by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.
According to the article, when Daniel Cormier was 48 he, a self-proclaimed pastor, married a 10-year old member of his Church. His Church was for the homeless and addicted. He said he was saving her by marrying her, and that he was ‘entitled’ to have sex with her because she was his wife.
Daniel Cormier started a Church to minister to some of the most helpless of our society, and then he molested someone even more helpless – the child of an addict in his Church.
Like I said, it seems like a story from the tabloids. But it’s not. If it were, it wouldn’t be true. And this is heartbreaking truth.
This man sexually abused his two daughters 50 years ago.
Crimes against children happen all over the world, even in our backyards. What saddens me is that I imagine for every story we read about, there are so many more we don’t know about at all. These stories are important, they are sad, devestating, stories that should not be told – but they must be told.
Me? I think it’s wrong. Definitely, people should respect others – regardless of the role(s) they play in society.
But last I heard it wasn’t against the law to act jerky – and I do consider people who insult others by calling them names, by slandering them, by being generally rude to them – to be acting jerky.
Can we start legislating jerkiness? Uh uh.
I’ve been called names before, both personally and professionally. I teach high school students, it comes with the profession. I’m sure I haven’t been met with the extreme prejudice that police officers have been met with, at least not professionally. I have personally though, I’m Jewish and I have definitely met and been insulted by people who didn’t like me because of it.
Jerky behaviour may suck, may hurt. But it sure shouldn’t be legislated against. And wait a second, while we’re at it – why in the world should we only ban insults against police? If we’re going to be banning insults, let’s ban them across the board. The next time a student or his/her parent calls me a, well, not a witch but close, I’m going to yell – citizen’s arrest!
Blogapalooza: A huge success! Click to view source
It’s a task, trying to trackback how I discovered something via social media. I follow a modest hundred or so people on twitter, have a few hundred friends on the book, and then there are the bloggers in my rss feed. But I am pretty darn sure I found out about Blogapalooza via @Linda704.
Like I needed to find MORE blogs to read! But what can I say, there are some pretty good finds here and I’m glad I participated.
So what is Blogapalooza? It’s Robert Hruzek‘s baby over at Middle Zone Musings. This year, it’s a group writing project called What I Learned From 2008, and participants were asked to create a list of our favourite blog posts, ones from our own blogs, 1 per month of 2008.
Here’s my What I Learned post. And that list you see at the bottom of this post? It is a list of the 128 bloggers who participated in this year’s event, organized alphabetically by first name.
Feeling a bit like this today. There are times when I feel confident, that I understand a situation, and then there are times when something happens that makes me realize what I understood was not really true at all. Antarctica goes North.
The rest of this post has been edited, on the advice of two educators I respect greatly. Thinking about it this morning, the morning after, I am deciding to take away some details, but leave the meat of what I am experiencing so that the record stands (about how I feel). I am not one to be silent about what matters to me, and nothing I write from here on need be censored after the fact. I will however, think carefully about how I write things. So, some self-censorship will be happening. This doesn’t sit very well with me. Not at all. But Michael and Ken are right, including these details could very well blur the issue and cause greater problems. They were written with anger and a little bit of spite. That doesn’t sit well with me either, so I need to make this right.
So, how do I proceed. It is not like me to be much less than completely honest in my posts, baring all. How do I talk about my feelings of confusion and questioning regarding a recent experience without describing the experience? Another example of Antarctica moving North. Details are important for me, they make the bigger picture make sense. But let’s see if I can focus on the big picture here.
I know that people are hurt. It is not a two-sided issue on that point, we are all feeling touched by a … disagreement that we are having. I feel shifted, where I once felt in congruence with my colleagues I now question that and I think that others are questioning it in themselves as well. It’s good to question things, but sometimes it takes longer to rebound when the questioning is so profound.
It’s good that today is a PED day for us, that I can focus on marking – report cards are due tomorrow morning – and that I can think about my students because they, after all is said and done, are why I teach.
Wait. After having just written that I realize I am wrong. I think that focusing too much on student-need and negating adult-need may be part of a bigger issue here. Teachers support students, many teachers will do almost anything to do so. But, in order to do so we need to work as a team, and we need to support the team and the individuals within it to keep things strong, so that we can support students in the best way possible.
A keynote speaker at a conference I attended years ago talked about teacher care. How we need to take care of ourselves, we need to take care of each other. And only then can we take care of our students with integrity.
I do know that this whole thing has given me a headache, is forcing me to redraw my map.
