Notes, Quotes and Billy Goats: Billy Goats Eaten By Gigantic 16-foot Man-Eating Crocodiles

Well, first of all, I want to say thanks to RG (whoever you are), Josh Keller, Jonathan Ziman and Ken VanMeter for your words of encouragement. Your perspectives were superbly helpful. I truly appreciate them.

Not only did the words from those men help give me perspective, but I read something else that made me think that maybe becoming a parent isn't the scariest thing in the whole world.

I read this story about a 16-foot crocodile that some wildlife experts caught in Lake Victoria in Uganda. Local fishermen think this thing was a serial killer and estimate that it had eaten 83 people over the past 20 years. You can see a pic of this beast here.

The crazy thing? The guys who caught it, caught it using rope. Rope! And, in a move that would have made Richard Dean Anderson proud, the dudes used duct tape to keep the 2000 pound man-eating croc's mouth closed.

Duct tape!

3M and Scotch needs to get on this. This is a serious marketing dream. I can see the tag now:

"If it's strong enough to stop a 16-foot, one-ton man-eating killer croc, we think it can handle the arm of your swirly chair."

So, I suppose that in comparison to these Ugandan dudes, becoming a parent is an easy task. Imagine your boss coming in to you and saying, "Okay, see, there's this crocodile..."

Third of all, I found by accident an interesting and insightful posting from a guy attending Harvard Law School about the Supreme Court's Ten Commandments case. Might make you think.

Fourth of all, I had a horrible experience with the District Office on Monday. The Director of Education came into my classroom at the beginning of the period to visit my AP English class. We were in the middle of playing a team building game we had just done at our Staff Development meeting. Apparently this "game" made the class look like a joke, and I got reamed for making Gunderson (and its staff and its AP coursework) look bad. Of course, nobody bothered to ask me why I was doing the activity, or how it related to my curriculum or up-coming Poetry Unit. But anyway. Someone can go ahead and call me a bad teacher. Doesn't make it true.

Anyway, it got me thinking about a funny story about impressions that are false.

Four years ago, when I first started teaching at Gunderson, our Assistant Principal of Discipline was this cut black man named Darik Jackson. I was teaching sophomores at the time, and we were studying the book To Kill a Mockingbird. We were having a class discussion about it, and we talked about how one of the reasons why the townspeople of Maycombe, GA treated Boo Radley and Tom Robinson so poorly is because they weren’t viewed as people. Just then, Mr. Jackson walked into my room to get a student. He looked at my room, and then made a very strange face at me. He then walked out, and I couldn’t figure out why he had given me the look.

I turned around and saw my board, where I had written, in large letters the phrase:

Boo Radley is Not Human! Black People Are Not Human!

Talk about bad timing.

I say this as an example of how sometimes, brief glimpses of something give entirely false impressions.