Disasters I Have Known... And Teaching

Someone asked me what my speech for high school graduation was about, and I decided "Disasters I Have Known... and Teaching" pretty well summed it up. Graduation went very well - no air horns, no eggs handed out during the handshake. Students behaved well, as always. Parents, not so much, but better than last year (no air horns). 
I think because I was standing in the library with my 7th grade class watching the Challenger shuttle when it blew up, it has bothered me more than most disasters, even to this day. It was supposed to be such a glorious event, the first teacher in space, but it jarred all of us who were watching. It made this a difficult speech to get through. But it was well received by the audience, and I even got a couple of laughs from the kids.  




Commencement Address
May 22, 2016

Wauconda High School                                                                                                

John Armstrong                                                                                                                     

Parents, friends, faculty, and members of the fraduating class of 2016:

On behalf of the District 118 School Board, I am pleased to welcome you to the 100th annual commencement of Wauconda High School.

I was standing in the hallway outside the auditorium at Wauconda High School after Honors Night a few weeks ago, when I was approached by Mr. Roy, one of the school counselors. He told me he hoped that my graduation speech was funny, because he enjoyed them more when they were. I know the Board of Education agrees with him and probably most of the rest of you would as well.

So I was thinking about jokes I could tell, but I realized that after teaching high school math for many years, a lot of the jokes I knew were math jokes. Like, when I grew up, I lived out in the country surrounded by farms and one day my Dad and I were leaning on the fence talking to my neighbor and my Dad asked him how many cows he had now. And the neighbor said it all depended on where they were. We didn’t understand that at all and asked him to explain and he said, “Well, if they are out in the field there are 196, but when I round them up, there are 200.”

And then I realized that maybe because I grew up in farm country, that a lot of the jokes I knew were about cows. Like two cows are standing out in the field and one of them says, “Did you hear there was another outbreak of mad cow disease going around?” And the other cow says, “Good thing I’m a helicopter.” And then I thought maybe I’ll just save the jokes for someone else.

There are certain events that are so traumatic on a national level that people automatically remember where they were when they happened. I was in the hallway outside Mr. Martindale’s Social Studies classroom when I heard over the loudspeaker that JFK had been shot. And I was in my own classroom when I heard about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. And lately I’ve been thinking about another such incident because we just passed the 30^th anniversary. Partly because I am such a math/science geek, but primarily because I grew up 10 miles from where Neil Armstrong grew up, I have always been fascinated by the NASA Space missions. It was even more exciting when, in 1984, in my 10^th year of teaching, Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space program. NASA wanted to find an ordinary person, a teacher, to be the first civilian in space. More than 11,000 of us applied for the job. In 1985, Christa MacAuliffe from Concord High School in New Hampshire was selected. And in January of 1986, she boarded the space shuttle Challenger with six other crew members. I was standing behind my 7^th grade math class in a junior high school library watching the TV as Challenger lifted off. In the library was a poster some of the older folks here today may remember – it had a picture of Christa MacAuliffe in her space suit and the words, “I touch the future – I teach.” Most of my life, as a child and an adult, has been spent in schools, on one side of the teacher’s desk or the other, so it is not a surprise that all of these events occurred while I was in a school. And those words “I touch the future – I teach” had a huge impact on me as a young teacher. And I would guess that the teachers sitting beside you today take that message to heart as well. I would like you to give some thought to that message as well.

There was a time a few years ago that I would not have encouraged a young person to give some thought to teaching. The ideas and procedures of No Child Left Behind were guaranteed to steal the heart and soul out of good teachers. The thought that all that was expected of you by those outside of teaching was to teach your students to do well on the state tests seemed to be a mockery of Christa MacAuliffe’s phrase “I touch the future – I teach.” But in recent years, things have started to turn around somewhat.

Now, I know that many of you have a specific career in mind right now. You may want to be an engineer or a physical therapist, a finance person or a dentist, a soldier or an entrepreneur. And those are all worthwhile careers. But one of the things we know now is that careers don’t tend to last as long as they used to. The fraction of the work force that stays in one career for 45 years, and then retires is significantly smaller than it used to be. A large percentage of employees are going back to a community college in their thirties, forties, and even fifties to be retrained for a new career. 

And so, it may be that, 20 years from now, you may find the prospect of getting a teaching certificate is intriguing. I hope that you give that some serious thought. You have a lot of good role models sitting near you today. And if you become a math teacher, you may get to hear what I heard from a 7^th grade student, “Mr. Armstrong, Do you know what Zero said to Eight? Nice belt.”

Thank you for listening and congratulations on reaching this milestone in your life.

It's That Time of the Year, Again.

Graduation season is upon us again here in Wauconda, Illinois. The middle school ceremony was last Tuesday. I threw out the speech I had because it refused to be tweaked into something decent. Ended up doing a modification of an old high school speech pitched to eighth graders. Seemed to go over well. I'll put it up here even though it's not new. It does give me a place to go that I know I can find them if my computer blows up.

