'Uncontacted tribe' sighted in Amazon - CNN.com
No that's not a Diablo 2 screenshot. Apparently a plane did a couple of flyovers to take pictures of this tribe of people in the Amazon that have not had contact with the outside world. Some anthropologists believe there may be up to 100 tribes worldwide that remain 'uncontacted.' Neato.
I put up a post up at The Noob Teacher about teaching history. I'd be interested in the perspective some of you have on it. So hop over, read the post, and leave a comment. Pretty please?
Yes it's three weeks later. No I don't care. This is a continuation of the previous post by the same name, so read that first if you want the full context. In that post I mentioned the fact that as I study history I realize there are so many people who seemed so significant but at best they end up being a paragraph in a history book that students don't care to read. So many of us want to be significant and live meaningful lives. But how do we do that?
I'm not sure exactly what the secret is but I know what it is not. The secret is not worrying about what other people think and striving for significance in the eyes of others. I am a huge sports fan and I love both baseball and football. I pay attention to the sports more than 95% of the population. But I'd have a hard time telling you who won the Super Bowl four years ago. (It was probably the stupid Patriots.) In the moment those guys winning the Super Bowl was the biggest thing - it was all over the news, they went to Disneyland and on talk shows - and then, nothing. Nobody cares anymore and a new season begins. When the king dies and five, ten, twenty years go by he is nothing but a memory. A hundred years go by and he's a paragraph in a textbook.
I don't want that to happen to me!
Looking death in the face can be a terrifying thing. I'm on this planet for a short time and then I'm gone. What will be left of me? I know this sounds lame, but all that will really be left of me are the memories the people I love and that loved me have. The only things that will really last forever that I did on this earth will have to do with the people I spent time with and the relationships I developed. Time I spend pursuing goals outside of people will be essentially wasted time.
So I don't want to be a paragraph. I want to be a husband, father, friend, disciple of Jesus, teacher, mentor, coach, etc. I want to fight against the constant desire to be admired or looked up to or whatever else it is I want by other other. As long as that is the goal of my life I'm going to be disappointed. This isn't anything terribly profound but it is something that's hit home to me more lately. Having a daughter and thinking about her future, thinking about the fact that the day will come when I'm not there, makes me consider how much more precious life is.
As my favorite radio show hosts have said, "you never walk away from a dinner saying to yourself 'man I wish I had some more of that pie!'" Well I'm fairly confident I will not reach the end of my life saying "I wish I'd had that better gaming rig" or "I wish I'd had that award" or whatever else. All my regrets are probably going to have something to do with people. So I'd better do what I can to focus on people and avoid the fate of becoming a paragraph.
You know, this whole two-post thing was a lot more eloquent in my head at 5am when I first came up with it three weeks ago.
The Noob Teacher is a new blog I'm doing to try to focus my writing a little more. Of course you will probably laugh, considering my total inability to regularly post here, but this other blog will be a place for me to put down things that will hopefully be helpful to me and other teachers and/or anybody interested in my adventures as a new teacher (or this summer, as someone looking for a teaching job).
I will post the other part of that paragraph post thingy this week, too. Sorry. Hah.
Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. “Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night!” We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!
[crowd cheers]
This has nothing to do with anything, but I wanted to share it with you because:
1) It is awesome.
2) I don't have the mental energy to post anything original.
3) I want to post something.
4) It is so awesome.
This morning I was spending some time studying for the CSET, a big test I'm taking on May 17th. It's one step along the way towards becoming a teacher. I have to take this series of three subtests to prove I know my stuff. The first test is on World History and Geography, the second is U.S. History and Geography, and the third is Economics/Government/California History and Geography. I'm taking them all May 17th and expect them to be a headache but I also expect to pass them.
Anyway, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, this morning while studying for the CSET I was once again struck by a thought that has occurred to me a number of times. As I read through the history of American Imperialism in the late 1800's and early 1900's, the struggle for Mexican independence, Russia's slow climb (descent?) into Bolshevism, China and Japan's eventual acceptance of foreign influence, and so on, I came across lots and 
lots of names. Benito Juarez, Santa Anna, Pancho Villa, Porfirio Diaz, Marie Curie, Alexander Graham Bell, Otto von Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor Mutsuhito, The Dowager Empress Cixi, and so many more.
