes that way back when, approximately 400 years ago, a man and woman fell in love. Unfortunately, like all great love stories, their families had some huge beef so they couldn´t get on with loving each other. So he became a tree and she became the lake. Lookie, no touchie.
This was told to me in spanish, and this may be over simplified but you get the idea. Ecuadorian Romeo y Julieta.

True or not I can´t say, but the tree is 400 years old and looking mighty fine with his short self on top of the mountain. Not to mention, all other trees are spring chicks compared to him. And across the way, there is a 600 foot heart embedded (by a giant who fell) into the mountain. I am unclear of the magical properties of El Lechero, and I certainly don´t want to fall victim to the look-but-don´t-touch aspect, but I gave it a hug just in case.

Southern Exposure

At 11:00 one night I bought my tickets to Ecuador on a whim. I have no real excuse to go; no friends, no ancestry, no spiritual mecca in Ecuador. I was in Chicago, it was cold and it sounded like a good idea to be closer to the sun. The inherent irony is that I am actually going into the southern hemisphere's winter, but I guarantee that Ecuador will give me much more vitamin D then brackish summer soup of SF fog.

So you don't loose me here is a map:

The first two weeks are planned in granular detail, thanks to my trusty roll dog, Brianna 'Narnie' Hughes. (More on her to come) While the remaining month remains in relative obscurity.

well, they showed you a statue, told you to pray
they built you a temple and locked you away
aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
for things that you might have done.....Only the good die young **Billy Joel

Schooooools out for summer

I started working at the June Jordan School for Equity four years ago. Last Friday the class I came in with graduated. It is a rather large milestone as an educator to know you will continue without the class you started with. A certain nervousness sets in, who will torture me with their late papers? Who will call me at all hours of the day and night to ask me questions about how to sign-up for the SAT's? Who will be my friends? But then you realize, just as quickly, that your friends, the ones who are your age, are the people you have been ignoring for the past 10 months and summer is the perfect time to catch up. And really there will be many more questions and late papers soon enough.

Each year I sit in the audience and get all teary eyed because I know what a big deal it is. Some of them are the first in their class to graduate high school, most are the first to go to college. They have often lost someone very close to them, some times a parent, some times a sibling, some times their best friend. Those who have gotten to our stage, have been put through fire and brimstone with a variety of educational benchmarks that other schools don't have.

There is something called and "aha" moment that is used in certain circles. It is basically equivalent to a boulder being thrown at the door of your conscientiousness, forcing insight into plain view. Sometimes it has a snowball effect, as if you were standing at the mountain looking at the snow, marveling at its quiet beauty when all of the sudden an avalanche has covered you. My aha moment came over dumplings after graduation.

This is my big learning from the past 4 years:
It is our job as educators to instill a tremendous sense of self worth and responsibility in young people because it is there job to find their path and place in this world. As life may have it, they may not find this path with any sort of expediency so we must also imbue a sense of passion and patience to sustain a long life. Their dreams will only be possible with a variety of tools and skills most importantly a tremendous imagination. The reason we have dreams is not because we will always assuredly achieve them but because we will learn something that we needed to learn along the way. So as educators, we must inspire the tenacity to walk towards what they love, not because we always believe they will do what they say, but because it is their path not ours.

So our job is the most simple and complex of all things, our job is to get up in the morning and love what we do so they know what loving life looks like every day.

Whew. I have a lot to work on.

No more pencils No more books No more teacher's dirty looks**AC/DC (not that we ever give undeserved dirty looks)

P*R*O*M

Enough said.

Hottest chaperons ever

Prom King 2018

When you're socially awkward with two left feet, the best idea is to turn butter balls into a snowman and take scenic pictures.

No more GTA

An Alliegory is...

This is my shout out to my friends and family, new, old and soon to come. An upcoming trip forced me to evaluate the state of modern communication and decide whether I want to subject you to endless e-mails or me to endless postcard purchases. I decided the happy medium is the choose your own adventure via the blogasphere. So, whoop here we are.
I love writing and have 20 years of journals to prove it, but I resist actually ever subjecting my prose to public comment. So give me feedback, send me your copy edits, make me better, but don't bite the hand that types for you.

That's an alliegory.

Just in case, you need a memory jog, an allegory (sans 'i') is:
a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. (I.E. Read between the lines) The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. Thanks, tnellen.com