Commencement Address

May 17, 2016

Wauconda Middle School / Matthews Middle School

John Armstrong

Parents, friends, faculty, students:

Promotion day is often a time to look back, to reminisce about the last three years of middle school life:  the classes, the games, the dances; what we did in Mrs. Robb’s class, what Ms. Carlson told us, what activity Mr. Prostka had planned for us.  It is an enjoyable exercise: to look back; to remember the good times, laugh (finally) about the bad times.  It is a time to celebrate all that has gone before.

But now we are where we are, another new stage of life with it's own unknown challenges and questions, happiness and sorrows.  Over the next few months, there will be many changes.  You will lose old friends and make new friends.  You will find things you used to do are no longer interesting and you will develop new interests.  You will find the high school has more choices than you have had before, more activities like Math Team and Photo Club; more sports, like golf or bowling; more variety for classes, like Foods and Environmental Science.  It is a whole new world for you and part of our job as a school district is to ask you to consider how you are going to respond to those changes. 

I was privileged to see the historian David McCullough speak at a school board convention in Chicago not too long ago and it prompted me to read one of his books.  In the book he talks about what he sees as an alarming shift in the mindset of what kind of country the United States should be.  Historically, he wrote, it has been a country that valued achievement over safety.  When people moved from Europe to the United States in the 1600’s, they knew they were taking a tremendous risk.  When people loaded their possessions in a wagon in the 1800’s, and headed west, they knew they were taking a tremendous risk.  And when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbed into the lunar module of Apollo 11 in the summer of 1969 and headed for the Moon’s surface, they knew they were taking a tremendous risk.

Lately, it seems, risk has become a bad word.  Safety and security have become the watchword for our country.  And when I speak to young people about what they will do with their lives, I can hear the echoes of lots of adults telling them to play it safe.  We adults have tried to protect you as you grew up and as a consequence you have heard us say over and over again to say no to this and say no to that.  I am here to appeal to you to take some risks as you make decisions about what you will do with your time in high school.  I don’t mean that you should ride in the car without a seat belt or put things in your body that will mess up your health or your psyche.  But as you move from middle school to high school, trust in yourself.  Dream big.  Don’t play it safe. Maybe being in the school play has sounded interesting, but you weren’t sure you could do it. This may be the year to get involved, either on the stage or behind the stage.  Maybe math team will spark some interest. Or you like playing tennis. Spend some time working hard at that this summer and decide whether you would like to try out for the tennis team. Do something that will make you stretch and grow.  And trust in yourself. 

I had dinner last week with a 48 – year old friend whose company decided to hire an outside consulting firm to do the work that his department does.  After 15 years with the company, he is out of work.  He has been an accountant all his life.  But what he wanted to do 30 years ago when he went to college was teach science.  At the time, you couldn’t make much money in teaching, so he decided to play it safe.  Next Tuesday he has an interview with an organization in Chicago that helps people earn alternative teacher certification if they are willing to work in inner – city Chicago.  It will be a big change in his life and he will have to start all over.  But he is very excited about his future right now. 

Helen Keller said, "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” 

I hope your next four years are a daring adventure. 

Thank you. 

Loss of an Icon

When Ann and I were visiting Mike and Tammy recently, we got a chance to relax and listen to some albums on their new turntable. They have a very nice set-up and, although they don't have a lot of albums yet, there are enough to easily fill an afternoon of playing board games.    

 I have been fascinated these last few years as vinyl becomes a thing again. We were in the Barnes and Noble store a few weeks ago and found a selection of albums prominently displayed back in the music section. Some albums from newer artists like Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift were there, but David Bowie and Chicago were in the mix as well.   




I use my Kindle quite a bit to read, but still go to the library every two or three weeks because I enjoy having a physical book to read, with pages to turn and a place to put my bookmark. I get that same feeling when I handle a record album. Seeing the artwork, looking at the list of songs and composers on the back side, reading the liner notes to find out what's new with the band. That was very much a part of my high school and college days. I have albums from The Association, James Taylor, The Kingston Trio, and even an Aaron Copland classical album.   



So I'm excited that the kids are into vinyl. Nate's collection is pretty large. He has been buying albums for quite some time. Unfortunately one of the best places to look for albums is now gone. The Jazz Record Mart, which long billed itself as “The World’s Largest Jazz and Blues Record Store,” closed its doors due to rising rents at 11:30 a.m. Monday, 10 minutes after a deal was completed to sell the business, according to the Chicago Tribune. Wolfgang’s Vault – a Reno, Nev., operation that buys and sells music, film and other cultural items – has acquired the store’s inventory and the Jazz Record Mart name and web site.   

I've been in the store once or twice in the past when I've been downtown for something else and I know Nathan goes in whenever he has time and a little extra money, so The Record Mart will be missed. The Logan Hardware is still open on Fullerton. Its website promises:  

Looking for a working Fun Chicken? We have one. Looking for that Polish language LP from 1971 about the goat and the ostrich? We've got it.   

