Another Week in Paradise

*At first I thought she was just slurring her words. Then I thought that maybe I was just not hearing very well. I am getting older you know. Nope. She spoke clearly and I heard right. Vog. We have Vog on Maui. We can't see the mountains and it looks overcast all day. What's vog? That would be volcanic fog. I don't think they would have nicknamed Mel Torme after this. Maybe Tom Waits. So people are coughing, crabby, even dizzy. Freakin vog. I'm waiting for locusts next.

*For now, this is cute, but if it continues, it's going to be a major pain in the ass. We finally started getting out there and campaigning - Summer Starr & Co. So I met her at the St. Joesph's Feast. It's a church festival and there were a lot of local people there. Perfect. I showed up with my boot...I think I've officially campaigned under every possible condition now...which was fine. Summer got there with virtually no campaign literature and not very willing to approach people. This wasn't going to be easy. I basically had to verbally hold her hand as we talked to about 20 people and then she was done. Again...one time is cute. She's been freakin arrested for protesting and she was nervous about approaching someone to tell them that she's running for office.

*Not much else is going on. Two weeks and 4 days left with this stupid boot on. I have to buy a new keyboard for my laptop....stupid beer. Working at the YMCA is...uh...ok...the weird thing about it is the GILF's there. Yeah, I said it...GILF's. Not much else new going on. Campaigning, school & the Y. Podcasting and once in a while (like right now) a radio shift.

New Radio Gig

Just a quick post to let you know that I'll be on at Mana'o Saturday night 8pm - Midnight. Which is uh....2am - 6am Sunday morning for you East Coasters.

Da Man is Everywhere

It's true.

In my last post, I talked about my budding Bill-o. Well, we talked about my discoveries about her discoveries. She seemed undisturbed. In fact, she told me that she checked into all the facts her crackpot said and found it to be true. It was on National Geographic. Uh...I checked...it's not.

And I'M indocrinating the kids.

From this movie, the kids were supposed to do a 1-page reflection. Not a summary, but a reflection. There's a student I have who is very nice, but she can't write. The girl just can't. We've had her tested and she's not "special ed", but the kid can't write to save her life. So, when her reflection on the Al Gore movie came to me entitled "The Inconvenience of the Truth Reflection" (proper capitalization added), I didn't even notice...because...the...girl...can't...write. But as I read this paper, denying the existence of global warming and that it's a government plot to get money from corporations, I remembered who her Dad is. That nut who insisted that it was cool of us to take the Hawaiians' land. And who does Dad work for? Da Man.

And I'M indocrinating the kids.

Over the next 2 days I'm taking my students to the island's cable access TV studio to get some training in video production. They needed permission slips to do this so I went into town to drop them off. As I'm talking to the Education Coordinator, I started asking her questions about submitting video, etc. So I mention that I'm the campaign manager for Summer Starr because cable access will put on political stuff here. Well, she went nuts! She dragged me into the office of the CEO and left me there with him to talk.

Well, take a look at this article in today's Maui News. Kyle Yamashita is the guy we're running against. They HATE him. Well, I'm not comfortable putting in writing the things shared in our conversation, but I learned a lot about our boy Kyle...

He's Da Man! And not in a good way.

This place is just plain old nutty.

And on a final note: when my 30 days with this f-ing boot are up, I'm going to burn the thing, I swear.

My Budding Bill O'Reiley

I have this student who lives with her Grandparents...well, actually, she lives with her Mom on Oahu, but stays with her Grandparents on Maui during the week, just so she can come to our school. Grandpa's a nice guy. He's always been supportive of what we do (even me). But it's pretty obvious that he's on the right of most issues. He's the one that got the kid to show up with the Bill O'Reiley children's book...which scared the bejesus out of me.