Each of these people was incredibly important in their time. Some accomplished much good, others much bad, most a bit of both. People knew who they were, they had power, they had influence, they had the kinds of things that supposedly make one's life worth living. I was struck by the finality of the words in this textbook as I read. These peoples' lives and accomplishments were boiled down into a sentence or two, or if they were particularly important they got a paragraph or a sidebar with a few paragraphs and some bullet points. They're gone, and I suppose the world is different for their having been here, but to most people they're simply a paragraph on a page. No matter what you accomplish - whether it's opening your nation to Western influence and beginning the process of modernization (like Emperor Mutsuhito) or being a soldier in a war where millions died over Nationa
listic sentiments or being one of the 20 million who succumbed to the Influenza Epidemic in the early 20th century - that's it for your life. You're done, and at best you're a paragraph in a history book that very few people find interesting and fewer care about.
I don't usually read posts longer than this if I didn't write them or if they're really interesting, so I'm going to stop here and complete this thought in a separate entry, to be posted soon.
I love this quote from Mere Christianity. I'd add some sort of commentary but really believe it speaks for itself:
Faith seems to be used by Christians in two sense or on two levels....In the first sense it means simply Believe - accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people - at least it used to puzzle me - is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue - what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements?...What I did not see then - and a good many people do not see still - was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a things as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so....
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which Christianity looks very improbably; but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.
Today marks the last day of my employment at Crossroads. I think I've done a lot to make sure my various bases are covered as I leave. For the last six years I've worked there I've had a constant cloud of unfinished tasks and open loops. There's always more to be done. So today when I loaded up the program I use to keep track of my tasks/projects/all that I realized it was weird to see I don't really have a whole lot of unfinished stuff. It will be nice to have less responsibilities for a while, and to be able to pick and choose a little more of my ministry responsibilities since it won't be my job anymore.
Good news on the job front - I haven't landed an HR job yet but I do have a long-term sub job. I'll be subbing at Washington for a teacher that had to retire mid-year starting Monday. It's a pretty perfect setup because it's at the school I want to be at, I have 4 U.S. History classes and one social science elective class (not sure what it is, maybe Sociology), and 6th period prep which means I get to leave early. Also since it's a long-term job I'll make a bit more money than I otherwise would. It's pretty great that while I'm looking for another job I'll have this consistent income. I will actually be teaching instead of just babysitting (the usual charge of subs) but I'm actually a little excited because it's stuff I'm interested in (my major was History with a focus on US History) with older students.
Yesterday I was cleaning up my Facebook profile and removing my support for Ron Paul. (You can read this post at another blog for some of my reasoning for supporting and no longer supporting Paul...it wasn't written by me but I don't feel like writing an entire post on the subject and I'm pretty much with the iMonk.) While doing so I noticed a number of people in my friends who had checked that they "support" such people as John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Such sentiments are very popular these days, as supporting a Republican is generally considered uncool by most people under 40. I am not a Republican myself, and that's not the point of my post. The point is that I think a lot of people "support" Obama or Hillary (more Obama) because it's cool to do so and they think it sounds good, they hear it's a good thing to do and "BUSH = HITLER, NO BLOOD FOR OIL!!!!"
Since I work with students and know a lot of people in their mid-to-late teens, many who are just becoming aware of the political process and the fact that they have a place in it, and since I live in the freakin Bay Area, I am surrounded by people who make goo-goo eyes over someone like Obama. I don't really have any particular issue with Obama other than disagreeing with him on a number of political issues - but I'm not really sure where he stands on some things. I know he wants Universal Health Care (but I don't know the particulars of his plan), I know he's Pro-Choice, I know he's been unfairly made fun of by idiots for the similarity of his name to Bin Laden and Saddam and accused of being a stealth Muslim, I know he thinks "the rich" don't pay their fair share of taxes, I know he's a good speaker...but I don't know much about his positions and how they would differentiate him from Edwards, Clinton, or even Giuliani (except for his position on Iraq). What bugs me is there are so many people who support Obama (or any other policitican) who don't know crap about him. They see him as this cool savior for mankind who talks about hope and change but they don't know what he means by that or how he wants to make it happen.
Most of the time when someone makes a comment on how they love this or that politician I ask them "why do you support that person?" Lately that comment has been directed towards people who express love for Obama or Hillary (Edwards isn't chic). I've gotten a very short list of replies. They are:
(1) He isn't George Bush.
(2) Because.
Few things bug me more than people just falling in line with something or someone they think is cool or good or whatever, with no good reason. In my work at Crossroads I have always tried to tell people they need to think through what they believe and why they believe it. People are too willing to blindly follow the crowd without engaging in any critical thinking. It makes them feel cool and progressive and like they're doing something to ride on the coattails of some popular politician and maybe they'll even vote for him/her but they really have no idea what they're doing. I'm sure there are Obama supporters out there who like him for legitimate reasons...I just haven't met one and am not sure I even know one. But I know a lot of Obama "supporters."