Old School Records in Forest Park is not a big store, but I enjoyed looking through their albums last time we were out in that direction shopping. And just down the street is Defiant Comics, which is also a fun place to stop.   

Mike asked for some advice on picking a jazz album to add to his library, so when we got home, I ordered him "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis. It shows up on most top five lists for best jazz album ever. If you don't know it, here's a sample. Enjoy.   
  


  

Just Walk Away, Michael

Michael Brown, the brilliant leader and keyboardist of the rock group, The Left Bank, passed away last year at the age of 65, according to the Los Angeles Times.  Brown was the main songwriter for the group, though he left in 1967 after just one album. At the age of 16, he co-wrote and wrote, respectively, the band's best-known songs, "Walk Away Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina", both odes to unrequited love. The band's use of strings and harpsichord earned them the label "baroque-pop," while their sound echoes on in the work of acts such as Belle & Sebastian, Elliott Smith and Jens Lekman, whose "Black Cab" sampled the band's "I've Got Something On My Mind."   

I was a big fan of Left Banke in freshman year at Michigan State University in 1969. They just seemed to hit a chord for a young man with a heavy background in high school chorus and pop music who was living away from all of his family and friends for the first time. Almost every evening had Association, Left Banke, Simon and Garfunkel, and CSNY songs filling the third floor of Fee Hall.  

For your enjoyment, Walk Away Renee:  

                

It's Fantasy Time!

Do you know Jon Lester's FIP rating?  Or Joey Votto's OPS? If you do, you're probably getting ready for another season of Fantasy Baseball. I've been in a (mainly) family league called Evolution on Yahoo sports since 2004. This year will be our 12th year in existence and it promises to be a special year because, for the first time since 2005, I will be the reigning (co)champ of the league.

The past few years have been pretty dismal. I finished dead last in 2006 and 2013. A couple of early years, the only thing keeping me out of last place was that we didn't have enough teams in the league, so we gave one to the cat. We drafted the worst players in the league for Twilight, then never looked at it again. I beat her by two points.Two points, because she didn't have thumbs to make trades.

It got to be so bad that in 2011 my team name was "I'm Aiming For Third." I finished fifth.

Luckily, the draft is mainly a social event. We love getting together at my sister-in-law Randi's house in Fort Wayne for the draft. Ann always makes frosted Christmas cookies, which irritated Mike when he had to join us by Skype from Portland. This year he is coming from Des Moines, I think just for the cookies. My dad is in the league. At 93, he is the senior member of the league and tends to grab up all the Reds players he can.

The last three years, we have let the reigning champ pick the rules for team names. In 2012, your name had to be someone famous in history (my team was the Where's Waldo Emersons). 2013's name had to have something to do with the movies (I see Dead Cubs), and last year, it had to be a beverage (Starling Latte). For next year, my co-champ Mike and I have agreed on games - your team name should have something to do with a board game, video game, or a game you played outdoors when you were a kid, like Kick the Can, which would become a team name of Kick the Cano to tie it in to baseball, you know, because Robinson Cano is a baseball player. Well, they can't all be gems. My dad's team is going to be Grand Theft Votto. That's better.

Anyway the draft is this weekend, followed by several more days in Ohio cleaning up the Glass homestead to get it ready to sell. Closing could be as early as in three weeks, so we have a lot to get moved out. But it will be good to see both boys, Dad, Randi, and Steve on Saturday and do some good old trash talking about fantasy baseball. Let the games begin!

What Do You Mean It's Not A Mongoose?

Back before Halo and BattleToads and even MarioKart, there were things called text games. You would lie on the floor with your Apple IIc and type in commands as you hung out on a Saturday night with the Lighthalls and the Robinsons. The one we played a lot was called Zork and it was built in the late 70's by a bunch of guys who went on to found Infocom. You typed in commands on the screen based on the information you had at the time:

"look under rug", "open mailbox", or, our favorite, "take mongoose."

The assumption was that you would eventually run across a cobra and the mongoose would save your life. Unfortunately when that happened and you offered up the mongoose, it turned out that it was really a ferret and the cobra killed it immediately.

In 1983, Zork sold over 100,000 copies. The next year, a new text adventure came out from Infocom. Here is some history:

It therefore stands to reason that any game which combined a really good programmer with a really good writer was likely to do well. So when Steve Meretzky of Infocom got together with Douglas Adams to create a game based around the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the result was never going to be less than interesting and more than likely insane. So it proved - the Hitchhiker's Guide adventure game was one of the best-selling games of its era, selling some 350,000 copies. In 1984.

Then graphics games came along and the computer using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together - the point and click game.

 Here is a shot of the opening screen with a possible command typed in:


 


In honor of the 30th anniversary of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the Game, BBC Radio 4 has released on their servers an updated version of the game for you to play at work when you have some free time. Or when you get bored. Or anytime really, because, come on, the work will still be there tomorrow. This version has the ability to save your progress, which is very important because, as the game says,

A word of warning

This game will kill you frequently. It's a bit mean like that.