So we've started doing this quarter-long project on our carbon footprint. The first thing we did was to watch the move An Inconvenient Truth and the kids have to write a one-page reaction paper. So today, the student comes up to me with this huge grin on her face and shows me this huge print out of a web article (the thing was like 40 pages) that refutes everything Al Baby says in the movie.

OK...so I take a quick look at it and jot down the address.

I just finished taking a look at it, and noticed something that was bugging me...the footnotes. There were only 2 resources for this guy's info; one was the site that this article was published on. The other was this nutty, right-wing blog. Not good. So I googled the author...he's a bit of a nutjob himself and the institute he writes for is sponsored by the oil industry.

This is going to be an interesting conversation with the kid tomorrow.

The Longest Post Ever

There's a lot to talk about and I tried to decide if I should separate the topics, but then you'd have to scroll down and find the first one to get it in the right order so I'm just going to jam it all into one bad-mama-jamma-post. So make sure you have a beverage, this is going to go on for a while.

But before I start, could someone tell me why 20 e-mails a day from the Canadian Pharmacy are getting through my spam filter? Seriously...even if I did order viagra from Canada, I sure as hell wouldn't need that much.

*Monday: School started back up and it was my day to take kids out into the field. We went to the Maui Community College Earth Day Fandango (or whatever it was called). We got there 30 minutes after it was supposed to have started and still couldn't really figure out what they were doing...no fandango. Eventually they got around to doing some stuff, but if we weren't there, there would have only been 2 people on the horticulture tour - instead of the 27. A few more people showed up for the talk about biodisel, but if we weren't there it still would have been less than 10. One of the people there was a dude named Maury...hold onto Maury...he comes in at the end.

Later that day I get a call from the YMCA...you know...where you can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal, you can do whatever you feel. Anyway, I had the shortest job interview in history with them the week before (9 minutes...and 3 of those minutes were waiting and walking to the office). I'm told they want to hire me for the part-time gig. I should come in on Thursday to fill out paperwork. Cool. I'm not going to be drowning in money, but I should be able to be relatively out of debt by the time I get off this rock...though I'm going to be back to working 7 days a week. Good thing the economy is OK.

*Tuesday: I'm supposed to take the other half of our kids to the Earth Day fandango...see the previous post about how that was canceled and we ended up writing haiku's at the dump.

It was also tax day! hooray... Now here's the deal with this....I'm sure you remember the post about my taxes...I owe $1400 federal...then there was my dentist bill for a cleaning...$200, which I didn't count on. So the dentist's money came from the $300 that was left in my account that I knew the war mongers were going to take out of my account on the 15th. So, I figured Uncle Sam would go to my account and just take whatever was left. Nope. The gub'ment wants their fucking money. So instead of it "bouncing" or whatever happens when you pay for something online and it's not there, the government somehow got my credit union to give them their stinking money and put my checking account 300 bucks in the hole. Niiice. So the moral to this story is, kids...don't fuck with the government.

This pretty much was the last straw in terms of my stress...it's just gotten so ridiculous that I don't care any more. Everyone's going to get their money, I just don't care when and if it pisses them off.

*Wednesday: This turned into an "old school" day. I thought I had given up shit like this, but... We actually didn't have school as there's...uh...kind of like a big charrette for the charter school. I was supposed to go, but instead I played hookey and went for the last day of the ED fandango (earth day, not erectile dysfunction). Why go? At noon the speaker was Bill McKibben, whose stuff I've read and really dig (go read Deep Economy and see the light), then at 2 was Bill Schultz, former Executive Director of Amnesty International. That was followed by some chick I never hear of but whose topic I thought would be cool for the kids' projects for the quarter.

But first...I had to stop at this medical supply shop for "the boot". Yep. I decided to go through with the boot. For those who haven't been paying attention, I'm supposed to wear this boot for 30 days as my achilles is ready to blow. It turned into this bureaucratic conversation between the doctor, the insurance company and the medical supply folks. So no boot today.

