Why we should take action on global warming

Here's an argument.

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Cicadas

What's fun about our summer of cicadas is that they are the buzz, literally in woody areas all around us and also it is the talk of the town. Everyone from my three-year-old niece to my twenty-three-year old friend is fascinated and riveted by a natural event, which is phenomenal itself.

Yesterday I had lunch with a group of alumni from my high school, most of us knew one another in high school, though the group also included two of my students, who are still students. We talked about cicadas, about a death in the community, about watching television responsibly or not at all. Interestingly, we didn't at all discuss Gaza, or Iraq, or anything beyond our own purview.

Read something interesting

here's my to-read list for summer 2007, so far:

1. Assault on Reason by Al Gore
2. The Cairo Trilogy by Nagib Mahfooz
3. Venture of Islam, vol 1 by Hodgson
4. Orientalism by Edward Said
5. 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa by Stephanie Nolen
6. Islam the Natural Way by Abdul Wahid Hamid
7. Sound and Fury by Faulkner
8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

An Interview with the Blogger

I've noticed several references to a school and students. What exactly is it that you do?
I teach English to high school students at a small private religious school.

You mean a Catholic school, right?
No, I work at a Muslim pk-12th school.

A Madrassa!?!
Heh! No. My students have one religion class every day, and one combined Arabic language and Quran class. Sadly, parents and students are much more focused on immediate academic and economic goals--the religious education aspect of the school often feels like an afterthought, an add-on. By the way, a madrassa is simply the Arabic word for school.

Are you certain about this? I imagine it takes a great amount of resources to put up a building, hire staff, etc. If there is no focus on religious education, why don't these parents take advantage of the public schools in the area and simply send their kids to after school language classes?
Well, if we were all as smart as you are, I'm sure that would be the rout parents would take. Too many parents however are negligent of their duties as parents, or rather they are incompetent parents. So encountering a big scary world where their kids could loose their religious identity, they opt for the security of a Muslim environment. Notice I said Muslim environment, because the Islamicity of the institution is often questioned.

Islamicity?
Yes, by that I mean an adjective signifying the degree to which values and practices are in keeping with Islam, as revealed in the Quran and as taught by the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

That's quite a mouthful. You must be a poor excuse for an English teacher.
I've never claimed that I'm a good teacher, or even a competent teacher. In fact, be self-doubt is the main reason I'm stepping back from the teaching job.

Oh.

This interview may a continue in a future post.

what's this "poem" about?

From the void comes a cry,
not wild or a thing of nature
but muffled as the mangled soul, polluted.
Its distorted waves hit the pure and the serene, disturbing.
But in the sterile blankness
of the mind that has
itself rejected, as the coward it is, the harmony--
the nobility in man with plain clothes
or the untouched beauty outstanding in the blemished face.
In this what remains of the marvel--
the neurons and the dopamine and the need for a consort--
the cry from the void is hailed, unfathomed.

I don't recommend you read this post, and that's not a gimmic to get you to read it.

I don't want to write, at all. But I'm beginning to fear that in fact I'm losing my ability to formulate coherent and relevent ideas. That doesn't mean that what I'm about to write is going to make any sense whatsoever to anyone, but as long as I can type, it may mean that eventually I can say something meaningful, hopefully.

1. My nephew asked me just now, adorably and sweetly, to take him outside to play. But I really need to clean my room. And I really want to go to sleep. Adorable nephew will not always come asking me for sweet favors, so maybe I should oblige while I have the opprutunity. On the other hand, my room is disgusting and disorganized and I can't do anything in it as it is.

2. There's an interesting article in the Nation by Barbara Ehrenreich called "The HIgher Education Scam" which brings to mind my own ambivelence about my level of education? Did I recieve appropriate education? Were my four years of undergraduate education worth it? Would I have learned the same or more had I not attended a tradition high school or college? Did I really learn much at all? As a teacher, I have the opprutunity to constantly expand in areas of education in which I'm deficient. Teaching requires expertise and to teach you have to strive for that in whatever you are doing. Over the last few years, I've learned to make sense of texts and grammar concepts that I never did quite do in college..............z..

What Mad Teachers do when procrastinating