So have fun, and remember, there are graphics there. They're just in your head, like when you used to pick up a book to read rather than wait for the movie to come out. Try it. You'll like it.

A Movie Recommendation, Eventually

The movie / TV distribution business has been pretty chaotic over the last few years. Network TV has been losing market share pretty steadily, in spite of their commitment to copying whatever the hot new show was last year rather than trying to make something original. Cable has picked up the slack and seems to have the new hit shows, but they tend to be a little dark to sit down with the family and watch on a Sunday night. People tell me Game of Thrones, Dexter, House of Cards, Homeland, and Orange is the New Black are all great shows, but I haven't gotten into them. I miss Pushing Daisies and Life and Farscape. On the movie side, Netflix was the anti-Blockbuster. Get dvds in the mail, keep them however long you wanted, and lots of choices. Then came HULU and now there's HBO online and there are lots of choices for how to receive your movie. We still have Netflix, getting one dvd at a time, watching it almost immediately, and sending it back right away so that we are seeing a couple of movies a week this way. We also have lots of Netflix movies that can be streamed over the computer that we can watch on the big TV with the Apple TV box. We went to see the new Hunger Games 3A movie this week at the theater and realized we had forgotten most of the previous movie. So when we got home, we dialed up Hunger Games 2 on Netflix Streaming and watched it from the couch.    

I like Netflix because we have seen a number of quirky movies over the years that we wouldn't have paid to see at the theater and many of them have been very good. Our most recent watching was a movie that I would recommend to my family because I know they have some of the same sensibilities we have. In particular, I know that music is very important to them. We have top ten lists for movies and for books on our Marshmallow Fight website, but when we looked at top songs, we knew it would take at least 25 to get all the songs onto the list that we wanted. So each person there has a top 25 list of songs, which, in the case of Dave and me, expanded to top 30 because we couldn't make the final 5 cuts. They are all great songs, but they aren't all there because they are great songs. Many of them are there because they are tightly connected to important moments in our lives. Psychologists tell us that smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory. Strong smells can trigger our memory of events long gone from our conscious mind. But I think music is equally powerful. And it's not just events. When I hear some Association songs, I am taken back to my Freshman year in college some 45 years ago. My roommate was a junior who loved the Association and had a stereo. You needed a record player back then as there were no ipods or smartphones and itunes wasn't even a ka-ching in Steven Jobs' eyes yet. You went to the record store if you wanted to buy a new album. There were people there who liked to talk about music. You might have a conversation with someone standing right next to you. OK, I've gotten off track here and started shouting at the kids to get off my lawn. Sorry about that. Anyway "Along Comes Mary" just sends me off thinking about late night talk sessions in the dorm, skateboarding along the Red Cedar River at two in the morning, and many other memories of my first year away from home and family.    

There is a scene in the movie I am recommending where a record producer explains to a songwriter what a splitter does. You plug it (nowadays) into your phone or ipod, then the music is split into two sets of headphones. The producer, played by Mark Ruffalo in a wonderful turn as a jaded, declining  middle aged man recovering from a meltdown in his life, relates the story of wandering around New York with his girlfriend many years ago, listening to each other's playlists. And that is a scene that I can easily see people I know recreating. Especially people who believe their playlist is a window into their heart and their soul.  

The movie is called "Begin Again" and stars Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, although the supporting cast is excellent as well. Ann and I both really liked it. The vocals in the movie are mostly done by Keira Knightley, Adam Levine (the front man for Maroon 5), and CeeLo Green (from the Voice) and, yes, I already downloaded the soundtrack to itunes. But the only one here to talk to during the download was Whimzy, so maybe I'll still go out to the record store for old times sake.    

Road Trip!

Now that Mike and Tammy are relocating to Raleigh, North Carolina, it's time to start planning a new road trip. We have done two road trips to Portland, Oregon while they have been living there, hitting all the major scenic hot spots like Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone National Park, and the Corn Palace (look it up - it's pretty cool) in Mitchell, South Dakota. We have also spent some time (and money) in Reno and driven through the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah. We have one last trip to Portland planned for Mike's graduation, but unfortunately we're flying out because of time issues. It will be sad to say goodbye to Portland - we really like the area and it's close to my brother and sister-in-law - but now we are planning a trip east to the Atlantic. Well, not right now. Now we are getting excited about Nate and Dana's wedding this summer in Chicago. But when we do plan to head east, we already have one destination picked out.  