OK...McKibben was really good, Schultz was good. Then I had an hour and a half with nothing to do...you would think they would have planned something but no. So I'm wandering around this strangely barren campus (they're not on break, but there weren't a lot of people there) and thought I'd get something to drink. So I went into the building with the cafeteria and everything was closed (!) but there was some talk going on...I assumed it was for Earth Day so I thought I'd join in. Then I saw two teachers from the Charter school who were supposed to be at the charrette (?). I sat down and soon realized this had nothing to do with Earth Day. This big sweaty guy was doing some presentation on technology in education and his presentation was scary...showing off all these simulations that the military uses to find better ways to kill people and flashing the word "cyborg" like it's enlightenment. I got the point about how even "blue collar" jobs are technical now, but this guy didn't seem to grasp the concept of community and how we have become separated by our technology (as I blog from 6000 miles away). Hang on to big, sweaty cyborg guy...we'll get back to him.

So finally I went to see the last speaker and I'm starting to fade. I haven't been sleeping and this day's getting exhausting. This chick was supposed to be talking about fun ways to green your life for under $50. I was there for over an hour and she STILL hadn't gotten to the topic and I was starting to get pissed. I waited for literally hours for this talk and she was horrible and off the point.

Now, while I was waiting for this waste of time that I'd never get back, I talked to Summer. Her partner had an accident while body surfing. He was at the ER and his face was pretty busted up. So she wasn't going to the Maui Unite meeting that we had planned on. (Maui Unite is a new grassroots group that seems pretty cool) Enter campaign manager...fine...so I went to the Maui Unite meeting. This month, the guest was Mayor Tavaras (not related to the 70's funk group - I know, I'm bummed about that, too). At all of these things was my boy Maury (remember, Maury comes back in at the end)

The Mayor

I get home around 9pm...eat and sleep.

Thursday: School. Show An Inconvenient Truth, blah, blah, blah. School is done and I have to leave right off the bat...I have to go get The Boot, then to the Y to do paperwork for the job. I get The Boot, but decide to wait until later to deal with it so I can get to the Y. Turns out I wasn't there to just to do paperwork...I had to work! I'm just at the front desk so I had to just learn where everything was, procedures, etc. But I wasn't really counting on doing an actual shift - I was still in school stuff, hadn't eaten, brought nothing to do when it gets slow.

The gig seems fine. No restraints...that's for sure. And I get a free membership while I work there, so I can work out - when The Boot's gone. But it's in Kahului which is 20-30 minutes away, but it's cool. The people seem friendly...not really my speed, but it works.

Friday: More school. Parents are a trip. For next week, I set up a field outing at the island's cable access station. All the kids are going to be trained in TV production. I STILL had parents bitching...and it was FREE! Gluesniffers.

Our lead teacher, Dan, asks me if I'm interested in going to talk with big sweaty guy! Seems that he's actually on the island for us (among others)! I found out that Big Sweaty Guy came to our school on Thursday, stayed 15 minutes and talked about himself the whole time. It was something out of Dilbert. Nice consulting. I don't know where I was when this went down. Then, Dan and others had dinner with the guy, where he proceeded to get drunk and more obnoxious (and I'm guessing more sweaty). But dig this...

Last week, some weird dude with connections to the charter school asked me to write a grant proposal to get money to do something with the kids on land development. Seriously...this guy doesn't know who he's playing with...talk about indoctinating the kids! So I actually worked up a good idea, but there's nothing I'd need to spend money on...it's just a good lesson. Enter, Big Sweaty Guy. His creepy, simulation software may be something we can use to show capitalist suckwads what their development plans would do to the land, people, etc. Hello, BSG! Hello, grant! Goodbye, developers.