I generally ignore these ‘things about me’ memes but lately I’m feeling introspective (for a few holy cow reasons that I may get into at a later date :) ) and have decided to take Kate up on her invitation and keep this meme moving. So, 7 things you probably don’t know about me…
Doing some butterfly hands drills in class about 7 years ago. Note my lazy hands… or don't
I studied martial arts for 15 years. I started here in Montreal, with sil lum hung gar kung fu and when I moved to Seoul I continued with Shaolin (or so they called it :) ) style and Tae Kwon Do. My Korean kung fu classes were interesting. They were each night from 7 to 10 and I started during the rainy season when the school had lost its electricity due to the extreme humidity, really! So we did kung fu to candle light. The class was made up of 3 middle school boys, a businessman, and me. The instructor spoke no English and at the end of each class we sat in a circle, drinking yogourt, and having strange little conversations translated by the boys who knew a bit of English. I think they thought I was the strangest thing, this foreign lady who wanted to take kung fu with the boys! Then when I moved to Beijing I learned some Chang Chuan, a long fist style, from a tiny, powerful instructor who did not speak a word of English. I learned how to count in mandarin through her. I also learned about muscles in my body that I had never previously encountered. That was probably the sorest period of my life. She had me doing acrobatics – flips, those hands-free cartwheels, and movements I have probably blocked from my psyche. I haven’t been to a kung fu class in almost 2 years. I’m starting to miss it.
My 2nd piece of knit jewelry. I made it for my friend, who asked me to.
I make jewelry. I started with some beading a few years ago with my dear friend Marga and have recently begun to combine my new-found love of knitting with beading to create some knitted necklace charms. I’m enjoying it immensely and am about to try selling some jewelry on etsy. My problem is that when I make something I have a hard time imagining selling it! I usually give what I make to friends as gifts or keep them for myself. I love wearing something I made myself :)
When I was 5 years old I changed my name to Harmonica Goldfish. My family moved to New York and I thought it to be a great time to recreate myself. My first day at the park (we lived near Central Park) I told all of the new children I met that I was Harmonica Goldfish and later that day, or maybe week, one knocked on our apartment door and asked if Harmonica Goldfish could come out to play. My bubbie was staying with us to help out during our first week in a new city and she asked, who? I came running out – that’s me! She started to laugh so hard, I remember her whole body shaking.
My real name is Patricia May. After the Harmonica Goldfish situation, my mother sat me down and explained that since it wasn’t my real name my teachers probably wouldn’t use it (I was starting kindergarten shortly thereafter). She then told me that since my real name was Patricia I could start using that name instead if I liked. It was kind of like changing names since everyone called me Tracy. I agreed and was called Patricia for a few years. Now some people know me as Patricia, some as Tracy. And a couple even call me Harmonica Goldfish from time to time :)
I love watching sappy movies. Those feel-good movies about young people achieving their dreams and conquering the odds a la Fame or Rudy or Akeelah and the Bee. My absolute favourite thing is to watch them in a movie theatre in the middle of the afternoon by myself with my bag of popcorn, collection of candy, and a handful of napkins because I always cry at the end. The sappier the better and they never cease to inspire me to go home and create. I swear to God.
Some of my red books. I also like ravens, this one was purchased last summer on a trip to Vancouver. It remember lugging it back home – it's made of cement.
I organize my books by colour. This is something new. About a month ago I noticed that I had a lot of red books and decided to put a bunch of them together on this little bookshelf I have. Then I noticed my blue books. So I spent a couple of days clumping my books (I have a lot of books) together by colour. Amazingly I’m realizing that I remember books by their covers (no judgment, just recall) and am finding that not only do I like the visual effect but it’s working for me on an organizational level as well.
I really enjoy being by myself. I’m finding that lately I cherish the times when I am at home cooking, decorating my apartment, working on jewelry, reading, updating my blog, listening to music, gardening (ok, not right now, it being -22 C out, but as soon as the sun and warmth returns!). It really does give me energy. When I was doing my Masters degree a few years ago we were all required to take a Myers-Briggs personality profile assessment and I discovered I was an INFP. People who are INFP’s generally gather energy from within and I’m learning that there’s truth to this for me. Not that I don’t like being with other people! I need to balance my social/work time with time spent by myself to stay focused and true.
So, there you have it. Seven things you probably didn’t know about me. Or maybe you did but I bet someone else doesn’t. In the spirit of Kate’s post, I’m not tagging anyone. Feel free to pick up the ball if you like. I enjoyed the activity!