When we were vacationing in St. Louis many years ago with the Lighthalls and the Robinsons, I picked up a sign that I kept on my desk at school for twenty years. It read "No one gets in to see the wizard! Not no one, not no how!" It is a manifestation of my enjoyment of all things Ozian. I loved watching the Wizard of Oz movie when I was younger. Back in those pre-cable days, it ran on CBS exactly once a year. There were no recorders so if you wanted to see it, you had to be planted in front of the TV while it ran. You couldn't buy it from Amazon or even in the video store - neither of those existed in 1960. It was definitely "must-watch" TV. I read some of the original books when I was growing up, then bought the collection for my Kindle and have been working my way through it again. There used to be a Wizard of Oz Museum north of Valparaiso, Indiana, on our way to Ohio, but it closed a few years ago.  

I was excited, then, to find that west of Raleigh, North Carolina, on Beech Mountain, there is an abandoned Wizard of Oz theme park. I first read about it on Roadtrippers, which is my go-to road trip app. The Land of Oz was opened in 1970 with the intention of keeping the ski lodge employees working during the summer months (it's up in the mountains). It got 20,000 visitors a day at first, but fell victim to a fire in 1976 which destroyed some of the Oz memorabilia, then closed in 1980. Several years later, the theme park opened for one weekend only to allow former employees a chance to get together again. October 5th of this year is the 20th year of the "Autumn at Oz" celebration. The rest of the year the park is closed.  

But there is a loophole. Tucked away on the grounds of The Land of Oz is a house built to model Dorothy Gale's house in Kansas and it is for rent year round. For $165 a weeknight, you have access to the grounds of the theme park. 

And even though the park is in bad shape, there are still lots of things to see. So, sometime in the next year, "We're off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." I just hope it can live up to the splendor and awesomeness of the Corn Palace. 

WHS Commencement Address, 2014

It's that time of year again. WHS graduated last Sunday; the two middle schools graduate next Tuesday. I have been giving the commencement address for the last twelve years, with a couple of years off to go see Mike and Nate graduate from college. There is concern that you take the right tone with the speech - it needs to be for the parents of the graduates as well as the graduates. But I'm sure very few of you would remember your high school commencement speaker or her/his text for the day. So although there is some pressure, it is not overwhelming. Just try to be a little funny and finish quickly. Unfortunately for the people I know, the commencement address is at times a story, and so my family, usually Nate and Mike, often appear in the story in an exaggerated way. At other times I just simply make something up to fit the theme. I'm a first level Keillor in this dungeons and dragons game: I can't help it. Unfortunately, this graduation had a cloud hanging over it: Tom Weber, who had been on the board for 19 years and is the biggest WHS booster in town was in the hospital after suffering from a stroke and would pass away that evening after graduation finished. He was always in our thoughts as we handed out diplomas. Anyway, here is this year's version.   

Commencement Address

May 18, 2014

Wauconda High School

John Armstrong

Parents, friends, faculty, and members of the graduating class of 2014:

On behalf of the District 118 School Board, I welcome you to the 98th annual commencement of Wauconda High School.

For the second time in the last five years, I received a distressing envelope in the mail from someone that was once my friend. Inside the envelope was a letter reminding me that it had been 45 years since I had graduated from high school and it was time for a high school reunion. Now, I won’t pretend that you’re thinking “45 years, Mr. Armstrong? That’s not possible.” But, in fact, 45 years ago, in a small rural town in Ohio, I sat in a seat much as you do now and listened to a commencement address. I don’t remember who gave the commencement address at my high school or what the address was about. You won’t remember yours either. By this time next week, it will be relegated to that portion of the memory devoted to your sister’s birth date and the quadratic formula.

It was thinking about that invitation to my high school reunion that made me want to talk to you today about friends. We all know what a tremendous impact your parents and the rest of your family have on you. And we are very proud of the quality of the teachers and staff here in District 118 and recognize that they have a profound influence on your lives as well. But today, I want to talk to you about friends. As my school board friend Mr. Swanson is fond of saying, “There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with doughnuts.”

I mentioned my upcoming reunion to my son, who graduated from Wauconda High School in 2001, a few weeks ago when we were visiting him in Chicago. He had missed his 10^th reunion three years earlier and was sorry about that. My son was very engaged in high school, heavily involved in sports and activities as many of you are, though not as involved in the classroom as his parents would have liked. He went to every dance and we often had kids spending weekend nights at our house. He had a group of 5 or 6 close friends, but seemed to know everybody. That was primarily a function of his extroverted nature. When he was a freshman at University of Illinois in Chicago, when we walked from his apartment to go out to dinner, I found he was on a first name basis with most of the regular homeless people in that section of Milwaukee Avenue. He made friends easily. When high school was over, though, he moved on to college and only sporadically would get together with his high school friends. Years would go by and he wouldn’t have had any contact with any of the kids he graduated with. His life changed and his friends changed, too.

Although I am not the extrovert that my son is, our experiences after high school were very similar. I left Ohio to go to college, then moved to the Chicago area right after college to go to work. When I drove from Wauconda to my old hometown to visit my parents, I might run into a former classmate at the grocery or at a restaurant, but I didn’t plan anything with my old friends when I was there. And years would pass before I would see anyone from good old Memorial High School. The only person I have stayed in touch with was the girl I went to prom with senior year, and that’s because we’ve been married for 40 years now.