Today was also my first day with The Boot. Not too bad. Driving's a bitch...basically, my right leg is in the passenger seat and I'm doing the pedals with my left. They won't let me drive the vans for school like this, so someone else is going to have to drive for school. Here's The Boot:




In the afternoon, I had sign class with the little ones. I don't understand this, but for some reason the game of Go Fish is magical. I have used it with jaded, inner-city high schoolers and 5-year-old, goofy homeschoolers and they all love it. Of course it's Go Fish in sign language, but it still boggles the mind.

So I finish with sign class, which is done at the high school. I went back over to my school to get some work done as I have to be at the Y and have campaign events to go to this weekend. I checked my e-mail quick and found...well, first...

There's a bit of a problem here. Just like every other state, The Man in Hawaii hates charter schools. I'll give my two cents on this another time, but in their latest budget they increased the money charter schools get, but increased the amount of charter schools in disproportion so that in reality we're getting less per student...and it's by a lot. So there's a letter writing campaign going on to the state senate about this.

So, in my e-mail was a note from Maury (I told you he'd be back). I was blind copied on it. It was a note he sent to everyone at the state government level...governor, senators & legislators. This is the entire e-mail verbatim:

I have become acquainted with one Dave Atias, an amazing teacher at the Kihei Charter School. I have seen him bring his students to listen to & participate in testimony in front of the Maui County Council. I have seen him fill rows of seats with his students this very week at the Maui Community College Sustainability Summit. I have seen Dave bring students to testify at least one evening event in Kihei (I believe they testified against Wailea 670 & good for them). I have been at participatory events held at the school involving the students. I have found them to be engaged in learning & interested in the process. I’m not sure I ever had a teacher quite like Dave, though I had some good ones. I am impressed with what this school does & what it is about. there should be more schools like this. Please make sure funding is available to continue this type of education.

BTW, I attend many events of political, educational & cultural events during weekdays on Maui & I’m not sure I can remember ever seeing another teacher with a load of students there. I wonder how come?

Maury King

Wow. Seriously...I'm printing this and putting it in my teaching portfolio. I got run out of schools in Rochester for doing stuff half as crazy as I'm doing here. I haven't even e-mailed Maury back, because I'm freakin speechless.

A Pinnacle in My Career

Today, my lesson was garbage. Literally.

There's a three day Earth Day Conference at Maui Community College going on. I took half the kids yesterday. It was so sparsely attended in the morning that if it wasn't for us there would have been 3 people who showed. So I was going to bring the other half of the group today. Well, I got a call yesterday afternoon telling me that the activity planned was canceled and that there's nothing happening until Noon. We couldn't swing that, so I was without an activity for today.

I couldn't come up with anything...at least this last minute. I called the other teachers...nothing. We're starting a quarter long project on our Carbon Footprint (Check it out here.)and I needed the activity to be connected to that so I started gripping a little.

I started running through my mental lesson plan file...for some reason, the lamest thing I've done this year kept popping up in my head...when we went to the beach and wrote haiku's. Then it hit me...we won't go to the beach...we'll go to the dump!

And so we did.






The county workers looked at me like I was nuts when two vans full of kids pulled up. One guy sent me to the supervisor's office and I had to talk to three people. They weren't comprehending what the hell we were doing there. (I left out the haiku part - I just told them that we were working on a project about pollution) So they let us hang out on this hill to observe and take notes. Of course the kids are complaining about the smell, even after I told them not to because it's their garbage out there - they made the smell.

Then a couple of workers in a golf cart tools up and told us that we can't stay there and there's this big bruhaha. So we're getting ready to go and one of the dudes asks how much time do we have...plenty...so he took us on a van tour of the landfill, including how they're starting to capture the methane gas - but unfortunately just burning it off, they're not using it for energy consumption, yet.

As we're finishing up the tour, one of my kids asks the guy how he got this job. Turns out he has a degree in engineering & biology...seeing as how we're a STEM school they all moaned as if when they graduate from here they're doomed to working at the dump.

Then we came back and wrote freakin haiku's about the dump. I've learned that my kids either don't know what a syllable is or they can't count to 7. Either way...

