Endurance Philosophy

 The 2020-2021 school year ended this past week. It was a year filled with unknowns, emotions, frustration, and long stretches of Zoom induced boredom followed by moments of "why isn't it doing that?" (Like while attempting to get your fourth device to connect to the wifi so you can write with the magic stylus and it worked just a minute ago but now 23 high school sophomores are watching you struggle hard.) The highs were high, and the lows were low. It was very easy this year for students to avert my educatorial gaze by simply hitting "stop video", and yet I made some profound connections with students this year that I might not have if we didn't have a pandemic. There are several thoughts I have in regards to the past 10 months, and here are some of them.  First, I can't help but face the fact that I'm underwhelmed. We got to the end of the year, this crazy year, and it sort of just ended. It left me thinking, "Is that all there is?" The ...

 In which, some comments are made on the recent weather; the nature of the problem is considered; a digression occurs; what it means to be normal is examined; an analogy is made; and questions are asked, and answered. It was hot outside last week. Really hot. Here in Maine, it felt like it did when I lived in Florida. It was so hot you might have thought about how unusual it is for the weather to be this warm this early in the season. You might have then thought; I know that my experience is small and anecdotal. It can't be used as proof of huge phenomena. Right? Right. So you tell yourself. It stands to reason, your brain argues with itself, that while it might be hot - so hot that it endangers other living things around you - this is weather. And as was beat into by some teacher somewhere along the line (and me, in previous posts ) weather is not climate.  At this point we can acknowledge that we have a problem. Not the climate crisis, although that is a problem. No, our pr...