I know what we write in our friends’ yearbooks in our senior year and what we say to each other when we reconvene downstairs when this ceremony is over. And you know what, it might not be true. You may end up going very different directions, and you may not see or talk to that person that is so important to you today for years at a time. And that’s OK. Just because that friendship doesn’t extend for years from now, just because you find other people to share your most important thoughts and feelings with over the next few years, doesn’t diminish in any way the importance of the friendships you have had in high school with the people sitting around you in this room. The years you spend in high school can be incredibly terrifying at times. The decisions you make every week can rebound with consequences for years to come, whether you recognize the consequences or not. And without the graduating seniors around you in this room, those four years would have been much more difficult. They have encouraged you, commiserated with you, cried with you, celebrated with you, and most importantly, they cared about you. And you cared about them. And whether you are still best friends ten years from now does not take anything away from how important they have been for the last four years.

When I go to my reunion next month and talk to people I haven’t seen since the last reunion five years ago, we will remember moments from those years together. We will tell stories only slightly embellished of things we did as teenagers and especially stories of people who for one reason or another could not attend this year. We will talk about Mr. Eversman’s Geometry class. About singing in the choir together. About being in the cast for the play “Our Town” in our junior year. And about four summers of two-a-day practices for football in the heat of August. And although we don’t say it out loud, mostly we celebrate how important we were to each other for those four years.

A friend doesn’t need to be a friend forever to be important. They just need to be a friend today.

Thank you for listening and congratulations on reaching this milestone in your life.  

What I Did Yesterday!

Anna and I have been talking about getting a new(ish) car since last October. We wanted something that would be comfortable enough for long drives and road trips. When we drive Ann's Subaru to Ohio, my knees are pretty sore by the time we get there. It's a great car for her, just a little cramped for me. My last car was a Chevy S-10 truck and we are going to hang on to it for a while. It seems with the summer finally here, we use that quite a bit to haul the mower in to get fixed, pick up paving blocks or bags of mulch from the Home Depot, and generally anything that would make a mess of the car's trunk. We'll see if we can afford the insurance for a while. Our intent is to drive the truck until it dies or gets killed, then donate it.   

Anyway, here is the car we came up with. It's a 2011 Nissan Maxima with about 29,000 miles on it. In the past we have bought new cars, but almost always in a basic version - very few of the bells and whistles that were available. I was hoping to step up a grade on this car, so getting it three years old brought it back down to my price range. It has a sunroof, keyless start and keyless entry (you just have to have the key nearby), a Bose sound system, and seats that remember where to adjust to. Which is a lot fancier than the truck or the Astro van (named the Tank by the kids) I had before the truck, neither of which had heated bun warmers. It also had the most rear seat legroom of the cars we tested, so I will now get to drive to some school board events (people keep saying "Yes" when I ask if they mind riding in the bed of the truck) instead of riding with Carey.

So, I have a new ride to cruise the local parking lots in. I watched the TV ads really closely this winter and saw all the people taking their cars up the mountain to go skiing or mountain biking or having everyone in formalwear and headed for the opera. I'm thinking I'll go to the Jewel this afternoon and buy something to grill out tonight. Woooooo!    

You're Fired, Part Three

#3

Our final story of the sequence occurs much later than the first two, in 1979. I have been teaching for 6 or 7 years, first in Lake Forest and now in Mundelein. Besides teaching math classes, I am a football coach in the fall and a tennis coach in the spring. If you remember, I mentioned that I had become a member of the union when it was possible to do so. By this time, I have worked my way up to the position of President of the Mundelein Education Association, a branch of IEA/NEA. In Mundelein at that time, our superintendent was not happy with the outcome of the most recent round of teacher negotiations (I was the chief negotiator for the union). As a result, he fired me from my job as Freshman Tennis Coach. His stated purpose at the time was that we would need to meet from time to time to discuss the new contract and I could not do that if I was busy every afternoon coaching tennis. Our union contract did not cover extra-curricular positions, so there was not much I could do. He also tried to lower my evaluation as a teacher based on what I had done as union president, but when the IEA rep called the school's law firm to discuss that, that got thrown out pretty quickly. Within the next year, I found a new job in Barrington and moved out of Mundelein. My six years in Mundelein were very enjoyable. The guys I coached football and tennis with were great, and the people in the math department (and science department where my desk was) were good to work with. But it was time to move on. With the higher pay in Barrington, I could stop coaching and go back to school to get my Master's. And soon thereafter, there was the pitter - patter of tiny feet (at first - eventually they grew to a size 13) in the Armstrong household, and a new set of duties to take on.   

So, that's the story. Thanks for following along. We'll try to pass along some happier memories in the weeks to come.   