All Hell Breaks Loose

What the???

OK, maybe this isn't such a big deal, but it was definitely a surprise. Hmmmm...I'm not going to mention names here and not give clues for you to figure out who these people are...most of you wouldn't know these folks anyway. Even though I haven't had contact with these people in a while, I still consider them my friends and would never do anything that would hurt them.

Having said that, here's my tale.

While there is still more to be done, I do try to keep finding new ways of promoting the podcast. I think I've done a pretty good job. The latest thing - streaming the shows on our MySpace and Facebook pages has worked well so far. So, on Myspace you can go through everyone in your e-mail address book to see if they have MySpace pages, then you can Friend Request them. So I did that...and there were a bunch of people who showed up; some are already "friends" of the show, some I don't want to be friends of the show and a few who weren't but would like them to be. So I thought I'd check that last group out to see if they actually use their pages.

Whoa.

A few friends of mine have either become single or are telling the cyberworld that they are. And I don't mean people who were in new relationships when I left town. I mean, long time, marriages. I guess they just couldn't keep up the facade of a relationship after I left town. (Yeah...I know)

One of these pages left me absolutely speechless. It was if dude decided to become a pimp or something. And I'll just understate it when I say that was NOT his character before.

I guess you don't really know people...

Which is true...Michael and I have this long-standing agreement that as long as my mother is alive (no camping jokes please), if I meet an untimely death, Michael has agreed to go into my apartment and do a sweep of anything he deems...uh...unmomable...not-mom-worthy...uh...well, you know what I mean.

But that profile really blew me away...oh, I bookmarked it all right.

Irony...It's Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

As I sat, proctoring today's State standardized test, I was re-reading John Taylor Gatto's, A Different Kind of Teacher I was almost awestruck by the irony. It was then that my brain started working a little bit of overtime. Some old ideas/efforts from the past kind of came together with the direction I seem to be going in and a really freaking good idea hit me. I'm not quite ready to throw it out there, I have a couple of snags I have to figure out first, but if I can find the right vehicle for this, it could be something cool. Let's hope it gets out of the idea stage.

It's too bad I can't make money off of the podcast. Oh well. By the way, the last one has me all by my lonesome. A few interesting things: I confess to being a bad lesbian, I also announce my semi-temporary retirement from the Green Party. You can actually listen to it streamed now (without downloading) at our myspace page. Or you can just download it here.

So, I had a job interview scheduled for this afternoon that was postponed...that was followed by a call from the dentist. She had a last minute opening and they wanted to know if I was free to go to stage 2 of my cleaning. (Did I mention before that it had been a while since I'd been to the dentist?) I unfortunately did. Two hours of needles and drooling. Now I'm just drooling. Oh yeah, and a $200 bill. That would be $200 I didn't have. It's going to be an interesting 2 weeks.

So, I'm just starting to feel the right side of my face...and it ain't feeling too good. Can't wait for the left side to free up. Well, I guess I'll have to decide on what will have the least side effects - 2 Alieve or 2 beers. After laundry, we'll find out.

Hmmm...so what else...well, some new folks moved in upstairs. Good news: no dog. Bad news: they're loud and dude has a guitar. I'm getting old. The next thing you know I'm going to be complaining about damn kids on the lawn. And I don't even have a lawn!

Feed Dave for a week for 39 cents...

...because appearently I live in a fucking third world country. I need help from Sally Freaking Struthers! Today was windy. Not, hurricane windy. Not tropical storm windy. Just windy. And power went out across the whole island! Did someone trip over the one cord that powers the whole island? We have these huge fucking windmills that don't mean jack squat if they can't deliver the electricity because our grid is make of freaking Lincoln Logs! Unbelievable. Hey all you rich folk - make sure you spend millions on your overpriced condo so that your power can go off every time two birds land on the same wire.

Alright...I'm online so obviously the power's back on...but that's not the point.

Stupid third world island.