You're Fired, Part Two

#2

After my Junior year in college, I found out that the Goodyear factory where I had worked the last two summers was not hiring summer help that year. It was a great job and paid good money. I worked the 11PM to 7 AM shift in the Banbury division (we took the raw rubber in bales, threw it in a two-story mixer with a bunch of chemicals and lamp black powder, turned up the heat, and out of the bottom came usable rubber that ran through a big pasta making machine that turned it into thin sheets that hung up to dry before being shipped out to the rest of the factory. The lamp black was terrible stuff to get off your face. It took a lot of time and vaseline to clean it from around your eyes, so most of us only did that on Friday morning when we finished our last shift of the week. Which meant I spent most of the summer looking like a raccoon. Ann barely mentioned it (three or four times a week, tops). When I got off work at 7 AM, I would meet Ann for breakfast or to play tennis, then she would go off to work and I would go home to bed. We had evenings together, until 10:30, when it was time to go to work. One of the pluses of working at Goodyear was that as I went off shift, I would swing through the first floor of the factory and say Hi to my dad who worked the morning shift. He was a supervisor and my most lasting memory of him at the factory was coming downstairs and hearing him explain to a young man that a box of #4 washers shouldn't be dumped into the bin marked #5 washers and that he'd better get busy sorting washers. Although he used a lot more colorful language than that which I think he learned while in the Navy.   

So when the Goodyear plant quit hiring, I was forced to look for something else. My brother Alan and Ann and I spent part of the summer making candles which we sold to gift shops and department stores. As you can imagine, not a lot of money there. Probably not even enough to pay the damage we might have caused melting wax over an open flame in Mom's kitchen. Luckily we got the fire out in time. Mostly it helped to fill the time in the summer. Every weekend we went to a craft fair and set up a booth selling candles to people passing by.   

I found out from my roommate Guy that the steel mill in Cleveland he worked at needed help and I was welcome to move up to his house and we would work together. So I packed what I needed into the VW bug and headed for Olmsted Falls. It turned out the steel mill was owned by his girl friend's father, which is how we got jobs there. I worked most of my time on a big machine that pressed down on a piece of steel and made something out of it. After 40 years, I have no recollection of what it made. It was just tedious work (I was low man on seniority and got the worst job). It broke down often and I would have to sit and wait for someone to come fix it. The machine was probably 10 feet tall. On one of the days when I got to work I was a little early and someone else was running the machine. It must have broken down for him, too, because when I got there he was hanging from the top of the machine pounding on it with a small sledge hammer. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, "Percussive maintenance."  

On our last day of the summer, with two hours to go before we were officially off the job for the last time, my machine broke down again. I called it in and when Guy came by to see what was up, he suggested that we take a tour of the plant and say goodbye to everybody while they fixed the machine. Guy had an office job and had a lot more freedom than I did. Ten minutes later the foreman found us and fired us on the spot. When he escorted me back to the machine to get my stuff, it still wasn't fixed. I asked why I was being fired for not working when I couldn't be working, he said I was required to stay by the machine. I asked when the machine was going to be fixed and he said they needed a part. It was down until the next day. He also made some comments about how we weren't in the union and there wasn't anything we could do about it. Probably one of the main reasons I have been in a union on every job since then if it was possible. When he walked us to the gate and we punched out for the last time, I had lost 57 minutes of work time. I know Guy and his girl friend talked to her dad about what happened. I don't think anything came of it except to let her dad know we weren't goofing off when we could have been working.   

So that was job #2 for being fired. Soon, firing #3.

You're Fired!

Over Christmas break, while the kids were here, we got to talking about the jobs we had when we were younger and I happened to mention that I had been fired from at least three jobs in my life.
That immediately prompted a request for details. So, here goes.   

#1   

When I was a sophomore at Michigan State University, I spent fall quarter working at an International House of Pancakes in East Lansing. As Paula Poundstone would say, "It was a dream and I made it happen." I worked there from September through December from 6 PM until midnight. I was a busboy and dishwasher, and besides making some money, it fit the bill in another way. My friends, Guy Conger and Bob Paski, and I had moved that year from the regular dorm room into an apartment in the dorm to save some money. The money savings was that we didn't get a meal plan - we were expected to do our own meals in the apartment. At IHOP, I was given one free meal a day, and I made it count. An omelet with pancakes and a root beer were gourmet cooking to me. Unfortunately, they didn't understand that I went home to Ohio for Christmas break for three weeks. That was the first time I got fired.  After talking to the manager about coming back on the job in January when I returned to campus, I was told not to bother because they would have to hire someone to fill in for me while I was gone. Luckily, I found a job in January working late nights in the dorm grill. I spent a lot of time Freshman and Sophomore years in that grill playing pinochle when I got tired of studying, so it worked out OK.   

Looking back, moving to the apartment in the dorm was a bad idea. I wasn't at all prepared to be responsible for my own food, so it was a year of peanut butter and crackers. I had a yellow VW bug that I could drive, but there was no parking near the dorm. You had to park in an outlot and take a shuttle from the dorm to the parking lot, so going to get groceries was a hassle. Students weren't allowed to drive on campus until after 6 PM, so you couldn't really go during the day unless you wanted to chance getting a ticket bringing the groceries back to the dorm, which was expensive. And as Nate found out in his Freshman year, it is a pain to have food around when you and your roommates are not all on the same page when it comes to cleanliness. There was one plus to it Junior year. Guy's dad had been working as a scientist for NASA in Cleveland, but got transferred to California during our Sophomore year. So Guy transferred to Stanford that summer to be near his parents (we kept in touch; Guy was a groomsman in my wedding). The dorm assigned two new people to room with Bob and I. One of them was from Detroit and his parents owned a restaurant there. So when he came back to the dorm Sunday night, he brought lobsters and steaks and we ate well for one night. On the downside, they were the impetus for me to learn the ins and outs of the bail bond system in Lansing (for them, not for me). Turned out the older brother of one of my best high school friends was a bail bondsmen. But that's a story for another time.   

Later this week: part two of You're Fired!  

It's Getting Better

So we're up to 15 degrees today, from -17 on Monday night. That's the same amount of change as going from 18 degrees to 50 degrees, so in comparison it feels really nice outside. Whimzy played in the snow for a while instead of dashing in and out as fast as she can. And it won't be that long before things are nice again. So in honor of that idea, some summer pictures to give you something to look forward to.

 

Whimzy at Grandpa's in Ohio, chasing rabbits out of the woodpile.

The last blooms of the fall, Aconitum or Monkshood, which put up stalks in May, but only bloom for two or three weeks before  the first freeze in October.

Our New Years resolution for this year: use our deck more for entertaining, grilling out, and, most importantly, reading in bare feet.

The Memory Conundrum

My mom was ten years older than I am now when she passed away of diabetes problems and related heart problems. Ten years does not seem like a long time to have left. And as I seem to more often forget what I cooked for dinner last night (which is a blessing because I'm sure it wasn't healthy), I also seem more able to remember some things from a long time ago. Our friend's son Patrick is starting a new job in Okemos, Michigan. Almost 41years ago, Ann and I moved into our first apartment on our own in Okemos, Michigan. We were married on Saturday night, December 30, 1972, in St. Marys, Ohio, spent our wedding night in Toledo (how many people can say that?), then moved on to Okemos to open the new apartment we had loaded up with lots of boxes and left-over furniture from both families  two weeks earlier. I was to start student teaching at Okemos High School three days after we got married. Unfortunately, when we arrived late at night in Okemos, our apartment door was open and there was nothing inside. Turns out, the heavy rains had gotten into the apartment and soaked all the boxes and bookcases and other furniture. Luckily our landlord had moved all our stuff to a new dry apartment. He happened to see us standing in front of the old apartment and came out and explained everything. We traded keys with him and went "home" to find everything piled in next to the door. We had never lived together - we had dorm rooms and apartments at our respective universities, and when we went home for break, we each lived with our own parents, who lived two miles apart.  So the first apartment was a big deal. This was not a good way to start. We were in a drier apartment, but much of our stuff was soaked and hadn't been laid out to dry. We had spent time two weeks earlier arranging our furniture the way we wanted it. The new apartment was shaped differently and would take a while to sort out. And it was 11 PM on the 31st. We had one day (New Year's Day) before I needed to report to Okemos High School on January 2nd. Much of the rest of that winter and early spring are not as vivid in my mind. I know Ann would sometimes get up early (she was waiting to get signed up to do sub jobs at local elementary schools) and cook pancakes and sausages on the electric griddle we got as a wedding gift. We had a 1962? yellow Volkswagen Beetle that we loved. And not much money to live on. And we survived. The next year we moved to the Chicago suburbs looking for teaching jobs and our seven months in Okemos was over. But we remember it fondly for the most part. We were together, happy, and broke - the newlywed trifecta.

 I wouldn't be surprised to see more of these posts in the future. It is a simple way to pass our story on to our kids. Some of the story they have heard before, but some will be new. Other people will see these stories, too, but that's OK because these stories are often their stories as well. A lot of these stories involve our kids, the Lighthalls and/or the Robinsons, and their kids or our families and their kids. They are welcome to fill in any gaps they see or make corrections in the comments. We can talk about what happened. When my parents did this with their friends around the dinner table in the 50's we would call it "green shuttering". "You remember the Murphys; they bought the old Doc Place house two years ago, you know, the one with the green shutters. She was a Hertenstein, I think, Sam's daughter." And on it would go for two hours or more while we kids quietly snuck out of the kitchen to find something to do.

So, Patrick, enjoy your time in Okemos. Make a lot of memories, so that when 2054 rolls around, you can tell us all about it. Well, not us. We'll have our hearing aids turned off to make life simpler in the home the kids put us in. Just talk really loud. We can't hear that either, but you'll feel good, because, like, you really tried.